In a packed St. Peter’s Square, despite the bad weather, Pope Francis recalls the Italian saying: “Don’t put your finger between husband and wife” and explains that, instead, you should put a finger, that of God who is the Holy Spirit. In continuing his catechesis, on the theme «The Spirit and the Bride. The Holy Spirit guides the people of God to meet Jesus, our hope”, the Pontiff spoke about the sacrament of marriage.
He underlines that the main architect of the doctrine on marriage is Saint Augustine. «He starts from the revelation that “God is love”. Now love presupposes one who loves, one who is loved and love itself that unites them. The Father is, in the Trinity, the one who loves, the source and principle of everything; the Son is the one who is loved, and the Holy Spirit is the love that unites them.” But what does this have to do with marriage, Francesco asks? To answer, he recalls that «someone proposed calling the Holy Spirit, not “the third person” singular of the Trinity, but rather “the first person plural”. He, in other words, is the We, the divine We of the Father and the Son, the bond of unity between different people, the very principle of the unity of the Church, which is precisely a “single body” resulting from several people”, thus in “Christian” marriage which “is the sacrament of man and woman making themselves a gift for each other” it is understood that “the human couple is the first and most elementary realization of the communion of love which is the Trinity. The spouses should also form a first person plural, a “we”. Standing in front of each other as an “I” and a “you”, and standing in front of the rest of the world, including children, as an “us”.
Francis says that «it is beautiful to hear a mother say to her children: “your father and I…”, as Mary said to Jesus, when they found him as a twelve-year-old in the temple teaching the doctors, and to hear a father say: «Your mother and I”, almost as if they were a single subject. How much do children need this unity, father and mother together, this unity of parents and how much they suffer when it fails! How much the children of fathers who hope for each other suffer, how much they suffer! To correspond to this vocation, however, marriage needs the support of He who is the Gift, or rather the giving of oneself par excellence. Where the Holy Spirit enters, the ability to give oneself is reborn.”
But marriage must be built on rock and not on sand, because when they fail or when it is seen that there is no love between the spouses, the first to suffer are the children. «Of course», he explains, «it may seem easier and more hasty to build on sand than on rock; but Jesus’ parable tells us what the result is. In this case, then, we don’t even need the parable, because the consequences of marriages built on sand are, unfortunately, there for all to see and it is above all the children who pay the price. Children suffer from separation or lack of love from their parents. What Mary said to Jesus in Cana of Galilee must be repeated of many spouses: “They have no wine”. The Holy Spirit, however, is the one who continues to perform, on a spiritual level, the miracle that Jesus performed on that occasion, that is, changing the water of habit into a new joy of being together. It is not a pious illusion: it is what the Holy Spirit has done in many weddings, when the spouses have decided to invoke him.”
And he proposes that «alongside the information of a legal, psychological and moral nature that is given, this “spiritual” preparation should be deepened in the preparation of engaged couples for marriage» so that between the two spouses there is always the finger of God which is the Holy Spirit .
