"They are no longer two but one flesh"
« What God has joined together, man should not separate. » This expression “sums up the essential greatness of marriage and, at the same time, the moral intensity of family life.” Today we wish the same greatness and dignity for all married couples of the world; we wish the same sacramental intensity and moral integrity for all families. And we ask this for the good of humankind! For the good of each person. The human person has no other way towards humanity except through the family. And the family itself should be at the very basis of every effort so that our human world might become ever more human. No one can run away from this concern: no society, no people, no system; neither the State nor the Church nor even the individual.
The love that unites a man and a woman both as married couple and as parents is both gift and commandment…: “You shall love...” (Mt 22:37-39). To obey the love commandment means to accomplish every obligation of a christian family. At the end of the day, everything is reduced to this: marital fidelity and probity, responsible fatherhood and education. The “little church” – the domestic Church – refers to a family living in the spirit of the love commandment: its interior truth, daily effort, spiritual beauty and strength… If God is loved before all other things then the person is loving and is loved with all available plenitude of love. If this inseparable structure, of which Christ’s commandment speaks, is destroyed then our love will be detached from its deepest roots, it will lose its roots of plenitude and truth essential to it. We pray for all christian families, all families in the world, that this plenitude and truth of love may be granted to them as Christ’s commandment indicates.