The Catholic Church must help young people understand that marriage
isn’t always easy, “but it is so beautiful,” Pope Francis has said.
Speaking today during a meeting with members of the Pontifical
Council for the Family.
”There are problems in marriage: different
points of view, jealousies, arguments, but tell young couples to never
let the day end without making peace. The sacrament of matrimony is
renewed in this act of peace.”
“This path is not easy, but it is so beautiful,” the pope said. “It’s beautiful. Tell them that.”
For the Church, he said, a family isn’t simply a group of
individuals, but it is a community where people learn to love one
another, share with and make sacrifices for each other and “defend life,
especially of those who are more fragile and weak.”
The family as a special community must “be recognised as such,
especially today when so much emphasis is placed on the safeguarding of
individual rights,” he said. “We must defend the rights of this
community that is the family.”
Defending the family also means defending the basic fact that it is a
community founded on the marriage of a man and a woman, he said.
“Spousal and familial love clearly reveal that the vocation of the
human person is to love one other person forever and that the trials,
sacrifices and crises in the life of the couple or the family are stages
for growth in goodness, truth and beauty,” he said.
As he has done on several occasions, Pope Francis also spoke about
the special place in the family reserved for children and for the
elderly, family members who are “the most vulnerable and often the most
forgotten.”
“Any time a child is abandoned or an older person marginalized, it is
not only an act of injustice, but marks the failure of that society,”
he said. “Taking care of little ones and of the elderly is a mark of
civility.”
Pope Francis, departing from his prepared text, told members of the
council, “When I hear the confession of a young married man or woman,
and they refer to their son or daughter, I ask, ‘How many children do
you have?’ and they tell me. Maybe they’re expecting another question
after that, but I always ask, ‘And tell me, do you play with your
children? Do you waste time with your children?’”
“The free gift of a parent’s time is so important,” he said.