Welcome to Family Life Ministry in the Diocese of Leeds!

This site, launched on the Feast of the Holy Family 2005, offers an introduction to how Family Life Ministry can help enrich your own family life and relationships as well as something about how you and your family are connected through local schools and parishes to the diocese and the wider church.

The news stories and main projects are highlighted on the right. Just follow the links to find out more about any story there. The two big current projects are - Celebrating Family: Blessed, Broken, Living Love which is the three year national initiative of the Catholic Bishops' Conference (to follow on from Listening 2004: My Family My Church)  and Come and See our own diocesan renewal process comeandsee.org.uk.  Everybody's Welcome, Home is a Holy Place and Passing on the Faith are all part of Celebrating Family celebratingfamily.org.uk.

Along the top you can search:

For events and how to book places simply look in the Diary page.

Then, there is information about Marriage: marriage preparation (including how to join the team as well as details of courses being run throughout the diocese with contact numbers) and marriage enrichment - for all marriages whether you have been together for three years or thirty three years or longer!

For parents, help is at hand! Look in the Parenting section and see easy to use resources that will help you and your friends to become more confident and skilled parents.

Family Spirituality is a developing field of theology. For some time now the church has taught that families are 'domestic churches'. This can sound strange. We need to think carefully about what it is to be 'family', to be 'holy' and to be 'church'. God is love ('Deus Caritas Est' ) Pope Benedict reminds us in the first encyclical of his papacy Click here to view.  Families actually have their own unique way of reflecting God's love in the world and here you will find out more about how you are already doing that whether you realise it or not! Home is a Holy Place homeisaholyplace.org.uk is the focus for the second year of Celebrating Family. Passing on the Faith passingonthefaith.org.uk is now merged with Home is a Holy Place due to the complementary nature of both topics.

Outreach gives an indication of other areas of collaborative work undertaken by Family Life Ministry within and outside the diocese. Here you can see how we are involved with Come and See and the Home School Parish initiative. If you click on News you will be able to search (by month and year) for earlier stories from the site and also from the Catholic Post. This archive is not complete as it is taking some time to get load the stories but we have made a start!

Links offers direct access to many other useful Catholic, and other, local, national and international sites.

Finally we have resources you can download - Helplines for times when you are in need of extra help and a free Library of books, and some video resources, for you to use at home.

FLM is a preventative and 'proactive' ministry. When problems arise at home other agencies are here to help. Try Catholic Care (via Links)

If you have any comments on this website or any questions about Family Life Ministry including how YOU can be involved then please do Contact us at flm@flm.org.uk