.jpg?width=1024 "Pope Francis meets the newlyweds")
Pope Francis meets the bride and groom – Osservatore Romano (2017)
“Every true marriage, even the nonsacramental one, is a gift from God to the spouses. Marriage is always a gift! A good! A good of extraordinary value for everyone: for the spouses themselves, for their children, for all the families with whom they enter into a relationship, for the whole Church, for all humanity”.
Conjugal fidelity is based on divine fidelity, conjugal fruitfulness is based on divine fruitfulness. Husband and wife are called to accept this gift and freely respond to it with the mutual gift of self.” Pope Francis said this when receiving the Court of the Roman Rota on the occasion of the ceremonial opening of the court year. HERE THE TEXT
“This beautiful vision may seem utopian – the Pope admitted – because it does not seem to take into account human weakness, the fickleness of love. Indissolubility is often perceived as an ideal, and the mentality that marriage lasts as long as there is love prevails.”
‘But what is this love? – he asked – Here too, true conjugal love is often unconscious, reduced to a sentimental level or to mere selfish satisfactions».
Instead, “conjugal love is inseparable from marriage itself, in which human love, fragile and limited, meets divine love, ever faithful and merciful”. According to Francis, “it is a gift entrusted to the freedom of spouses, with their limitations and failures, for which the love between a man and a woman needs constant purification and maturing, mutual understanding and forgiveness”.
“I would like to underline the latter – he added extemporaneously -: Hidden crises are not solved in secret, but in mutual forgiveness.”
.jpg?dt=1674820380810?width=620 "The Hearing before the Tribunal of the Roman Rota")
The hearing before the Tribunal of the Roman Rota – Ansa / Vatican Media
The Pope recalled that “the gospel of the family refers to the divine plan of creation of man and woman, that is, to the ‘beginning’, according to the words of Jesus: ‘Have you not read that the Creator did from the beginning they male and female, and he said: Wherefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and be united with his wife, and the two shall be one flesh? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore man should not separate what God has joined together” (Mt 19:4-6). And this one fleshness is part of the divine plan of salvation.”
According to the Pope, “according to Christian revelation, marriage is neither a ceremony, nor a social event, nor a formality; it is not even an abstract ideal: marriage is a reality with its precise consequence, not “a mere form of emotional gratification to be constituted in any way and modified according to each sensibility”.
“We may ask ourselves,” he continued, “how is it possible for a man and woman to form such a captivating bond, a faithful and enduring bond that produces a new family? How is this possible given human limitations and fragility? It is better that we ask ourselves these questions and let ourselves be amazed by the reality of marriage.”