Pope Francis said Saturday that the Church suffers with couples who are in a “wounded marriage,” and seeks their healing in truth.
“The wounds of marriage today – we know – have many and varied causes: psychological, physical, environmental, cultural – at times they are provoked by the closing of the human heart to love, by the sin that touches everyone,” Pope Francis said Nov. 30 in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. “This is why the Church when she encounters these realities of wounded couples, first of all, cries and suffers with them,” he said.
Pope Francis said that the Church first seeks to soothe and to heal, and then it “strives to be impartial and objective in seeking the truth of a broken marriage.” The pope met with participants in a formation course on pastoral care for married couples in crisis taking in place Nov. 26-30 organized by the Roman Rota. The Roman Rota is one of the three courts of the Holy See, along with the Apostolic Penitentiary and the Apostolic Signatura. Among the Rota’s primary responsibilities is considering appeals in marriage nullity, or annulment, cases.
Francis said that these situations cannot be treated with “a merely bureaucratic, almost mechanical approach,” but is “rather a question of entering into the lives of people who suffer.” “For this reason, even in its canonical and jurisprudential procedures, the Church always seeks only the good of wounded people, seeks the truth of their love; she has nothing in mind but to support their just and desired happiness, which, before being a personal good to which we all humanly aspire, is a gift that God reserves for his children and which comes from Him,” he said. CNA
