POPE LEO XIV has reiterated his Church’s commitment to traditional family life, while urging its priests to help rebuild the credibility of a “wounded Church”.

“Today’s world needs the marriage covenant in order to know and accept God’s love and to defeat, thanks to its unifying and reconciling power, the forces that break down relationships and societies,” he told a congregation of 70,000 in St Peter’s Square on Sunday, during the Roman Catholic Church’s Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and the Elderly.

“I would remind all married couples that marriage is not an ideal but the measure of true love between a man and a woman. . . This love makes you one flesh and enables you, in the image of God, to bestow the gift of life.”

The Pope said that married couples should provide “examples of integrity” to their children, “educating them in freedom through obedience”. He said that the Church had beatified and canonised a number of couples, including the parents of St Teresa of Lisieux, “as exemplary witnesses of married life”.

His remarks may be seen as qualifying the approach of Pope Francis, who upheld traditional Catholic teaching on male-female marriage but also faced criticism for endorsing same-sex civil unions, and allowing priests to bless same-sex couples (News, 22 December 2023).

Returning to the theme of marriage on Monday, the Pope told a seminar at the Vatican that Christian families remained the Church’s “primary nucleus”. He said that the Church should, however, avoid presenting Christian life “mostly as a set of rules to be kept”, or as a “moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live”.

He said: “It is not a matter of giving hasty answers to difficult questions, but of drawing close to people, listening to them, and trying to understand together with them how to face their difficulties.

“This requires a readiness to be open, when necessary, to new ways of seeing things and different ways of acting, for each generation is different and has its own challenges, dreams and questions.”

Addressing newly ordained clergy on Saturday in St Peter’s Basilica, the Pope told priests to avoid treating their status as “a kind of privilege”, and to help “rebuild the credibility of a wounded Church, sent to a wounded humanity, in the midst of a wounded creation”.