The degree scroll of these lines may seem strange to some, but it is an important reality for Christian families. All Christians participate in the royal priesthood of Christ. The life of the Christian family has, therefore, a priestly dimension. Family life is an offering to God, a school of faith, a service to people.

 1. The "spiritual worship" proper to married and family life. The human body was created by God to express and serve the human spirit, in the unity of the human person. According to Christian revelation, sin breaks the harmony between body and soul, and therefore wounds, obscures and weakens this capacity to manifest and submit love.

Christ, with his redemptive work, has also restored human love, and concretely conjugal love. In the sacraments, the Church uses the realities Materials - bread, wine, water, etc. - to manifest and communicate divine grace. In the sacrament of marriage, it is the very love of the spouses - which implies their mutual bodily submission - that serves as a channel for God to manifest and communicate his grace and power to them. This divine grace and strength - nourished by prayer and the Eucharist - is financial aid precious for living the indissolubility of the marriage bond. So that through Christian spouses divine love may reach the family and the world.

Marital sexuality lived in Christianity is a sign of the New Covenant in Christ. For this reason it is a sphere of worship of God. And not in a metaphorical sense, but in a proper sense. The relationship between the spouses, without being denaturalized in the least and taking into account their natural openness to the procreation of new lives, transcends them and is a channel that connects them with the love of God and of others.

St. Paul's exhortation to all Christians to "offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God: this is your reasonable service" (Rom 12:1) and "glorify God with your body" (1 Cor 6:20), becomes, in Christian spouses, a way of holiness for them and their children, the principal way of giving glory to God, no less. This is how fathers and mothers participate in the royal priesthood of Christians.

2. Piety with God is the first manifestation of this worship that spouses give with their own lives and that they promote among their children. Piety finds a concrete impulse in Sunday Mass and daily prayer - dialogue staff with God - to which certain times are reserved, and into which the children are gradually introduced. Around this nucleus, some family devotions and customs can grow, in which quality is more important than issue: the blessing of the table or the recitation of the rosary at least on special days.

Family prayer on the occasion of important events such as births, anniversaries, weddings, funerals, etc., is of special value. The sacramental life should be properly initiated with family accompaniment (baptism, confirmation, first Eucharist and first confession), since the sacraments allow us to be born and grow in the family of God, which is the Church, family of families.

3. The Education of the faith finds in the family a main protagonist, with the financial aid of the parish, the school, ecclesial groups and movements, etc. Today we are facing an "educational urgency" (cf. Benedict XVI, Message to the Diocese of Rome on the urgent task of the Education, 21-I-2008), which calls for a particular effort to overcome religious illiteracy, making a "leap of quality" in the catechesis and in the teaching of religion.

Young people in particular "must feel the closeness and attention of the family and the ecclesial community in their journey of growth in faith" (Encyclical Lumen Fidei, n. 53). They need to be shown the beauty of the faith, in its various dimensions (moral and intellectual, staff and social, etc.), and this can only be done through credible witnesses among whom their parents are first and foremost counted.

Today we are witnessing a Education that sometimes falls into the nets of environmental relativism and secularism, as a consequence of the rationalism that has moved in the West towards consumerism and nihilism. On the other hand, perhaps because of the law of the pendulum, we sometimes witness a Education of fideistic, spiritualistic and individualistic tendency, not alien to rigorism, also heir to the predominant deformations of the last centuries.

An adequate Education in the faith must avoid these extreme errors. To know how to educate in harmony, it is necessary to know how to use diverse instruments and registers like those that compose a symphony: Christian anthropology that leads to living and educating in the Church as the family of God, the way educational of beauty, the biblical Education or catechesis , the liturgical and sacramental Education , the moral life as a response to the love of God and which is reflected in the love of neighbor; the social doctrine of the Church on the basis of the social sensitivity received by the children through what they see in their family; prayer that brings us closer to God and takes us out of ourselves; apostolic, evangelizing or missionary zeal; holiness also in ordinary life. Parents should ask especially to the religion teachers -particularly to the Catholic-inspired school- and to the parish, the necessary partnership, without evading their own responsibility.

4. Charity, synthesis and fruit of married and family life. The life of the Christian family takes place in the midst of ordinary circumstances, in the light of faith, around the center of the Eucharist and continually bearing fruit through love, charity. Christian families should be able to say to the world: we have believed in love and we manifest it in deeds, daily. We manifest what we are: a family united to Jesus Christ, that lives from the life that God has brought to earth; and that transmits that life from within the human love between man and woman, with the potentiality that this love has, thanks to the action of the Holy Spirit.

Charity, especially towards the most needy both materially and spiritually, is the family's greatest strength for the new evangelization. That is why every family should be a "school of mercy" for its members.

At final, the priestly dimension of the Christian family is translated at internship into a family spirit that permeates everything with love and joy: from the love between spouses, integrated and nourished by the relationship with God, to the educational responsibility of the children in the faith and ending with the fruits of charity and mercy. 

As Pope Francis has written, "the spirit of love that reigns in a family guide both mother and child in their dialogues, where they teach and learn, correct and value what is good" (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, n. 139).