Lay initiatives continue to gain momentum in the UK...
On 24th March, the current president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life gave a warning that it is “dangerous” to speak of the family as a “little church” and the “domestic church”. “The Church, which is a familial Church, for me, it isn’t very clear, it’s dangerous, for example, to define the individual family as a little church...It’s very dangerous, because it can encourage an egoism of the family,” Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia said to a group of clergy and laity gathered at the major seminary of the Mexican diocese of Queretaro. Paglia called the tendency to the “egoism of the family” a form of “familyism” and claimed that Jesus spoke against “familyism.” “In the Gospel we have the very beautiful words of Jesus against familyism, very beautiful!” Paglia said. These words are naturally jarring to faithful Catholics, who know that the Church has always referred to the family as the domestic Church. Lumen gentium , paragraph 11, states: “The family is, ...