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Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - "Never place a finger, never intervene, between husband and wife, says an Italian proverb. Yet, there is in fact a 'finger' to be placed between husband and wife, the 'finger of God': the Holy Spirit!", said Pope Francis this morning, despite the heavy autumn rain, when he returned to St. Peter's Square for the traditional Wednesday general Audience.
The Pope thus continued the cycle of catechisms on the Holy Spirit and today he discussed the action of the third person of the Trinity in the sacrament of marriage.
Pope Francis quotes the Fathers of the Church in this regard, in particular Saint Augustine, whose reflections start from the revelation that "God is love", as we read in the New Testament. Love, said the Pope, presupposes "someone who loves; someone who is loved - and love itself that unites the two. In the Trinity, the Father is, the one who loves, the source and the beginning of everything; the Son is the one who is loved, and the Holy Spirit is the love that unites them". “The God of Christians is therefore a ‘unique’ but not a solitary God; he is a unity of communion and love.”
“What does the Holy Spirit have to do with marriage?” asks Pope Francis. “Very much, perhaps the essential thing, and I will now try to explain why! Christian marriage is the sacrament of the mutual gift of man and woman. This is how it was intended by the Creator. The human couple is therefore the first and most fundamental realization of the communion of love that is the Trinity”. The spouses too, the Pope stresses, “should form a first person plural, a ‘we’; they should face each other as ‘I’ and ‘you’ and appear to the rest of the world, including their children, as ‘we’. How much children need this unity of parents! How much the children of parents who separate suffer, how much they suffer!”
"However, in order to respond to this vocation," Pope Francis continued, "marriage needs the support of the One who is the gift, or rather the gift par excellence."
"Where the Holy Spirit enters, the capacity to give oneself is reborn." "No one claims that such a union is an easy goal to achieve, least of all in today's world. But this is the truth of things as the Creator intended them, and therefore lies in their nature," the Pope said. "This is not a pious illusion: it is what the Holy Spirit has done in so many marriages - namely when spouses have decided to invoke him." "It would therefore not be bad not only to give future married couples legal, psychological and moral information, but also to deepen the "spiritual" preparation of the engaged couple for marriage," the Pope concluded.
After the catechesis, Pope Francis addressed those present with two appeals. The first is addressed to all the faithful: "The month of October invites us to renew our active collaboration in the mission of the Church. Be missionaries of the Gospel everywhere, offering the spiritual support of prayer and your concrete help to those who strive to bring it to those who do not yet know it".
The second is for peace: "Let us pray for peace. Today I received the latest statistics on the victims of the war in Ukraine: It is terrible! War is irreconcilable; war is a defeat from the start." And "Let us not forget Myanmar, let us not forget Palestine, which suffers inhuman attacks, let us not forget Israel and let us not forget all the nations at war. One number should frighten us: the most profitable investments today are the weapons factories. They make money from death. Let us pray for peace," is the Pope's appeal. (F.B.) (Agenzia Fides, 23/10/2024)
