"Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment for their development and emotional maturity." The Pope reiterated this in his address, on November 17th, to the International Conference on the Complementarity of Man and Woman, sponsored by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The complementarity of man and woman "is the basis of marriage and the family, which is the first school where we learn to appreciate our gifts and those of others," and "in families—he observed—there are tensions" but they are also resolved in the family. "When speaking about complementarity between man and woman in this context, we need to avoid confusing that term with the simplistic idea that all the roles and relations of both sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern. Complementarity takes on many forms, because each man and each woman makes his or her distinctive contributions to their marriage and to their children's education. Each one's personal wealth and personal charisma, together with their complementarity, becomes a great resource. Besides, it is not just a good asset but it is also beautiful."
The crisis of the family, according to Francis, has led to "an ecological crisis – for social environments, like natural environments, need protection": "although the human race has now come to understand the need to face what endangers our natural environments, we are slow – we really are slow, aren't we? in our culture and even in our Catholic culture – when it comes to recognizing that our fragile social environments are also threatened. It is therefore essential to foster a new human ecology and make it progress."
The Pope urged the young people not to “give themselves over to the poisonous environment of what is transitory, but rather to be revolutionaries with the courage to seek true and lasting love, which means going against the tide." Then, he said that we must avoid considering the family ideologically: "We must not fall into the trap of being swayed by ideological concepts. The family is an anthropological fact, and consequently a social and cultural fact ... and we cannot qualify it on the basis of ideological ideas valid only at one moment in history. It is not possible to speak about a conservative family or a progressive family: the family is family. Neither one of these concepts, nor any kind of ideological notions, can be used to qualify it. The family is per se; it has a power within itself."
Read the entire speech
