VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Catholic Church, its ministers and its members must find new ways to reach out to and welcome families who are distant from the church and have no understanding of how much God loves them, Pope Leo XIV said.

Writing to 40 theologians and pastoral ministers participating in a seminar on evangelizing with families, the pope said the first goal of outreach is to help people longing for love and meaning to find that in Jesus.

“How often, even in the not too distant past, have we forgotten this truth and presented Christian life mostly as a set of rules to be kept, replacing the marvelous experience of encountering Jesus — God who gives himself to us — with a moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live in concrete daily li

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