He observes that the emphasis on the value of individual life, which gives prominence to the individual's desires and needs, is in a certain way a good result of the contemporary cultural anthropological exchange, because it gives more "opportunities to recognize each person's dignity and qualify the interpersonal relationships."

However, behind this assertion and promotion of the individual―he continues― there can be a hidden snare: "the temptation to selfish individualism," which can lead to conceive man as "an island" separated from the rest and closed within the absolutism of his desires and arbitrary freedom.

The individualistic conception of existence inevitably also affects the dimensions of affectivity and procreation, so that the first, dissociated from the latter, "loses its interpersonal meaning and implodes in the ego," enslaving the body to the claims of hedonism; the latter, lived selfishly, "unhooks the filial generation from the sexual relationship between man and woman, so depersonalizing the generative act and claiming the child as a right of every adult, regardless of his/her identity and sex."

In order to deal with this dangerous drift, the pastoral challenge is to show that Christian marriage and the family, lived in the light of the Gospel, are actually ways of responding to and satisfying the search for happiness, by making it concretely visible on the faces of men and women, who have discovered this beauty and manifest it daily, thus showing that no conjugal and familial reality is too wounded and distant to be reached by Christ's love.