There is no doubt that the country’s main problem is “the material and spiritual poverty of a major part of the population”, and “the situation of lots of children who were born without a family” or that 60% of children “born out of wedlock who have no family to properly raise or support them is worrying”. This is a statement about the state of Peru (click here) made by Gina Anderson Trujillo, deputy secretary of the Peruvian Bishops Commission for the Family, that will be a member of the official national delegation at the VII International Meeting of the Families (Milan, 30 May - 3 June). In the Andean country, the family pastoral service, although uneven and inadequately developed everywhere, not least in response to such situation, is fairly dynamic and aims at spreading the family pastoral service in all dioceses, along with the parallel pro-life service. “We think new creative and attractive forms of communication must be created - Anderson points out - that must fit in with the new information and communication systems, that should be especially adapted to young couples and to people who live in rural regions”.

An Italian family, a French family, a saint, a child, and the miracle that binds them together. This could sum up the story told to SIR (click here) by Adele Schilirò, mother of Pietro, a child who is in the fourth form, who has to receive his First Communion, who plays and “simply lives”, even if he is used to “praying the Lord”. When Pietro was born, he had very serious problems with his lungs, and the doctors had given his parents, Adele and Valter, very few hopes: after some initial confusion, his parents begged the Lord, “unpretentiously”, for a miracle through the intercession of Luigi and Zelia Martin, the parents of Saint Theresa of Child Jesus, who had also lost four of their nine children. The miracle of Pietro, who according to science should have died and instead, “amidst the amazement of the doctors, nurses and even ourselves”, started breathing on his own, led to the beatification of the Martins in October 2008. One of the things that most surprised Adele Schilirò was finding out that “the Martins were very much like us. Holiness is within reach: just like us, they lived their everyday life, they had our own concerns... Finding them made us find out that marriage is truly a way to holiness”.