Because most people today do not understand that sacramental marriage really is a bond that binds them to each other for life, many marriages today can be considered invalid, Pope Francis said on June 16. “We are living in a culture of the provisional,” he told participants in the Diocese of Rome’s annual pastoral conference. The idea of commitments being temporary “occurs everywhere, even in priestly and religious life,” he said. Pope Francis told the story of a bishop who said a university graduate came to him saying he wanted to be a priest, but only for 10 years. That lack of true commitment is part of the reason, he said, that “many sacramental marriages are null. They say ‘Yes, for my whole life,’ but they do not know what they are saying because they have a different culture.”
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Pope Francis prayed that the Jubilee Year may become “a season of hope” and reconciliation in a world at war and suffering humanitarian crises as he opened the Holy Door in St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve.
‘If God can visit us, even when our hearts seem like a lowly manger, we can truly say: Hope is not dead; hope is alive and it embraces our lives forever!’
Inspired by his friend and mentor Henri Nouwen, Metropolitan Borys Gudziak, leader of Ukrainian Catholics in the U.S., invites listeners in his Christmas Eve homily to approach the manger with renewed awe and openness.
A Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, by Father Terrance Klein