Imperfection of love

Monseigneur Giampaolo Dianin, bishop

One of the most beautiful aspects of Amoris laetitia is its concreteness in approaching the love and life of the spouses. The Pope does not linger in idealized visions that characterize those who have known love only from books or romance novels. The first chapter, for example, recounts the couples and the wounded families who live in Scripture: «The Bible is full of families, births, love stories and family crises» (AL 8). And then the choice to speak of love by referring to the concreteness of Paul’s hymn to charity rather than to the intense and passionate pages of the Song of Songs. And, finally, the chapter dedicated to the broken and needy ties of being reread within the great river of God’s mercy. For Francis the family is “what it is”, with that sober realism that provokes the Church to a constant pastoral conversion that leads her to prefer the style of the Good Samaritan rather than the road of great proclamations. The family, the Pope affirms, is not an abstract ideal, but a “trade” (AL 16), as if to remind young people that they do not need “degrees in marriage” to get married, but that they set out,…