Scottish Catholic Observer

“The Church, in fact, can demonstrate God’s unwavering merciful love toward families, especially those wounded by sin and life’s trials, and at the same time proclaim the essential truth of marriage according to God’s plan,” the Pope said last Friday, in a meeting with members of the Roman Rota (above). The Holy Father holds the annual meeting to inaugurate the Vatican court’s judicial year.

Pope Francis said the court, which hears requests for marriage annulments, helps support families and the truth about the sacred bond of marriage.

In evaluating and judging marriage cases and contributing to formation, the Roman Rota helps promote and proclaim the truth, he said.

When the Church, through the court’s service, seeks to declare the truth about marriage in each specific case, it always bears in mind that those ‘who, through free choice or unfortunate circumstances in life, live in an objective state of error continue to be the object of the merciful love of Christ and therefore of the Church, too’.

The two gatherings of the Synod of Bishops focused on the family were occasions of ‘in-depth, knowledgeable discernment’ and they gave the Church a chance to tell ‘the world that there can be no confusion between the family desired by God and any other kind of union,’ the Pope said.

“The family, based on indissoluble, unitive and procreative marriage, is part of God’s ‘dream’ and the Church’s for the salvation of humanity,” he added.

The Church will always offer the truth about marriage, he said, ‘not as an ideal for the few, despite modern examples based on what is fleeting and transitory, but as a reality that, with Christ’s grace, can be lived by all the Baptised Faithful.’

—This story ran in full in the January 29 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.