Below is the complete catechesis of Pope Francis at the General Audience of October 23, entitled “The Spirit, the Gift of God”:
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
Last time, we explained what we proclaim about the Holy Spirit in the Creed. However, the Church’s reflection has not stopped at that brief profession of faith. It has continued, both in the East and in the West, through the work of great Fathers and Doctors. Today, we want to gather some “crumbs” of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit developed in the Latin tradition, to see how it illuminates the whole of Christian life and, especially, the sacrament of marriage.
The principal architect of this doctrine is St. Augustine. He starts from the revelation that “God is love” ( 1 Jn 4:8). Now, love presupposes someone who loves, someone who is loved and love itself that unites them. The Father is, in the Trinity, the one who loves, the source and the beginning of everything; the Son is the one who is loved, and the Holy Spirit is the love that unites them. The God of Christians is, therefore, a “unique” God, but not solitary; his is a unity of communion and love. Along these lines, some have proposed calling the Holy Spirit not the singular “third person” of the Trinity, but rather “the plural first person”. He is, in other words, the divine We of the Father and the Son, the bond of unity between different persons, the very principle of the unity of the Church, which is exactly a “single body” resulting from a multitude of persons.
As I was saying, today I would like to reflect with you on what the Holy Spirit has to say to the family. What does the Holy Spirit have to do with marriage, for example? A great deal, perhaps the most essential; I will try to explain why. Christian marriage is the sacrament of the gift of man and woman to one another. This is what the Creator thought when he “created man in his own image and likeness […]: male and female he created them” ( Gen 1:27). The human couple is, therefore, the first and most basic realization of the communion of love that is the Trinity.
Spouses must also form a first-person plural, a “we.” They must stand before each other as an “I” and a “you,” and they must stand before the rest of the world, including their children, as a “we.” How beautiful it is to hear a mother say to her children: “Your father and I…”, as Mary said to Jesus when they found him in the temple (cf. Lk 2:48); and to hear a father say: “Your mother and I,” almost as if they were one person. How much children need this unity, father and mother together, unity of parents, of parents, and how much they suffer when it is missing! How much the children of parents who separate suffer, how much they suffer.
To respond to this vocation, marriage needs the support of the One who is the Gift, or rather, the one who gives himself par excellence. Wherever the Holy Spirit enters, the capacity for self-giving is reborn. Some Fathers of the Latin Church affirmed that, being a reciprocal gift of the Father and the Son in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is also the reason for the joy that reigns among them; and they did not fear to use when speaking of Him, the image of gestures proper to married life, such as the kiss and the embrace.
No one says that such unity is an easy goal, and even less so in today’s world, but this is the truth of things as the Creator conceived them and, therefore, it is in his nature. Of course, it may seem easier and quicker to build on sand than on rock; but Jesus’ parable tells us what the result is (cf. Mt 7:24-27). In this case, we do not even need the parable, because the consequences of marriages built on sand are, unfortunately, visible to all, and it is above all the children who pay the price. The children, the children suffer from the separation or lack of love of their parents.
Of many married couples, we must repeat what Mary said to Jesus in Cana of Galilee: “They have no wine” ( Jn 2:3). However, it is the Holy Spirit who continues to perform, on the spiritual level, the miracle that Jesus performed on that occasion, namely, changing the water of habit into a new joy of being together. This is not a pious illusion: it is what the Holy Spirit has done in so many marriages, when the spouses decided to invoke him.
It would not be a bad thing, therefore, if, together with the legal, psychological and moral information that is given in the preparation of the bride and groom for marriage, this “spiritual” preparation was further elaborated. The Holy Spirit who creates unity. An Italian proverb says: “Between wife and husband, do not put your finger.” On the other hand, there is a “finger” that must be put between husband and wife, and it is precisely the “finger of God”: the Holy Spirit!