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What is a vocation?
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Vocation to Parenthood:
Building Holy Families
Based on the sacrament of marriage, the family is the "domestic Church" where God's children learn to pray "as the Church" and to persevere in prayer. - Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2685
"Love then is not a utopia: it is given to mankind as a task to be carried out with the help of divine grace. It is entrusted to man and woman, in the Sacrament of Matrimony, as the basic principle of their "duty", and it becomes the foundation of their mutual responsibility: first as spouses, then as father and mother. In the celebration of the Sacrament, the spouses give and receive each other, declaring their willingness to welcome children and to educate them. On this hinges human civilization, which cannot be defined as anything other than a 'civilization of love'.
The family is an expression and source of this love. Through the family passes the primary current of the civilization of love, which finds therein its 'social foundations'. The Fathers of the Church, in the Christian tradition, have spoken of the family as a "domestic church", a "little church". They thus referred to the civilization of love as a possible system of human life and coexistence: 'to be together' as a family, to be for one another, to make room in a community for affirming each person as such, for affirming 'this' individual person."
From the "Letter to Families" by Pope John Paul II
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