Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rome (Fides Service) - We give the second long excerpt of Pope Benedict XVI’s important address on the Family given at St John’s Basilica Cathedral on 6 June to open Rome’s diocesan Ecclesial Congress on the subject "The Family and the Christian Community: formation of the person and handing on the faith". (English translation from the original Italian by Fides)
Marriage and the family in the history of salvation
The truth of marriage and the family which is rooted in the truth of mankind is actuated in the history of salvation at the centre of which we have the word: "God loves his people". Biblical revelation is in fact first of all expression of a love story, the story of God’s covenant with mankind: this explains why the story of the love and union of a man and a woman in the covenant of matrimony is assumed by God as the symbol of the history of salvation. The ineffable fact, the mystery of God’s love for every man and every woman receives its linguistic form from the vocabulary of marriage and the family, in positive and in negative: God’s reaching out to his people is presented in fact in the language of the love of spouses, while the infidelity of Israel, her idolatry, is called adultery and prostitution.
In the New Testament God’s love becomes radical to the point that he becomes in his Son flesh of our flesh, true man. In this way God’s union with mankind takes on its supreme, irreversible and definitive form. And so the definitive form for human love was also outlined, that reciprocal ‘yes’ which cannot be revoked: this form does not alienate, rather it frees from the alienation of history and brings mankind back to the truth of creation. The sacramental nature which matrimony assumes in Christ means that the gift of creation has been elevated to the grace of redemption. Christ’s grace does not come from outside the nature of the human person, it is not a violation, it liberates and restores in order to lift this nature above its normal confines. And just as the incarnation of the Son of God reveals its true significance in the cross, so too authentic human love is gift of self, it cannot exist if it wishes to avoid the cross.
Dear brothers and sisters, this profound bond between God and mankind, between God’s love and human love, is also confirmed by certain negative tendencies and developments of which we all feel the weight. Debasement of human love, suppression of authentic capacity to love in our day shows itself to be the most effective weapon with which to drive God away from man, to distance God from the eyes and heart of man. Analogously, the desire to "free" nature of God leads to loss of sight of nature, including human nature reducing it to a set of functions, to be used as one pleases in order to build an alleged better world and a happier humanity; instead, this destroys the plan of the Creator and with it the truth of our nature.
Children
Also in the generation of children matrimony reflects its divine model, God’s love for all men and women. Man’s paternity and woman’s maternity, like their bodies and their love, cannot be circumscribed to the biological: life is given fully only when with birth love and meaning are also given making it possible to say yes to this life. It is precisely here that it becomes clear just how contrary it is to human love, to the profound calling of husband and wife, to systemically close their union to the gift of life and even more to suppress life or tamper with it at its earliest stages.
Neither a mother or a father alone have the strength to give a child sufficient love and sufficient meaning to life. In order to be able to say to a person "your life is good, although I do not know your future", it is necessary to have superior authority and credibility than that which the individual alone can assume. The Christian knows this authority is conferred on that greater family which God through his Son Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit created in the history of mankind namely the Church. Here the Christian sees at work that eternal and indestructible love which guarantees the life of each one of us permanent meaning even though we do not know the future. For this reason the edification of each individual family finds its place within the greater family of the Church which sustains and carries it and guarantees that there is meaning and that also in the future there will be the Creator’s ‘yes’. And reciprocally the Church is edified by families, "small domestic Churches", as Vatican II called them (Lumen gentium, 11; Apostolicam actuositatem, 11), referring to an early patristic expression (St John Chrysostom, In Genesim serm. VI,2; VII,1). In the same sense Familiaris consortio affirms " Christian marriage …constitutes the natural setting in which the human person is introduced into the great family of the Church. " (n. 15). (to be followed.) (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 8/6/2005, righe 52, parole 679)
