Pope Francis shared advice for engaged and married couples quoting the life of the Holy Family. The Holy Father was greeting his Wednesday audience.
The Pope highlighted how St. Joseph has drawn what real, “mature love” looks like, particularly when life throws a couple of unexpected challenges.
He asked the crowd gathered in Vatican City’s Paul VI Hall on 1 December to imagine that when Mary and Joseph were engaged to one another, “they had probably cultivated dreams and expectations regarding their life and their future,” when “out of the blue, God seems to have inserted himself into their lives.”
When Joseph learns that Mary is pregnant, “an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:20-21).
Pope Francis emphasized that “love is not the pretension that the other person, or life, should correspond to our imagination.”
“Rather, it means to choose in full freedom to take responsibility for one’s life as it comes,” he said. “This is why Joseph gives us an important lesson. He chooses Mary with ‘his eyes open.’ We can say ‘with all the risks.’”
“And Joseph’s risk gives us this lesson: to take life as it comes,” the Pope said.
In his address, Pope Francis urged Christian couples to remember that they are “called to witness to a love like this that has the courage to move from the logic of falling in love to that of mature love.”
He said that this requires making “a demanding choice” that “can fortify love so that it endures when faced with the trials of time.”