Cardinal  Felipe Arizmendi , Bishop Emeritus of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and responsible for the Doctrine of the Faith at the  Mexican Episcopal Conference (CEM) , offers Exaudi readers his article.

FACTS

Official statistics in our country indicate a progressive decline in the birth rate. Many young people no longer want to get married, preferring to maintain their freedom; and if they do marry, they don’t want children, preferring pets. This is not only a moral reality, but also a social and economic one, because without children, the number of elderly people increases, there is a shortage of workers, and there isn’t enough money to pay pensions.

Years ago, while traveling to Rome with a layover in Paris, I had a French businessman as my seatmate. He was returning from attending to matters concerning several of his companies in Latin America. He told me to urge Mexicans to protect their families as a great treasure, because in France that tradition had already been lost, and every day more foreigners were arriving to take the place of the French. The same thing is happening in other European countries, which are losing their cultural identity.

I was struck by the fact that Pope Francis repeatedly urged Europeans to have children to save society. That applies to other countries as well. Hence the assertion that without family there is no future.

LIGHTNING

Pope Leo XIV, in a recent Wednesday catechesis, recalling what the Second Vatican Council expressed in its Constitution Gaudium et spes on the Church in the world, said:

“The well-being of the individual and of human and Christian society is closely linked to the prosperity of the conjugal and family community… as an intimate conjugal community of life and love. The foundation of this union is recognized in the conjugal covenant, understood as the human act by which spouses give and receive one another. The reciprocal self-giving of man and woman, ‘so that they are no longer two, but one flesh’ (Mt 19:6), motivates the requirement of complete fidelity and the indissoluble unity of the spouses; and finds living expression in procreation and the education of children. A reflection of the divine Trinity, conjugal and parental love, through the Sacrament of Matrimony, is governed and enriched by the redemptive power of Christ, so that spouses may love one another as He Himself loved the Church and gave Himself up for her.”

Conjugal love is not limited to erotic attraction—though that is also part of it—but encompasses the entire will of the spouses, rekindling their affection and expressing itself through feelings and gestures of tenderness. This love embraces the good of the whole person of both husband and wife, equal in dignity; it permeates the entire life of the spouses and finds expression in the acts uniquely proper to marriage. The special intimacy of the spouses signifies integral love between persons, fosters mutual self-giving, and enriches their mutual joy.

The fruitfulness of conjugal love is also expressed in the procreation of children, the most excellent gift of marriage. By transmitting and nurturing human life, which must never be discarded, spouses become cooperators in the love of God the Creator and, as it were, its interpreters. Called to this human and Christian responsibility, they must be guided by sound judgment regarding their own good and the good of their children, whether already born or yet to come. This judgment, which spouses must ultimately form personally before God, requires that their conscience be conformed to divine law, as interpreted by the Magisterium of the Church in the light of the Gospel.

Life from conception must be safeguarded with the utmost care, rejecting abortion and infanticide; and the very acts proper to married life, ordered according to genuine human dignity, must be respected with great reverence.

The teaching of Gaudium et spes on the conjugal and family community thus goes so far as to underline the social function of the family, which it defines as a school of the richest humanism and foundation of society, reminding all those who have social responsibilities, especially in the political and cultural sphere, of the duty to contribute effectively to the progress of marriage and the family” (21-X-2026) .

ACTIONS

Let us take care of our families. May there not be so many separations without serious reasons. May marital love, with human and Christian maturity, help us overcome the inevitable problems. May young people be encouraged to marry and start a family with children, according to their Christian conscience and their circumstances.