Pope Francis: the Holy Spirit is essential for union in marriage

Pope Francis reflected in the General Audience on the gifts that the Holy Spirit grants to spouses who invoke him, making their union a marriage “built on rock.”

Before the faithful who listened to him from St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, the Holy Father made reference to the doctrine of Saint Augustine, who started from the revelation that “God is love” and taught how the Holy Spirit “especially illuminates the sacrament.” of marriage.”

Next, Pope Francis indicated that “the Father is, in the Trinity, the one who loves, the source and the beginning of everything; the Son is the one who is loved, and the Holy Spirit is the love that unites them.”

In this way, he specified that the God of Christians is a “unique” God, but not solitary; theirs is a unity of communion and love.

Along these lines, he explained that some have proposed calling the Holy Spirit not the “third person” singular of the Trinity, but rather “the first person plural.”

“He is, in other words, the divine We of the Father and the Son, the bond of unity between different persons, the very principle of the unity of the Church, which is exactly one ‘single body’ resulting from a multitude of persons. ”.

The Pontiff explained what the Holy Spirit has to say to the family. “What does the Holy Spirit have to do with marriage? A lot, perhaps the essential thing,” he noted.

First of all, he recalled that Christian marriage “is the sacrament of becoming a gift, one for another, of man and woman.”

The human couple is, therefore, “the first and most basic realization of the communion of love that is the Trinity,” Pope Francis said.

“Spouses must also form a first person plural, a ‘we’. Stand before each other as an ‘I’ and a ‘you’, and stand before the rest of the world, including your children, as a ‘we’. How beautiful it is to hear a mother say to her children: ‘Your father and I…’,” he added.

“How much children need this parental unity and how much they suffer when it is missing! “How much the children of parents who separate suffer, how much they suffer,” lamented Pope Francis.

He also stressed that, to respond to this vocation, “marriage needs the support of the One who is the Gift, or, rather, the one who gives himself par excellence.”

Where the Holy Spirit enters, the Pontiff continued, “the ability to surrender is reborn. Some Fathers of the Latin Church affirmed that, being a reciprocal gift of the Father and the Son in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is also the reason for the joy that reigns between them.

He also specified that this unity is not an easy goal, “and even less so in today’s world; but this is the truth of things as the Creator conceived them and, therefore, it is in their nature.”

“Of course, it may seem easier and faster to build on sand than on rock; The consequences of marriages built on sand are, unfortunately, visible to all, and it is above all the children who pay the price,” he noted.

Deepen spiritual preparation

The Holy Spirit, according to the Holy Father, “is the one who continues to perform, on the spiritual plane,” the miracle that Jesus performed at the Wedding at Cana, that is, “changing the water of custom into a new joy of being together.” .

“It is not a pious illusion: it is what the Holy Spirit has done in so many marriages, when the spouses decided to invoke him,” he pointed out.

“It would not be bad, therefore, if, together with the legal, psychological and moral information that is given in the preparation of the couple for marriage, this spiritual preparation were deepened,” Pope Francis proposed.