The Holy Father set in motion these past two years
of contention and, one hopes, constructive dialogue in the Church because he knows that marriage and the family
are in deep trouble throughout the world, just as he knows that marriage, rightly understood, and the family, rightly understood,
are the basic building blocks
of a humane society: the family
is the first school
of freedom, because it
is there that we first learn that freedom
is not mere willfulness; marriage, for its
part,
is the
lifelong school in which we learn the full, challenging meaning
of the law
of self - giving built into the
human heart.