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Rome, Italy, Jun 16, 2016 / 02:56 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis said Thursday that the great majority of sacramental marriages today are not valid, because couples do not enter into them with a proper understanding of permanence and commitment.

“We live in a culture of the provisional,” the Pope said in impromptu remarks June 16. After addressing the Diocese of Rome’s pastoral congress, he held a question-and-answer session.

A layman asked about the “crisis of marriage” and how Catholics can help educate youth in love, help them learn about sacramental marriage, and help them overcome “their resistance, delusions and fears.”

The Pope answered from his own experience.

“I heard a bishop say some months ago that he met a boy that had finished his university studies, and said ‘I want to become a priest, but only for 10 years.’ It’s the culture of the provisional. And this happens everywhere, also in priestly life, in religious life,” he said.

“It’s provisional, and because of this the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null. Because they say “yes, for the rest of my life!” but they don’t know what they are saying. Because they have a different culture. They say it, they have good will, but they don’t know.”

He spoke of his encounter with a woman in Buenos Aires who “reproached” him. She said that priests study for the priesthood for years and can get permission to leave the priesthood to marry and have a family. For the laity, this woman said, “we have to do the sacrament for our entire lives, and indissolubly, to us laity they give four (marriage preparation) conferences, and this is for our entire life.”

Pope Francis said that marriage preparation is a problem, and that marital problems are also linked to social situations surrounding weddings.

He recounted his encounter with a man engaged to be married who was looking for a church that would complement his fiancée’s dress and would not be far from a restaurant.

“It’s social issue, and how do we change this? I don’t know,” the Pope said.

He noted that as Archbishop of Buenos Aires he had prohibited marriages in the case of “shotgun weddings” where the prospective bride was pregnant. He did this on the grounds there was a question of the spouses’ free consent to marry.

“Maybe they love each other, and I’ve seen there are beautiful cases where, after two or three years they got married,” he said. “And I saw them entering the church, father, mother and child in hand. But they knew well (what) they did.”

Pope Francis attributed the marriage crisis to people who “don’t know what the sacrament is” and don’t know “the beauty of the sacrament.”

“They don’t know that it’s indissoluble, they don’t know that it’s for your entire life. It’s hard,” the Pope said.

He added that a majority of couples attending marriage prep courses in Argentina typically cohabitated.

“They prefer to cohabitate, and this is a challenge, a task. Not to ask ‘why don’t you marry?’ No, to accompany, to wait, and to help them to mature, help fidelity to mature.”

He said that in Argentina’s northeast countryside, couples have a child and live together. They have a civil wedding when the child goes to school, and when they become grandparents they “get married religiously.”

“It’s a superstition, because marriage frightens the husband. It’s a superstition we have to overcome,” the Pope said. “I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity, but there are local superstitions, etc.”

“Marriage is the most difficult area of pastoral work,” he said.

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Washington D.C., Jun 16, 2016 / 05:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Despite secularization in some countries, “the world is becoming more religious” and the United States needs to factor this into its foreign policy, one religious freedom expert said Thursday.

“The reality, whether someone likes it or doesn’t like it, is that the world is becoming more religious, not less religious,” Dr. Robert George, former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told CNA in a June 16 interview on Thursday.

This refutes “secularization theory,” the sociological belief that “as modernization moves forward, religion will retreat, as people learn more about science they become less interested in religion,” George explained.

George testified Thursday on the global state of religious freedom before the House Subcommittee on Global Human Rights. He was joined by Rabbi David Saperstein, U.S. Ambassador at-Large for International Religious Freedom, and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and former vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

“Religious liberty is called America’s first freedom,” stated Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), chair of the subcommittee, saying it is “not only an American value. It’s a universal principle.”

Yet it has “significantly deteriorated” around the world, he said, and “is constantly and brutally under siege.”

Advances have been made in some countries in favor of greater religious freedom, Saperstein noted, but overall “the challenges to religious freedom are daunting.”

The rabbi noted that he has already traveled to 20 countries in his 18 months as ambassador, and has met with many people, including those from the countries who are the worst violators of religious freedom.

“What has stood out is the incredible, irrepressible spirit of all the individuals who risk imprisonment, discrimination and even death for simply seeking to live out their lives in accordance with their conscience,” he continued.

Yet if the U.S. is to promote religious practice and freedom of religion abroad, how can it also act to curb religious extremism? Rather than promoting secularism as an antidote to religious extremism, the U.S. should empower religious voices who promote peace and reject violence, George said.

“Within any of the great religions, there are resources for combatting violent extremism and proposing harmony and cooperation, and even mutual understanding among people of different faiths,” he noted.

“We need to encourage the use of those resources by leaders and ordinary people within those religions.”

For example, within the U.S., Americans should look to support Muslims who are condemning religious violence and are putting “their very own lives at risk” by opposing terror groups such as Islamic State.

“In the United States, we should not simply be condemning Islam. We should be assisting those leaders and movements within Islam who are drawing on the resources that are present in the tradition, in the Muslim tradition, to promote peace and harmony and to reject violence,” he said.

Not to do so is to “play into the hands of ISIS and our other enemies, who seek to use violence to accomplish religious domination” and who claim the rightful interpretation of Islam, he added.

And historically, the “most murderous ideologies” have been “self-consciously secular,” he continued, noting the likes of fascism, Nazism, and communism.

In promoting religious freedom, the U.S. must emphasize that this freedom is not just limited to a “right to worship” and to pray in private or at a place of worship, George noted in his testimony.

“It is the right to follow one’s own conscience on matters of faith and belief,” while honoring the rights of others.

And we must work for religious freedom; it will not simply come about with inaction, George maintained in his testimony.

It’s a “widespread but false belief” that “history will inevitably move in the direction of moral progress,” he said, adding that “this view ignores the radical contingency of human affairs, and the reality of human freedom.”

“If liberty and justice are to prevail, it will require the free choices, determination, dedication, and courage of men and women, flesh and blood, human beings, citizens and statesmen.”

“Victory is not guaranteed. History does not give us a promise of everything coming out alright in the end, not in the world of human affairs,” he said.

Yet victory is possible, he added.

“So let us here -- to use Lincoln’s phrase – ‘highly resolve’ to turn the possibility of progress for religious liberty into reality.”

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IMAGE: CNS/Paul Haring

By Cindy Wooden

ROME (CNS) -- Like Moses before the burning bush, those talking about the real-life situations of families must take off their sandals because they are standing on holy ground, Pope Francis said.

The pastoral care of families requires "a climate of respect capable of helping us listen to what God is saying," the pope said June 16, opening the Diocese of Rome's annual pastoral conference.

The families, catechists, priests and bishops participating in the two-day meeting were focusing this year on outreach to families in Rome in light of Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation on the family, "Amoris Laetitia" ("The Joy of Love").

Pope Francis made a formal presentation, with several impromptu additions, and then answered questions at the end, speaking mainly from his pastoral experience in Argentina, but also as pope.

In the question-and-answer session, he assured participants that his exhortation was thoroughly reviewed by Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, a respected theologian.

The document, he said, fully conforms to Catholic doctrine, but some people "want doctrine that is mathematically precise. That does not exist!"

"Truth is found in neither strictness nor laxity," the pope said. "The Gospel teaches something different: welcome, accompany, discern, integrate."

A priest must listen to each family, ask questions that help the person reflect and grow, but "not sticking his nose into every detail" of the couple's life, the pope said.

"Morality is always an act of love, love for God and for one's neighbor, he said. "And it also is an act that leaves room for the conversion of the other."

An attitude of superiority, he said, can even lead to "pastoral cruelty," for example when a priest refuses to baptize the baby of an unwed mother.

In his formal presentation, Pope Francis said that as the diocesan gathering reflects on the family, participants must keep three things in mind: "the life of each person, the life of every family, must be treated with great respect and great care, especially when reflecting on these things; we must guard against setting up a pastoral plan of ghettos and for ghettos; we must give space to the elderly so they would begin to dream again."

The biblical image of the burning bush, Pope Francis said, should be a reminder that "family" is not a theme or a theory, but a reality lived by real people with real joys and sorrows.

"How helpful it is to give faces to the theme," he said. "That frees us from rushing to obtain well-formulated conclusions that can be lifeless; it frees us from speaking in the abstract so that we can draw near to and make commitments to concrete persons. It frees us from turning faith into an ideology with well-designed systems, but ignoring grace."

"To reflect on the life of our families as they are and where they are requires us to remove our shoes in order to discover God's presence," he said.

Faith prohibits the church from abandoning or giving up on anyone "because he doesn't live up to what we are asking," the pope said. The church must proclaim the Gospel and its values and help people to strive to live holy lives.

However, he said, Catholics must "avoid falling into judgments and attitudes that do not take into account the complexities of life."

"Evangelical realism," the pope said, is the biblical way of looking at life and it "gets its hands dirty because it knows that 'grain and weeds' grow together, and the best grain in this life always will be mixed with a few weeds."

Pope Francis quoted from "Amoris Letitia," saying: "I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion. But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness."

Christians, he said, are "continually exposed" to a temptation to judge others and to think more of themselves by contrasting their behavior with the behavior of others.

"We all need conversion," the pope said. The only way to hear God providing direction in helping others is to pray and to start that prayer with the words, "Have pity on me, Lord, because I am a sinner."

Outreach to families will never succeed if conducted by "those perfect and immaculate people who think they know everything," he said.

One key resource the church has, but which too many people today ignore is the power of the witness of the elderly, he said. Couples who have been married for decades know the reality of the challenges, but they also know that true love exists and lifelong fidelity is possible.

Too often, though, "we have deprived them of the opportunity to recount their lives, their stories, their experiences," Pope Francis said. "Tossing them aside we throw away the possibility of making contact with the secret that allowed them to keep going."

Without models and guides, he said, there is little chance that young people, who already are fearful of the future, will find the courage to make a lasting commitment and to stick to it even when the relationship gets rocky.

"How can we expect young people to live the challenge of the family and marriage as a gift if they continually hear from us that it is a burden," the pope asked.

"We must develop a pastoral plan for families able to welcome, accompany, discern and integrate," he said. Families today need the churches help in constructing "scaffolding" that will support them and help them grow in the way God wants.

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