During his Wednesday General Audience, Pope Francis focuses on the sacrament of marriage, saying keeping faith and the Holy Spirit at the forefront can preserve and protect the love of married couples and their children.
By Deborah Castellano Lubov
“Marriage needs the support of He who is the Gift, indeed the quintessential giver. Where the Holy Spirit enters, the capacity for self-giving is reborn.”
Pope Francis offered this reminder to the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square during his Wednesday General Audience.
As he continued his catechesis series on the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, the Pope focused on the sacrament of marriage.
Holy Spirit and the family
The Pope began by saying he wished to reflect, in particular, on what the Holy Spirit has to say about the family.
“What can the Holy Spirit have to do with marriage? A great deal, perhaps the essential, and I will try to explain why!”
Christian marriage, the Pope highlighted, is the sacrament of self-giving, one for the other, of man and woman. “This is how,” he recalled, “the Creator intended it when He ‘So God created man in His own image… male and female He created them.’”
The human couple, he noted, is therefore the first and most elementary realization of the communion of love that is the Trinity.
Forming a united front
The Pope stressed that married couples “should form a first person plural, a ‘we,” saying, “They should stand before each other as an ‘I’ and a ‘you,’ and stand before the rest of the world, including the children, as a ‘we.’”
“How beautiful,” he marveled, “it is to hear a mother say to her children: ‘Your father and I…,’ as Mary said to Jesus when they found Him at the age of twelve in the temple, and to hear a father say: ‘Your mother and I,’ as if they were one.”
The Holy Father went on to lament how much children suffer when there is a lack of this unity between their parents, and how greatly children are impacted when their parents separate.
“No-one says that such unity is an easy task, least of all in today’s world,” the Pope acknowledged. However, he continued, “this is the truth of things as the Creator designed them, and it is therefore in their nature.”
Need solid foundations
Certainly, Pope Francis recognized, it may seem easier and quicker to build “on sand than on rock.”
However, he added, “the consequences of marriages built on sand are, unfortunately, there for all to see, and it is mainly the children who pay the price.”
The Holy Father concluded by offering an observation about the spiritual preparation couples should embrace before their wedding.
“It would not be a bad thing if alongside the information of a legal, psychological and moral nature that is given in the preparation of engaged couples for marriage, this ‘spiritual’ preparation was studied more deeply,” he said.
As Pope Francis recalled an Italian proverb which says, “Never place a finger, never intervene, between husband and wife.”
Yet, he said, “There is in fact a ‘finger’ to be placed between husband and wife, the ‘finger of God’: the Holy Spirit!”
Pope Francis at General Audience
