Catholic families from around the world will gather in Philadelphia Sept. 22-25, 2015, for the World Meeting of Families, a gathering sponsored by the Holy See’s Pontifical Council for the Family. The focus of this meeting will be the significant role that families have in society. Families also have a significant role in the church, and various documents speak to this importance. The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (“Lumen Gentium”), declared that in the mystery of the union between Christian spouses in the sacrament of matrimony the couple also shares in the fruitful love that exists between Christ and the church. “The family is, so to speak, the domestic church. In it, parents should, by their word and example, be the first preachers of the faith to their children; they should encourage them in the vocation that is proper to each of them, fostering with special care vocation to a sacred state,” said the document in No. 11. Another church document that speaks to the importance of the family is “Familiaris Consortio,” St. John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation on the role of the Christian family, published in 1981. In No. 15, the pope noted the importance of families for the life of the church: “Christian marriage and the Christian family build up the church: for in the family the human person is not only brought into being and progressively introduced by means of education into the human community, but by means of the rebirth of baptism and education in the faith the child is also introduced into God’s family, which is the church.” It continues: “The church thus finds in the family, born from the sacrament, the cradle and the setting in which she can enter the human generations, and where these in their turn can enter the church.” St. John Paul also noted that the family was established by God to be an “intimate community of life and love.” In the 1994 “Follow the Way of Love” pastoral message of the U.S. Catholic bishops to families, church leaders also noted the important role that families have in the church. It is in the family, the bishops wrote, that we first learn what it means to be loved and nurtured, where we first encounter God. In the family, we learn the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation, and why we should care deeply for others. In the family, we learn to pray, to celebrate life, to welcome visitors and to affirm life. All of these are essential aspects for living as disciples of Jesus. Pope Francis, on his recent trip to Ecuador in July 2015, nicely summarized the importance of families for the church when he said, “In the family, miracles are made with what we have, with what we are, with what is at hand.”