(Roberto de Mattei/Voice of the Family) — “Marriage is not an ideal, but the canon of true love between a man and a woman: a love that is total, faithful and fruitful”. This is what Leo XIV said on 31 May 2025, in the homily of the Mass for the Jubilee of Families, emphasising that this love “enables you, in the image of God, to bestow the gift of life”.
The meaning of this statement must not be overlooked, because too often today the moral law is reduced to an ideal difficult to achieve. The word “canon”, in religious language, indicates an official rule of the Church, a legal and moral norm, an objective law, that all Christians are bound to observe.
Marriage, one and indissoluble, formed by a man and a woman, is a divine and natural institution, willed by God himself and elevated by Jesus Christ to the dignity of a Sacrament. The family, founded on marriage, is therefore a true society with a spiritual, moral and juridical unity, whose constitution and rights God has established. Whoever observes this law receives from God all the graces necessary to observe it.
Presenting marriage as an ideal, and not as a law to which a grace is linked, is equivalent to affirming that this model does not belong to the world of reality, but to that of desires, sometimes unattainable. It therefore means falling into moral relativism. Men, in order to live, need principles that can and must be lived: one of these is marriage. The idea, instead, that “marriage is an ideal” runs through the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia of 2016, in which Pope Francis insisted on the fact that this ideal must be proposed gradually, accompanying people on their journey. But Catholic morality is not gradual and does not admit exceptions: either it is absolute or it is not. …
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