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MENEVIA FAMILY LIFE MINISTRY
June 2005:-
Papal Reflections
on Marriage and the Family
VATICAN CITY, 7 June 2005 (VIS)
Last evening at St. John
Lateran Basilica, Pope Benedict XVI inaugurated the ecclesial congress
promoted by the diocese of Rome on the theme "The Family and the
Christian Community: Formation of the Person and Transmission of the
Faith."
The Pope offered some reflections on "the meaning of marriage and the
family in the plan of God, Creator and Saviour."
The Anthropological Foundation of the Family:
He starts by saying that "the human being has been created in the image
and likeness of God and God Himself is Love. Thus, the vocation to love
is what makes man the authentic image of God. ... From this basic link
between God and man comes another: the indissoluble link between spirit
and body."
"The totality of man," he continues, "includes the dimension of time and
man's 'yes' ... means 'always', it is the space of fidelity. Only within
it can one grow in faith." He adds that "the greatest expression of
freedom ... is the capacity to choose a definitive gift in which
freedom, giving of itself, fully finds itself. Concretely, the personal
and reciprocal 'yes' between a man and a woman ... is destined to the
gift of a new life" and it is also a "public 'yes' with which the
spouses take on the public responsibility of fidelity."
Benedict XVI underscored that "the various forms of dissolving marriages
today, as well as the free unions and the 'trial marriages', including
pseudo-marriage between people of the same sex, are, rather, expressions
of an anarchical freedom, which passes itself off, wrongly, for a true
liberation of man. Such pseudo-freedom is based on making the body
banal, which inevitably includes making man banal."
Marriage and the Family in the History of Salvation
The Pope recalled that "biblical revelation, in fact, is above all the
expression of a story of love, the story of the covenant of God with
man; therefore the story of the love and union between a man and a woman
in the covenant of marriage was able to be assumed by God as a symbol of
the history of salvation."
"In the same way that the Incarnation of the Son of God reveals its true
meaning in the cross, authentic human love is the giving of oneself and
cannot exist if a person wishes to rid himself of the cross."
The Holy Father underscored several negative tendencies that are in
opposition to "the profound link between God and man, between God's love
and human love. ...The depreciation of human love, the suppression of
the authentic capacity to love is revealed, in fact, in our times as the
most adept and efficacious arm to remove God from man, to distance Him
from man's gaze and from his heart."
Children
"Even in generating children marriage reflects its divine model, the
love of God for man. In man and woman, paternity and maternity, as the
body and as love, do not let themselves be limited to the biological:
life is given entirely only when, with birth, love and the sense that
make it possible to say yes to this life are also given. Precisely in
this way does it become clear how contrary to human love, to the
profound vocation of a man and a women, it is when the union is closed
to the gift of life, or worse yet, suppresses or manipulates unborn
life. ... For this reason the building of every single Christian family
is placed within the larger context of the great family of the Church,
which sustains it and bears it within itself."
The Family and the Church
"Benedict XVI affirmed that "from all this comes an evident consequence:
the family and the Church, concretely the parishes and other forms of
ecclesial communities, are called to the closest collaboration in that
basic duty which comprises, in an inseparable fashion, the formation of
the person and the transmission of the faith."
The Threat of Relativism
"Today an especially insidious obstacle to the work of education is the
massive presence, in our society and culture, of a relativism which,
while recognizing nothing as definitive, establishes as a final measure
only one's 'I' with one's own desires and which, under the appearance of
freedom, becomes for each person a prison. Within such a relativistic
horizon it is not possible therefore to have a true education: without
the light of truth, sooner or later every person is in fact condemned to
doubt the goodness of his own life and the relations that comprise it,
to doubt the validity of his commitment to build, with others, something
in common. It is therefore clear that not only must we seek to overcome
relativism in our work of forming people, but we are also called to
fight its predominant place in society and culture."
Priesthood and the Consecrated Life.
The Holy Father concluded by pointing to the need to pray for many
vocations to the priesthood and to consecrated life and to pray that
priests and religious "give witness to the joy of having been called by
the Lord."
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