Continuing his catechesis series on the Holy Spirit and picking up a “few crumbs” of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit developed in the Latin tradition, Pope Francis at the general audience of October 23 considered how the Holy Spirit relates to the sacrament of marriage.
He noted St. Augustine’s contribution to the development of the doctrine on the Holy Spirit. And asked, “What can the Holy Spirit have to do with marriage?”
“A great deal,” the Pope replied.
Christian marriage is the sacrament of self-giving, one for the other, of man and woman. This is how the Creator intended it when “God created man in his own image … male and female he created them.” The human couple is therefore the first and most elementary realization of the communion of love that is the Trinity.
Like the “first person plural” of the Trinity, married couples should also form a “we.”
Stand before each other as an “I” and a “you,” and stand before the rest of the world, including the children, as a “we.” How beautiful it is to hear a mother say to her children: “Your father and I …”, as Mary said to Jesus when they found him at the age of 12 in the temple, teaching the Doctors (cf. Lk 2:48), and to hear a father say: “Your mother and I,” as if they were one. How much children need this unity – mother and father together – unity of parents, and how much they suffer when it is lacking! How much the children of separated parents suffer, how much they suffer.
New joy
No-one said this is easy, the Pope admitted, and especially not in today’s world. But “where the Holy Spirit enters, the capacity for self-giving is reborn.”
In fact, this is the way that the Creator designed it and it is therefore “in the nature” of these things. Leaving aside his notes to insist that “children suffer from the separation or the lack of love of the parents,” he urged repeating what Mary said at Cana: “They have no wine.”
The Holy Spirit is He who continues to perform, on a spiritual level, the miracle that Jesus worked on that occasion; namely, to change the water of habit 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. […]
An Italian proverb says, “Never place a finger (never intervene) between husband and wife.” There is in fact a “finger” to be placed between husband and wife, the “finger of God”: that is, the Holy Spirit!
And today we celebrate...