The pope preaches against license (June 6)

The pope opened proceedings of the annual congress of the diocese of Rome (June 7 and 8), on the theme Family and Christian Community: formation of the person and transmission of the faith. A meeting in which priests, religious and laity of the diocese of Rome participated, including many families. The cardinal vicar of Rome, Camillo Ruini, accompanied by a couple from Rome and their daughter, welcomed the pope shortly after 7.30 on Monday evening, June 6, in the basilica St. John Lateran, cathedral of Rome. “Many children pray every evening with their parents,” eight year old Sara told the pope, “and today we are happy to pray with the pope”.

 During the course of a long talk, the pope affirmed that “the current different forms of erosion of marriage, such as cohabitation and “trial marriage” and even pseudo-marriage between persons of the same sex, are instead an expression of anarchic liberty which is erroneously passed off as the true liberation of man.”

 Such “pseudo-liberty”, continued Benedict XVI, is founded on the trivialization of man, which presupposes that he can do what he wants to himself, his body, thus becoming a secondary thing. Evoking the anthropological foundation of the family, the pope said that marriage and the family were not a chance sociological construction, adding that this construction could not be replaced by others.

 Licentiousness, insisted the Sovereign pontiff, which tries to pass itself off as the discovery of the body and its value, is in reality, the opposite, a dualism which renders the body contemptible, placing it, so to speak, outside of the person’s authentic being and dignity. The pope then claimed that “the institution of marriage is not an illicit interference of society or authority, the external imposition of form, but on the contrary, the intrinsic requirement of the pact of conjugal love and the depths of the human person”.

The pope then explained the “theological character” of the body of the man and the woman, affirming that “man is not merely biological”. Benedict XVI then explained that human sexuality, equally, was not juxtaposed to the human being, but was an integral part of it. He added that it is only when sexuality is integrated within the human person, that it successfully acquires meaning.

 Then Benedict XVI talked about the gift of life. He said that it was contrary to human love and to the profound vocation of man and woman, to close their own union to the gift of life, and even more so, to suppress or manipulate unborn life.

Benedict XVI then invoked the “the threat of relativism.” He encouraged Christian families not to be discouraged by the difficulties they encountered, stressing that the educational relationship is by nature, something delicate. “Today,” said the pope, “the presence in our culture of a relativism which recognizes nothing as definitive, constitutes a particularly insidious obstacle in the work of education”. He added that this relativism, which leaves as the sole ultimate possibility, one’s own self and desires, presents itself “under the appearance of freedom and becomes a prison for each one of us”.

The pope continued his discourse, calling on families to oppose the predominance of this relativism in society and culture, stating that, for this, “apart from the teachings of the Church, the witness and public commitment of Christian families is very important, especially in order to reaffirm the inviolability of human life from the moment of conception to its natural end”.

Benedict XVI also recalled the “unique and irreplaceable” value of the family founded on marriage and the need for legislative and administrative measures which support the family in the task of bringing children into the world and educating them, an essential duty for our common future. “The family and the Church, the parish and other kinds of church communities,” the Sovereign Pontiff noted, “are called to collaborate as closely as possible in (…) the formation of the person and the transmission of the faith.”

At the end of his talk, Benedict XVI evoked the essential role of priests and religious in the Church, confirming the necessity of families to pray for vocations. Furthermore, the pope made it clear that “the choice of virginity for the love of God and neighbor, which is required for the priesthood and consecrated life, goes hand in hand with the estimation of Christian marriage”. “Both, in two different and complementary ways, make visible the mystery of God’s Covenant with His people”.