Hi, my name's Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in scripture, and passed down through

the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a year is brought to you by ascension.

In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity and God's family as we journey together toward a heavenly home. This is Day 286. We're reading paragraphs 2207 to 2213, as always. I'm using the Ascension edition of the Catechism, which includes the foundations of faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You can also download your own catechism in a year reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash CIY. And you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications because today is day 286. You guys, we're continuing to talk about the family. Yesterday we talked about the nature of the family. How does the

family operate in God's plan as well as the Christian family? We talked about the reality, I believe,

that as we continue to carry out the missionary mandate of evangelizing, making disciples of all

nations, there are a couple means that we're going to do with this. One is through friendship.

The other, I believe, is through the family.

And we have that.

We have, the Christian family has an evangelizing and missionary task to it.

Now, today we're going to talk about the family and society, which is just, I think, is compelling, is fascinating, and is really, again, instructive.

This is not reactive.

This is not responsive as much as it is

instructive and directive to us as Catholics, but also to the world to be able to say,

okay, here is the role of the family in society that we're going to affirm this and assert

that the family is the original cell of social life. We've talked about this many times.

As often as we talk about marriage and the family, we say that again and again. We also talk about how today in paragraph 2208, the family should live in such a way that its members learn to care and take responsibility for the young, the old, the sick, the handicapped, and the poor, that basically the family, as Pope John Paul

the second said, the family is the school of love. So marriage and family is meant to be the school

of love. And so that's where we learn to do this, learn to take care of each other. But going on,

the family must be helped and defended by appropriate social measures. Now that's really important

because the importance of family

for the well-being of society gives then society a responsibility, right? So because the family

...