The Synod of young people has once again shown that the institution they value most is the family. This may seem surprising given the crisis that marriage and the family have been going through for decades. But young people sense - some of them even though they have never experienced it - that the family is the ideal place for full personal development. And in their hearts is the longing for a home, for a full welcome, for unconditional love such as can only be experienced in the bosom of a family.
Since the 1960s, the basic pillars of marriage and the family have been undermined and a lifestyle based on fierce individualism, on the rejection of all commitment and of any reference to truth, and on a conception of freedom as something absolute, without content, has been imposed. As far as sexuality is concerned, it has been detached from love, commitment and openness to life, coming to be considered a mere source of pleasure, something private and purely subjective, something belonging solely and exclusively to the intimacy of each individual, leaving it to the discretion of the subject to give any meaning to his own sexuality and to the relationships he may establish.
But this lifestyle has not brought more happiness or fuller lives, but quite the opposite. It has brought loneliness and uprootedness, much suffering and deep emotional wounds.
At the Synod, young people have shown that they have an immense need to feel loved, and to really love. They are looking for something great, something beautiful. They turn to the Church to find answers on which to build their lives and to found their hope. Let us not disappoint them. And let us not be naive. Young people, who were born immersed in the cultural environment we have described above, and often without having had an experience of true love, need a lot of help.
We must help them to confirm their hope, to overcome the anthropological pessimism in which many are immersed due to the affective wounds within them, making them see that true love is possible. That it is not an ideal reserved for only a few, that it is within the reach of those who are determined to "querer querer", especially if they are open to God's help.
We must help them escape from the culture of individual rights, which runs radically counter to a culture of love and responsibility and is destroying families.
We must help them to overcome the false idea that freedom is an autonomous and unconditioned force, without bonds or norms. We must help them to overcome the absolutization of sentiment and to rediscover that the inner dynamics of married love includes and needs reason and will and is open to paternity and maternity, harmonizing human freedom with the gift of Grace.
Marriage, even if it is the union of a single man and a single woman, can hardly be lived in the solitude of the two, and even less than ever in this society of ours, which is so focused on the desires and the provisional. Spouses need to be accompanied, especially in the first years of marriage (40 % of marital breakups occur in the first seven years). Families can and should accompany other families by building authentic communities that strengthen their members and bear witness to true love in the midst of the world.
We must help them not to be afraid, because the Good Shepherd is with us as he was at Cana in Galilee as the Bridegroom between spouses who give themselves to each other for life. In the heart of the Christian there must be no room for apathy, nor for cowardice, nor for pessimism. For Christ is present. This is why St. John Paul II addressed Christian spouses with these words: "Do not be afraid of risks! Divine strength is much more powerful than your difficulties!" (GrS, 18).
Director of the Center for Family Studies. Francisco de Vitoria University (UFV).
