DECREE
The Teams of Our Lady were started in France during 1938, on the initiative of some couples who, accompanied by a priest, Father Henri Caffarel, used to meet every month to rediscover together the meaning of marriage and the riches of this sacrament. The first team meeting took place in Paris on the 25th of February 1939. Soon these couples found in it so much benefit for their married life that they attracted several others to share their experience. Thus it was that on the 8th of December 1947, the Charter of the Teams of Our Lady-which is considered the founding document of the movement-was finalised.
The Teams of Our Lady are a movement of married spirituality established to meet the needs of christian couples who wish to live their married life to the full on the basis of their sacrament of marriage. According to their Statutes, the Teams of Our lady, being a “movement of spiritual formation and renewal”, help their members to progress in the love of God and in the love of their neighbour. They took to fraternal mutual help as a way to help their members to live out, individually and as a couple, the concrete conditions of their married, family, working and social life in accordance with the will of God. They encourage them to become aware of their evangelising mission in the Church and in the world and to carry it out by the witness of their
married love and by other forms of actions of their choice”(Statutes, art.3).
During the Jubilee of the year 2000, Pope John Paul II, stressing the meaning and value of married communion, said that, “in the sacrament of marriage, the spouses endeavour to express to one another the indissoluble love with which Christ loves the Church and to bear
witness to it in the world. This is a ‘great mystery’, as the apostle Paul calls it (Ef 5:32) (John Paul II, Homily of the Jubilee of Families, 15th October 2000, 4).
The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, as well as the post-counciliar Magisterium, paid very particular attention to associative forms of participation in the life of the Church, by expressing its deepest esteem and consideration of these forms of Participation (see the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity Apostolicam Actuasitatem, 18, 19,22; John Paul II, Post-Synod apostolic Exhortation Christifideles laici, 29).
In a similar vein, Pope John Paul II wrote, at the begining of the third millennium, that ‘the duty to promote various types of associations is of great importance for communion, whether they be in traditional forms or in the form of more recent Church movements. They continue
to give vitality to the Church which is a gift from God and which is atrue “spring-time of the spirit” (Apostolic Letter Novo Milennio Ineunte,46).
Therefore:
Bearing in mind that the Pontifical council for the Laity has, by a decree dated 19th April 1992, recognised the Teams of Our Lady as an International private association of the faithful, with juridical status in pontifical law and that it approved these Statutes ad experimentum;
Responsing to the request presented to us on the 11th of March 2002 by Gerard and Marie Christine de Reberty, Leading Couple of the International Leading Team of the Teams of Our Lady, who requested a definitive approval of the Statutes;
Accepting, at the same time, the modifications made to the text of the Statutes;
Taking into consideration the apostolic influence of the Movement and the in-depth formation of the members of the Teams of Our Ladyan association that has served the family and society for all these years by helping couples to live out their married life in a Christian way and to discover God’s plan for them in their daily life; and in view of articles 131-134 of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Bonus on the Roman Curia, as well as canon 312, 1, 10 of the Code of Canon Law.
The Pontifical Council for the Laity, by this decree,
1. Confirms the recognition of the Movement of the Teams of Our Lady as an international private association of the faithful, with juridical status, in conformity with canons 298-311 and 321-329 of the Code of Canon Law,
2. and approves definitively the Statutes of the Teams of Our Lady, the original of which are deposited in the archives of the Pontifical council for the Laity.
Given at the Vatican on the 26th of July 2002, on the liturgical Memoria of Saint Joakim and Saint Anne, parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Stanislaw Rylko
Secretary
James Francis Cardinal Stafford
President