In the Mass that celebrated in the Plaza de San Pedro for the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and the Elders, Pope Leo XIV remunched that “from the sinus of families the future of the peoples is born” while indicating that the marriage “is not an ideal”, but the “model of true love between men and women.”
In the homily, the Holy Father cited this phrase of the encyclical Human lifeof San Pablo VI, published in 1968 after the Second Vatican Council, and pointed out that conjugal love is “total, faithful and fruitful.”
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“This love, by making them one flesh, enables them to give life, in the image of God,” he said to hundreds of families from about 120 countries, according to data from the organizers, who have participated in this great date of the Holy Year of Hope 2025.
Thus, in this great jubilee event that has gathered three generations together (parents, children and grandparents), the Pontiff called to be a “sign of peace for all, in society and in the world.”
He emphasized, in this sense, that the Lord “gives full meaning to the luminous moments of our mutual love as parents, grandparents, sons and daughters” and said that “the future of peoples is born from the bosom of families.”
On the other hand, he stressed the role of the family as a vital space for the transmission of faith and, therefore, as “a privileged place to find Jesus.”
Pope Leo XIV stressed that, as soon as they were born, all babies need “others to live; we would not have achieved it.” And he added: “We all live thanks to a relationship, that is, to a free and liberating bond of humanity and mutual care.”
Betrayed humanity
However, in a serious tone, he found that sometimes this humanity “is betrayed.” And he gave as an example the occasions in which “freedom is invoked not to give life, but to remove it, not to protect, but to hurt.”
The Pontiff did not specify the practical cases referred to in particular, but one of the arguments that are used, for example, in euthanasia or abortion is individual freedom as a supreme good against the right to life.
In any case, he said that “even in the face of the evil that divides and kills, Jesus continues to pray for us for us, and his prayer acts as a balm over our wounds, becoming an announcement of forgiveness and reconciliation for all.”
Pope Leo XIV also called for unity in families and in the Church, always respecting diversity and differences, and said that this example is precisely what we “want to announce to the world.”
“We are here to be one as the Lord wants us to be one, in our families and in the places where we live, work and study: different, but one; many, but one, always one, in any circumstance and age of life,” he said.
In his homily, he claimed that unity as “the greatest good that can be desired” because “he makes among the creatures the eternal communion of love that is God himself: the father who gives life, the son who receives it and the spirit that shares it.”
The Church is not an indistinct mass or an anonymous block
In any case, he specified that he does not want the church to be “an indistinct mass, as an anonymous block.”
He also invited parents to be for their children “examples of coherence, behaving as they want them to behave, educate them in freedom through obedience, always looking for their own good and the means to increase it.” He also put duties to the children, who asked them to “be grateful” with their parents.
In the Eucharist, he also focused on the testimony of marriages that have been proclaimed blessed, not separately, but together, claiming the marital love of husbands as a model for the current world.
The Pontiff especially remembered Luis and Celia Martin (in French, Louis y Zélie Martin), A French marriage of the nineteenth century, parents of Santa Teresa of the Child Jesus, also known as Santa Teresita de Lisieux, who were canonized together by Pope Francis on October 18, 2015. It is about the first canonized husbands as a couple in a ceremony.
Leo XIV also gave the Blessed Luis and María Beltrame Quattrocchi, an Italian marriage of the twentieth century, which were beatified together on October 21, 2001 by Pope John Paul II, becoming the first beatified marriage.
And finally, he also referred to the Polish Family Ulma: a martyr Catholic family of World War II, composed of the Józef and Wiktoria Ulma husbands and their seven children, who were killed by the Nazis on March 24, 1944 for having hidden eight Jews at home, in the town of Markowa, in southeast of Poland. They were beatified as a whole family on September 10, 2023 in a ceremony held instead of their martyrdom.
For the Pope, these examples are a call for the present time: “Yes, by proposing as exemplary witnesses to holy marriages, the Church tells us that today’s world needs the conjugal alliance to know and welcome the love of God, and to overcome, with its strength that unites and reconciles, the forces that destroy relations and societies.”
Finally, Pope Leo XIV launched a special message for the elderly, whom he asked that “wake up, wisdom and tenderness” for their families.
Victoria Cardiel
Victoria Cardiel is a journalist specialized in social and religious information issues. Since 2013, he has covered all the news of the Vatican for various media, such as the Spanish news agency Europa Press, or the weekly of the Archdiocese of Madrid, Alfa and Omega.