Loving families cultivate healthy relationships

Families are the universal school of life and the school of love, so it is only natural for the Church to concentrate not only on Christian marriage but also on the situation of family life throughout today's society. If the family is weakened then the whole quality of life within our society is systematically impaired, and the individual finds it even more difficult to learn how to love and to form mature, sane and satisfactory relationships.

Nowadays, perhaps more than in the past, much importance has to be given to the sound principle that the family is founded on God. At the heart of the family there is the love between husband and wife, a love that is natural, basic and needs to be permanent. Parents have the very noble vocation to be wife and mother, and husband and father.

It is clear that the most characteristic feature of Christ's teaching on marriage was his repeated insistence on its permanence, on the lifelong commitment of husband and wife to each other; a love commitment in season and out of season. The stronger the commitment and the love, the stronger they become.

When the Lord said: "What God has united, man must not divide", he was not imposing on married people a set of precepts, but was focusing on what he saw as the given reality. He saw, and taught what human and married love is and can be, and how marriage can best express that love and prevent it from being spoiled, abused and degraded.

As Pope Benedict XVI stressed in his address during the fifth world meeting of families, in Valencia, Spain, in July 2007:

"The family is an intermediate institution between individuals and society and nothing can completely take its place. The family is itself based primarily on a deep interpersonal relationship between husband and wife, sustained by affection and mutual understanding. To enable this, it receives abundant help from God in the sacrament of matrimony, which brings with it a true vocation of holiness. Would that our children might experience more the harmony and affection between their parents rather than disagreements and discord, since the love between father and mother is a source of great security for children and it teaches them the beauty of a faithful and lasting love".