Benedict XVI presides over Holy Mass for families : report from Zagreb

Pope Benedict presided over Holy Mass for thousands of famiglies in Croatia' s capital Zagreb on Sunday to celebrate the first National Day for Croatian Catholic Families.
Tracey McClure reports :

Two hearts joined at the side: Croatia’s flag and Pope Benedict’s coat of arms – just one symbol from Sunday’s celebration: the closeness of this nation’s majority Catholics to their beloved Pope, who had come on the heels of Pope John Paul II who celebrated mass here back in 1998.

And they came from all over Croatia and beyond: Bosnia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Greece, Hungary and Italy. Parents and children, grandparents, aunts and uncles: some four hundred thousand of them trudged through the muddy grass to get to the mass area inside Zagreb racetrack to greet the Pope. Not put off by frightening thunderstorms, they started streaming into the grounds in the wee hours of the night to prepare for the Pope’s arrival with a festival of music and prayer. By the time he got there, the rain had disappeared, the sun burning the grass dry.

With muddied shoes but smiles on their faces, and waving the Croatian and yellow and white Vatican flags, they cheered as the pope toured the track in his pope mobile, stopping to kiss a baby and caress a small child. Icons of the south Croatian Madonna of Sinj bobbed up and down in a sea of heads.

It was a solemn but joyful Byzantine and Latin rite liturgy, a little longer than usual because a mix of Croatian, Latin, and Italian.

And though the Pope was the star of the day, of course it was the family that was the main protagonist for the Church here. Croatian families of all walks of life carried offertory gifts to the altar: families with small children, with older kids, and the disabled.

The Pope encouraged Croatia’s families to become “small churches” in which “to live unity, communion and prayer!” He invited parents to teach their children to pray and to pray with them, and to draw them close to the sacraments.

“In today’s society,” he said, “the presence of exemplary Christian families is more necessary and urgent than ever.” And he noted the challenges facing families today: secularization which excludes God and the disintegration of the family, “especially,” he said, “in Europe.”

Seeking individual and material well-being, and “transient experiences” he warned, is being “cultivated as an ideal” in today’s world. Love has become a sentimental emotion often slave to an impulse of immediate gratification “without a commitment to build lasting bonds” between a man and a woman open to life.

And in a country where one in nearly five marriages ends in divorce, and a majority believes cohabitation without marriage is ok, that explains a lot. Couples are waiting longer to marry, preferring greater material comfort and families are having fewer kids – as in many European nations, more people die here than are born.

Krk Archbishop Valter Zupan, president of the Bishops’ Family and Life Commission, alluded to the problem too. Contributing to the erosion of marriage and the family for him is the increasing popularity of “different forms of civil unions that have no foundations in European culture.”

Here in Croatia, married and unmarried couples enjoy the same civil rights and rights of inheritance.

But Pope Benedict called on families to “be courageous!” Sunday. “Do not give in to that secularized mentality which proposes living together as a preparation or even a substitute for marriage!” “It is possible,” he said, “to love without reserve, and do not be afraid to make a commitment to another person!”

Speaking for Croatia’s Catholics once afraid to speak out under an intolerant Communist era, Archbishop Zupan forcefully demanded “the inalienable right to live and publicly express” their Christian values.

Expressing hope that the Communist period was a chapter closed forever, he called on political leaders to promote a mentality for the defence of life, and to review the Communist era 1978 abortion legislation which allows all women access to abortion within the first ten weeks of pregnancy – for the modest sum of 240 euros. May the term “progress,” he said, no longer be used to describe that which leads to death.

Praying that Croatia’s families will become those small churches he talked about earlier, Pope Benedict called them then to rejoice in father and motherhood, to be open to life – a sign they are also open to the future and to true Christian progress.

In the Croatian capital with the Pope, I’m Tracey McClure

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