A very warm welcome to the website for Family Life Ministry in the Diocese of Leeds. Use this site to look for resources which are available to be used by you in your own home, parish, school, community. As Pope John Paul II said in Familiaris Consortio, "No plan for organised pastoral work at any level must ever fail to take into consideration the pastoral area of the family."

What is Family Life Ministry?

Whatever helps us to love God and to love each other: couples to love each other; parents to love their children; family people to love each other, and to love our neighbours and to love the wider world, is the business of Family Life Ministry.

Love, can be very ordinary and unglamorous: When Jesus demonstrated his new commandment to 'love one another as I have loved you'  he washed the dirty feet of Peter; and also incredibly difficult: Jesus loved us enough to die a cruel, violent, public, criminal's death for us. It is also life giving, life affirming and wonderful in countless ways.

When do you love and care for yourself or another human being in that way? Do you wash tired and dirty feet? nappies? school uniforms? jeans? Do you comfort a sick or distressed child, wife, brother, mother? Do you cook? clean? grow or buy food? Do you guide in love an errant child? Do you talk with your children, family and friends about the wonder of God and how God's love, shown by Jesus, inspires and informs everything you do? Do you forgive? or struggle to forgive?

If you are doing any of this, however imperfectly, then you are living your vocation to 'be what you are'...guarding, revealing and communicating love!

Family Life Ministry is here to proclaim that vocation, to celebrate it and to affirm your importance as ministers of the home (or 'domestic church' ) and as the first evangelisers of your children.

How? You do it by loving your family; we do it by by resourcing you to live your vocation to love. This website shows some of the resources available. All you have to do is look, ask and take action to help yourself and others in your family and community!

"What you do in your family life is very close to the heart of the Church and therefore to the heart of Christ. I want to thank all those involved in the building up of marriage and family life, bringing life to one another. Family is the cement of society, the cradle of the Church" 

Bishop Arthur Roche, June 2004

The Power of Love

“Love has the power to reveal again the depth and truth of our humanity. This is achieved in the enduring love of parent for a wayward child, in the love of friend or spouse faithful through every crisis, and in the unconditional love given by the saint, often to the poorest and most forgotten. This is the love given supremely in Christ, and in him crucified.”
From the homily of the Most Rev Vincent Nichols at his installation as 11^th Archbishop of Westminster, 21^st May 2009