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Earlier this year, I had the privilege of representing our Order at the Fifth World Meeting of Families with Pope Benedict XVI in Valencia, Spain.
During my presentation to the Holy Father, I said, “Marriage and family is the privileged place in which Trinitarian love and communion is inscribed within the very structure of creation. Marriage and family witness to the love and communion which is the true goal of every community and every society. The model of Trinitarian communion within the family points to the possibility of similar communion within every community and every society. If every person is called to a vocation of love, then the only civilization worthy of the dignity of every person is a civilization of love.”
More could have been said if time had permitted, but this brief summary presents the centerpiece of the New Evangelization according to John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The vocation to love within marriage is the example par excellence of the Christian way of life – of “loving one’s neighbor as one’s self.”
In this vision, the family becomes the “basic cell” of a new society. The vocation to love begins within the family, but it should not end there. It must radiate throughout all of society. And as it does so, it helps build what our Holy Father calls a new “civilization of love.”
This is why there is such an important connection between the Church’s teaching on marriage and one’s social responsibility to work for justice and charity. John Paul II reminded us that the family is a sanctuary of life and of love. In his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI encourages us to think of society itself in a similar way.
Those who argue that “traditional” marriage should be regarded as only one among several “lifestyle” choices miss this important connection between the health and stability of the family and the common good.
Instead, as Pope Benedict XVI made clear in Spain, far from accommodating itself to such misguided views of marriage, the Church is challenging secular culture to a higher standard – to abandon materialism, consumerism and the other symptoms of the culture of death and to choose instead “the way of love” leading to a culture of life and a civilization of love.
Just weeks before the Valencia meeting, faculty and students of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family were received in audience by Pope Benedict XVI to celebrate the 25th anniversary of its founding. On that occasion, Msgr. Livio Melina, the president of the institute, and I presented the Holy Father with the first published commentary on his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, prepared by faculty of the institute. The book, entitled The Way of Love, has been published in Italian and Spanish and will be published in English next month by Ignatius Press.
Clearly, the Knights of Columbus is committed to defending marriage and family. By living even more fully the principles of charity, unity and fraternity within the family we can, in the days to come, take up this challenge in even greater ways.
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