Pope: Couples Need Church’s Help

“Your work is precious to the Church,” Pope Francis told the international leaders of the Teams of Our Lady International Catholic Movement for Christian Married Couples, as he thanked them for their commitment to help families, especially many “striving to live Christian marriage as a gift.”
The Christian family, the Pope warned, “is currently facing a true ‘cultural storm’ in this changing era, threatened and tempted on various fronts.” For this reason, the Holy Father emphasized the value of the efforts to accompany couples closely so that they do not feel alone in the difficulties of life and in their marital relationship. “In this way,” he said, “you are an expression of the Church ‘going out,’ which draws close to people’s situations and problems and spends itself without reserve for the good of families today and tomorrow.”
“It is a true mission today to accompany couples!” the Pope said. “To safeguard marriage, in fact, means to safeguard an entire family, it means to save all the relationships generated by marriage: the love between spouses, between parents and children, between grandparents and grandchildren.” It means, the Holy Father suggested, saving that witness of “a possible and forever love,” in which “young people struggle to believe.”