The responsibility to protect and promote marriage and family life is “more urgent than ever before”, Pope Leo XIV said yesterday. Source: CNS.
In his first weekly general audience since undergoing lung cancer surgery, the Pope said marriage requires more than physical attraction, emphasising that authentic love involves mutual self-giving, fidelity and a lifelong commitment between spouses.
Pope Leo opened the general audience in St Peter’s Square by thanking God and the faithful for their prayers following his October 13 surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from his right lung.
Reflecting on the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes, Pope Leo said the council presented marriage as an “intimate partnership of married life and love”, rooted in the mutual self-giving of spouses.
He said the council recognised that the well-being of individuals and society was closely linked to the health of marriage and family life.
Rather than understanding marriage solely as a legal contract, the council emphasised the marital covenant, through which spouses mutually give themselves to and accept one another, the Pope said.
Such a union requires “total fidelity” and the “unbreakable oneness” of spouses, he said, and finds expression in the procreation and upbringing of children.
Pope Leo said marital love, understood through Christ’s love, is not limited to physical attraction but “involves the entire will of the spouses, enlivening the affections of their hearts and expressing itself through sentiments and gestures of tenderness”.
He emphasised that men and women are equal in dignity and that marital intimacy should deepen the mutual self-giving and shared joy of spouses.
The “supreme gift of marriage” is children, he said, through whom spouses become “cooperators with the love of God the Creator.”
Pope Leo said married couples must carefully consider their own circumstances and the wellbeing of their children when making decisions about having children, while ensuring those decisions are guided by conscience and conform to Church teaching.
The Pope also reaffirmed the Church’s teaching on protecting human life from conception, citing the council’s condemnation of abortion and infanticide, while emphasising the dignity of marital intimacy.
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Protecting marriage more urgent than ever, Pope says after surgery (By Josephine Peterson, CNS)
