The family's crucial service to life occurs physically as children are brought into the world and spiritually as values and traditions are handed on. This service extends to the development of the potential of each family member at every age. It is enlarged and enriched by all those fruits of moral, spiritual and supernatural life which the father and mother are called upon to hand on to their children, and through the children to the church and to the world. This is accomplished when the family, by respecting and fostering personal dignity, chastity and honesty inculcates in the young values such as respect, justice, dialogue, and love. In transmitting Christian values to their children, families, individually and working together, ultimately contribute to the building up of society on Gospel values.
Families are, in sum ''the first and irreplaceable school of social life.
Families share in the life and mission of the Church, and this is their fourth task. Family involvement on this ecclesial level occurs when the family becomes, in the security and warmth of individual homes, a believing and evangelizing community - a community in dialogue with God, and a community at the service of one another and ultimately of all humanity. As bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria, and spiritual father of its members, I would like to offer the following reflections in response to the work of the Diocesan Pastoral Council in 1993. Priests are the primary religious educators on the parish level. Pope Paul VI's encyclical frequently has been dismissed out of hand, often by people who have never read it.