Vatican City, May 17, 2019 / 02:38 am
The Vatican announced Friday that the next World Meeting of Families will focus on the vocation of married life as a path to holiness with a particular emphasis on Amoris Laetitia.
The 2021 World Meeting of Families will be held in Rome June 23-27 with the official theme selected by Pope Francis, "Family Love: a vocation and a path to holiness," the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, the Family, and Life announced May 17.
"The meeting proposes a rereading of Amoris Laetitia in the light of the call to holiness spoken of in Gaudete et Exsultate," according to the announcement.
"Conjugal and family love reveals the precious gift of a life together where communion is nourished and a culture of individualism, consumption and waste is averted," it continued.
The next World Meeting of Families will mark the fifth anniversary of Amoris Laetitia -- Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation on love in the family. The theme of the meeting seeks to examine family life through the lens of holiness, "the most attractive face of the Church," as described by the 2018 exhoration Gaudete et Exsultate.
The meeting announcement quotes Amoris Laetitia's section on Love in Marriage, which states: "The aesthetic experience of love is expressed in that 'gaze' which contemplates other persons as ends in themselves."
The World Meeting of Families, established by St. Pope John Paul II in 1994, takes place once every three years in a different country, most recently in Ireland in 2018. The 2021 meeting will be the third time World Meeting of Families will be hosted in Rome.
"As marriage and family shape a concrete experience of love, they demonstrate the great significance of human relationships in which joys and struggles are shared in the unfolding of daily life as people are led towards an encounter with God," the announcement states.
"This journey, when lived with fidelity and perseverance, strengthens love and enables the vocation to holiness that is possessed by each individual person and expressed in conjugal and family relationships."
