Witness of Christian marriage

(40) The efforts to obtain legislation favorable to de facto unions in many countries with an ancient Christian tradition are of great concern to pastors and the faithful.  Often it might seem that one does not know what answer to give to this phenomenon, and that the reaction is merely defensive, thus giving the impression that the Church only wants to maintain the status quo, as if the family based on marriage were simply the cultural model (a “traditional” model) of the Church that it wants to keep, despite the great transformations in our era.

In this regard, the positive aspects of conjugal love must be deepened so that it will be possible to return to inculturating the Gospel truth in a way similar to that of the Christians during the first centuries of our era.  The privileged subject of this new evangelization of the family are Christian families because they, being the subjects of evangelization, are the first evangelizers of the “Good News” of “fair love”, [95][95] not only through their words, but above all through their personal witness.  It is urgent to rediscover the social value of the wonder of conjugal love because the phenomenon of de facto unions is not on the margin of the ideological factors that obscure it and which correspond to an erroneous conception of human sexuality and of the man-woman relationship.  From this comes the transcendental importance of the life of grace in Christ of Christian marriages: “The Christian family too is part of this priestly people which is the Church.  By means of the sacrament of marriage, in which it is rooted and from which it draws its nourishment, the Christian family is continuously vivified by the Lord Jesus and called and engaged by him in a dialogue with God through the sacraments, through the offering of one’s life, and through prayer.  This is the priestly role which the Christian family can and ought to exercise in intimate communion with the whole Church, through the daily realities of married and family life.  In this way the Christian family is called to be sanctified and to sanctify the ecclesial community and the world”.[96][96]