Panel 2: The living and radiant stoves of faith – Ecclesiola

„For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them..” (Mt 18:20)

The second Vatican Council designates the family with an ancient term: Ecclesia
domestica, ‘family church’. Our family is a small church - just as the whole sacramental
presence is realized in every small piece of the Eucharist, the sacramental, communal
dimension of the Church lives in family homes.
The first Christians celebrated the breaking of bread in their homes. The family table was
the first altar of the Eucharist, on which the God-man gathered the members of the family, the
kinship, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood in a Eucharistic, sacramental way of life. It’s
not the walls that make up the church. The essence of the catholic church is the Eucharist,
where Eucharist is present and where it is worshiped.
“In a world that has not yet been baptized, family homes are the places where we are the
living tabernacle in the sacrament of marriage.”
“Each home can be transformed into a small church. Not only in the sense that the
characteristic Christian love, which consists of selflessness and mutual care, must prevail in it,
but even more so in the sense that the whole family life is called by faith to revolve around the
one reign of Jesus Christ.

Suggestion for spousal conversation:
What shapes the atmosphere of our home?