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Good Day, Friends,
Wow! This is the long-awaited day! Mostly from across two oceans, I have been watching with eager expectation for the Peyton Institute for Families to find a home and begin in earnest to accomplish its crucial mission in service to families. I would like to say a word about that mission, its founder’s inspired care for families, and why the Institute offers so much promise in addressing the challenges to the family in 2022.
“If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do the builders labor.” Psalm 129
The family is the most treasured human relationship on earth. It is God’s “Masterpiece,” according to Pope Francis in Philadelphia in 2015. The family is where life begins, faith is born, hope is nourished, and love never ends.
The Peyton Institute for Families takes a major leap forward today with the inauguration of its new home in this beautiful edifice. Its clear mission is to inspire, foster, and promote families that are happy, healthy, and holy. How will it accomplish this mission? By assembling a team of professionals to gather data on the needs of the 21st century family. Employing solid research, the Institute will develop programs and activities to respond to those needs in South Asia by training the trainers in psycho-spiritual health programs and by offering direct family therapy and counseling.
• Since God Himself created the human family, reaching out to God is the wisest and surest means of building up the Family. How do we reach out to God? Through humble family prayer. For this reason, it is truly amazing when the entire family calls upon God in heaven for His blessings. We believe that family prayer provides the healthiest, surest, and straightest line to God and ready access to all the blessings and graces He desires to shower upon our families.
• Venerable Patrick Peyton, C.S.C., for whom the Institute is named, grew up in a praying family in a poor village in County Mayo, Ireland. He founded our family of ministries eighty years ago this year to enrich the family. He believed that, "The family that prays together stays together,” and “A world at prayer is a world at peace.”
• He used the mass media of his day and huge public prayer rallies to call the family to its true destiny and fulfillment as God's Masterpiece.
• People of goodwill support this mission because they know how crucial prayer and spirituality are to the overall mental and physical health of the family and of society. Nothing is more important than the overall health of the family. This Institute promises great good news for the family and society and should fill us all with authentic hope, hope for a deeper and richer community in families and in society.
Led by our Founder Venerable Patrick Peyton, Holy Cross Family Ministries has been a media pioneer since the 1940s. As the World War raged across the globe, Father Peyton quickly understood the role of emerging 20th-century media like radio, television, and film. In Father Peyton's vision, Family Rosary and Family Theater Productions were powerful tools to promote family spirituality. Venerable Peyton walked into the heart of Hollywood equipped only with his positive vision for the family. He succeeded in recruiting many of Hollywood's A-list actors to help him realize his vision that, "the family that prays together stays together. "
Today in 2022, we are witnessing a global combat against the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020. This is similar to Father Peyton's situation in World War II, marked by tragedy, conflict, and loss of life. The Peyton Institute for Families forms a vital link in our worldwide efforts to build up the family through 27 centers in 17 countries. Holy Cross Family Ministries has picked digital media platforms to build its ministry of family prayer and spirituality across the world.
Our Ministries today are using digital media platforms to inspire, promote and foster the prayer life and spiritual well-being of families worldwide. But, like our founder, we ask ourselves every day: 'What is the best that we can do right now?'' What more can we do to serve the family?'
Human history progressed from feudalism to industrialization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Industrial age, dominated by large business corporations and manufacturing, has given way to the digital age. This new high technology era is revolutionizing our way of life, leading to isolation, loneliness, and conflict. In this new era, families and communities are weakened, creating a more profound yearning for the ties that bind family life and society. The COVID-19 pandemic and the instantaneous communication of information and misinformation created by social media have accelerated the breakdown of familial and social life.
At the Peyton Institute for Families, we occupy a vital role in developing, sustaining, and enriching the spiritual renewal of these communities. In Mathew 16, Jesus asks us to read 'the signs of our times.' The emergence of these communities is a sign of our times, in which we help inspire, promote, and foster the prayer life and spiritual well-being of families.
Let me share what many think is the single most profound human yearning of the 2020s decade: It is a yearning for community or, even better, for the recovery of community. To respond to the pressing need for authentic community following the years of pandemic, we are reaching out to families inviting them to connect, engage, and grow into healthy, happy, holy families. In the Letters of Saint John, the Beloved Disciple called these ‘the beloved communities.’ And the richest expression of these communities is family. Our ultimate goal is to build beloved communities, family by family, through our research, training of trainers, and direct service to families.
In describing family prayer, Pope John Paul II said: “Joys and sorrows, hopes and disappointments, births and birthday celebrations, wedding anniversaries of the parents, departures, separations and homecomings, important and far-reaching decisions, the death of those who are dear—all of these make God’s loving intervention in the family’s history.” {Familiaris Consortio} All the major moments of family life are given by God so that we may return them to God as an offering of praise and thanksgiving.
Friends, the Institute can help provide healthy rituals for families in three ways. First, it can suggest ways to build strong and healthy relationships within the nuclear and intergenerational family. Second, It can provide rituals of deepening those relationships by helping families work, talk, play, and pray together. Third, it makes sure families experience the joy of reaching out to neighbors, friends, family members for the mutual benefit of all.
Friends, once again, the mission of the Institute is to serve the total health and well-being of the family because the family is God’s masterpiece, and nothing is more important than the family. I pray and hope that every family touched by the compassionate service of the Institute will come to experience through the blessed community of the family that the whole world is “charged with the grandeur of God.”
Thank you.
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