Pope Leo XIV has written the foreword to a new edition of YouCat: Love Forever, a catechism aimed at young people preparing for marriage, due for release in November. Source: Aleteia.
The text offers the Pope’s most extended public reflection to date on human love, marriage, and the vocation to which the Church calls young people.
The first edition of YouCat: Love Forever was published in May 2025, one week after the death of Pope Francis. This new edition features testimonies from young people in over 30 countries.
Leo opens with a disclosure that is also a self-portrait of sorts. Addressing young readers directly, he points to the burning heart pierced by an arrow on his papal coat of arms – the symbol of St Augustine – and the sentence it encodes: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God” (Confessions 1:1).
This restlessness, Leo writes, is what lies beneath the longing for love: “Your heart longs for love. A love that is deep, self-sacrificing and enduring. This longing is no accident. It is a sign that you are made for love.”
He frames the desire not as a cultural construct or a psychological need but as evidence of a human nature oriented beyond itself – toward God, and toward another person as a path to God.
On the nature of love itself, the Pope draws a clear distinction between feeling and commitment.
Love between a man and a woman “may strike the heart like an arrow – intensely and swiftly,” he acknowledges – but it cannot remain there.
“True love does not stop there. It is not merely a fleeting, briefly inflamed emotion. It is more. It is a deep commitment to the other, a decision, a journey and a covenant for life.”
He describes solid relationships as built on “mutual trust, on that ‘forever’ that is the beating heart of every vocation” – and characterised by a love that “asks first: ‘How can I love as Christ loved?’ and puts the question ‘What do I get out of it?’ last.”
YouCat – Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church – was first published in 2011 with a foreword by Pope Benedict XVI and has since been translated into dozens of languages. Various follow-up volumes have focused on particular elements of the faith. YouCat: Love Forever focuses specifically on the vocation to marriage and family life.
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Leo XIV writes prologue for new YouCat on love and marriage (By Daniel Esparza, Aleteia)
