VI – Christian Guidelines

Basic approach to the problem: “At the beginning it was not that way”

(36) The Christian community is challenged by the phenomenon of de facto unions.  The unions without any legal institutional bond –civil or religious—constitute an increasingly frequent phenomenon to which the pastoral action of the Church must pay attention.[83][83]  Not only through reason, but also and above all through the “splendor of truth”, which has been given to them through faith, believers are capable of calling things by their own name: good, good and evil, evil.  In the current context, which is highly relativist and tends to dissolve all differences, including essential ones between marriage and de facto unions, greater wisdom and more courageous freedom are needed to avoid  errors or compromises, with the conviction that “the most dangerous crisis which can afflict man…[is] the confusion between good and evil, which makes it impossible to build up and to preserve the moral order of individuals and communities”.[84][84]  When carrying out a specifically Christian reflection on the signs of the times before the apparent obscuring in the hearts of some of our contemporaries of the profound truth about human love, it is good to draw closer to the pure waters of the Gospel.