Parents and children

"The crown of children" is "the glory of the married woman, the justification of marriage, the one of which Solomon speaks".

• Parents and children
• Wedding

It is not necessary to be virgins to be chaste. And chaste nuptial beds are guarded by angels and from them descend good children who make the virtue of their parents the rule of their lives.

• Angels
• Chastity
• Family
• Parents and children
• Words of wisdom

6.2 «The Lord has loved you very much…» says Elizabeth sighing.

«And that is why I am giving Him the thing I love most. This flower of mine.»

«How will you be able to tear it from your heart when the time comes?»

«Remembering that I did not have her and that God gave her to me. I shall always be happier now than then. When I know She is in the Temple I will say to myself: “She is praying near the Tabernacle, She is praying the God of Israel also for Her mummy” and I will have peace. And a greater peace I will have in saying: “She belongs entirely to Him. When these two old but happy parents, who received Her from Heaven, are no longer alive, He, the Eternal, will still be Her Father”. Believe me, I am fully convinced, this little creature is not ours. I was not able to do anything more… He put Her in my bosom, a divine gift to wipe away my tears and fulfil our hopes and our prayers. That is why She belongs to Him. We are the happy guardians… and may He be blessed for this!»

• Consecrated souls
• Family martyrdom
• Giving thanks to God
• God the Father
• Marie as a child
• Offer everything to God
• Parents and children

« Oh! Daddy, when will you take Me to the Temple?»

«Soon, my dear. But are You not sorry to leave Your father?»

«Yes, very much! But you will come… in any case, if it did not hurt, what sacrifice would it be?»

«And will You remember us?»

«I always will. After the prayer for the Immanuel I will pray for you. That God may give you joy and a long life… until the day He becomes the Saviour. Then I will ask Him to take you to the celestial Jerusalem.»

The vision ends with Mary tightly clasped in Her father’s arms.

• Anne of Aaron (mother of the Virgin Mary)
• Consecrated virginity
• Family martyrdom
• Joachim of David (father of the Virgin Mary)
• Marie as a child
• Parents and children
• Sauveur
• Words of the Virgin Mary

Children belong first to God and then to their parents. Every son can say what I said[3] to My Mother: “Do you not know that I must be busy with My Father’s affairs?” And every father, every mother must learn the attitude to be maintained looking at Mary and Joseph in the Temple, at Anne and Joachim in the house of Nazareth, a house which was becoming more and more forlorn and sad, but where one thing never diminished, but increased continuously: the holiness of two hearts, the holiness of a marriage.

What light is left to Joachim, an invalid, and to his sorrowful wife, in the long and silent nights of two old people who feel they are about to die? Only the little dresses, the first pair of little sandals, the simple toys of their little daughter, now far away, and memories of Her, memories… And peace when they say: “We are suffering, but we have done our duty of love towards God”.

• Consecrated virginity
• Family martyrdom
• Parents and children
• Peace

While obeying the Law, I must obey the Voice that whispers to Me: “I want You”; I am a virgin and a virgin I shall remain, How shall I succeed? This sweet invisible Presence that is with Me will help Me, because it is Its desire. I am not afraid. I have no longer My father and mother… and only God knows how My love for whatever human being belonged to Me was burnt in that pain. Now I have but God. I therefore obey Him unquestioningly… I would have done so also regardless of My father and mother, because I have been taught by the Voice that whoever wishes to follow It, must go beyond father and mother. Parents are loving patrols watching the hearts of their children, whom they wish to lead to happiness according to their plans… and they are not aware of other plans leading to infinite happiness… I would have left them My dresses and mantles, to follow the Voice that says to Me: “Come, My beloved Spouse”. I would have left them everything, and the pearls of My tears, for I would have cried having to disobey them, and the instincts of My blood, because I would have defied even death to follow the Voice calling Me who, would have told them that there is something greater and sweeter than the love of a father and mother and that is the Voice of God.

• Consecrated virginity
• Family martyrdom
• Obedience to the Virgin Mary
• Parents and children

A mother never renounces her creature unless she is forced to. Whether her heart is asked to renounce her creature by her country or by the love of a spouse or even by God Himself, she will resent and struggle against the separation. It is natural. A son grows in our womb and the tie that links him to us can never be completely broken. Even if the umbilical cord is cut, there is a nerve that always remains: it departs from the mother’s heart and is grafted into the son’s heart: it is a spiritual nerve, more lively and sensitive than a physical one. And a mother feels it stretching even to exceedingly severe pangs if the love of God or of a creature or the need of the country take her son away from her. And it breaks, tearing her heart, if death snatches her son from her.

• Parents and children

37.8 Finally I would like to draw the attention of parents to how Joseph made a clever workman of Me, without any help of pedagogical learning. As soon as I was old enough to handle tools, he did not let Me lead a life of idleness, but he made Me work and he made use of My love for Mary as the means to spur Me to work. I was to make useful things for Mother. That is how he inculcated the respect which every son should have for his mother and the teaching for the future carpenter was based on that respectful and loving incentive.

Where are now the families in which the little ones are taught to love work as a means of pleasing their parents? Children, nowadays, are the tyrants of the house. They grow hard, indifferent, ill-mannered towards their parents. They consider their parents as their servants, their slaves. They do not love their parents and they are scarcely loved by them. The reason is that, while you allow your children to become objectionable, overbearing fellows, you become detached from them with shameful indifference.

They are everybody’s children, except yours, o parents of the twentieth century. They are the children of the nurse, of the governess, of the boarding schools, if you are rich people. They belong to their companions, they are the children of the streets, of the schools, if you are poor. But they are not yours. You, mothers, give birth to them and that is all. And you, fathers, do exactly the same. But a son is not only flesh. He has a mind, a heart, a soul. Believe Me, no one is more entitled and more obliged than a father and a mother to form that mind, that heart, that soul.

• Family
• Jesus as a child
• Joseph of Jacob (Saint Joseph)
• Laziness - Idleness
• Parents and children
• Words of Jesus Christ for our time
• Work

37.9 A family is necessary: it exists and must exist. There is no theory or progress capable of destroying this truth without causing ruin. A shattered family can but yield men and women who in the future will be more perverted, and will cause greater and greater ruin. And I tell you most solemnly that it would be better if there were no more marriages and no more children on the earth, rather than have families less united than the tribes of monkeys, families which are not schools of virtue, of work, of love, of religion, but a babel in which everyone lives on his own like disengaged gears, which end up by breaking.

Broken families. You break up the most holy way of social living and you see and suffer the consequences. You may continue thus, if you so wish. But do not complain if this world is becoming a deeper and deeper hell, a dwelling place of monsters who devour families and nations. You want it. Let it be so.

• Family
• Parents and children
• Wedding
• Words of Jesus Christ for our time

ou do not necessarily spoil your children just because you keep them at home. To keep them at home implies loving them with good common sense and wholeheartedly.

• Parents and children
• Words of wisdom