Allocution to the Faculty of the Institute

John Paul II on the identity and goals of the Institute in the new century
Allocution to the Faculty of the Institute

Your Eminences, Venerable Brother Bishops, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen:

Today I welcome with great joy all of you who are taking part in the International Study Week conducted by the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family. I greet first of all Bishop Angelo Scola, Rector Magnificus of the Pontifical Lateran University and the Institute’s President, and I thank him for his words at the beginning of our meeting. With him, I greet Archbishop Carlo Caffarra of Ferrara, his predecessor, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the Chancellor of the Institute and Vicar of Rome, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, and the prelates present, the distinguished lecturers who have just reported on some interesting matters to me, and all those who in various capacities are working for the success of your convention. I greet you all, dear faculty members of the Institute’s various branches, who have gathered here in Rome for a systematic reflection on the foundation of the divine plan for marriage and the family. Thank you for your commitment and your service to the Church.

Husband and wife cooperate with God
Since its foundation eighteen years ago, the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family has promoted a deeper understanding of God’s plan for the person, marriage and the family, combining theological, philosophical and scientific reflection with constant attention to the care of souls.
This relationship between thought and life, theology and pastoral care, is really crucial. If I look at my own experience, I can easily see how my work with young people in the university chaplaincy of Krakow helped me in my meditation on fundamental aspects of the Christian life. Daily life with the young, the opportunity to guide them in their joys and efforts, and their desire to live to the full the vocation to which the Lord called them, helped me to understand ever more deeply the truth that the human being grows and matures in love, that is, in the gift of himself, and that in giving himself he receives in exchange the possibility of his own fulfilment.
One of the loftiest expressions of this principle is found in marriage, which “is the wise and provident institution of God the Creator, whose purpose was to establish in man his loving design. As a consequence, husband and wife, through the mutual gift of themselves which is specific and exclusive to them alone, seek to develop that kind of personal union in which they complement one another in order to cooperate with God in the generation and education of new lives” (Humanæ vitæ §8).
Inspired by the profound unity between the truth proclaimed by the Church and the concrete options and experiences of life, your Institute has offered praiseworthy service over several years. With full sessions in Rome at the Pontifical Lateran University, in Washington DC, Mexico City and Valencia; with campuses in Cotonou (Benin), São Salvador da Bahia (Brazil), and Changanacherry (India), whose full incorporation into the Institute is already under way; and with the forthcoming opening of the campus in Melbourne (Australia)—the Institute will now have centres in all continents. We must thank the Lord for this development, as we look with due gratitude to all those who have made and continue to make their contribution to the achievement of this work.

Children must be accepted lovingly as a gift from God
I would now like to look to the future with you and attentively consider the urgent needs that this field presents to the mission of the Church and, therefore, to your own Institute.
In comparison with eighteen years ago when your academic journey began, the challenge posed by the secular mentality regarding the truth about the person, marriage and the family has become even more radical. It is no longer only a question of debating the individual moral norms of sexual and family ethics. The image of man and woman proper to natural reason and, in particular, to Christianity is now opposed with an alternative anthropology. The latter rejects the fact, inscribed in our bodiliness, that sexual difference is a fundamental characteristic of the person; consequently the concept of the family founded on the indissoluble marriage of a man and a woman, as the natural and basic cell of society, is critically challenged. Fatherhood and motherhood are conceived only as private projects, which can even be accomplished by the application of biomedical technology without the exercise of conjugal sexuality. This attitude presupposes an unacceptable “division between freedom and nature”, which are instead “harmoniously bound together, and each is intimately linked to the other” (Veritatis splendor §50).
In fact, the sexual aspect of our bodiliness is an integral part of the original divine plan, in which man and woman are created “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:27) and called to create a communion of persons that is faithful and free, indissoluble and fruitful, as a reflection of the riches of Trinitarian love (cf. Col 1:15-16).
Therefore, before being a project of human freedom, fatherhood and moth-erhood are a vocat-ional dimension of conjugal love, to be lived as a unique responsibility before God by accepting children lovingly from him as a gift (Gen 4:1), in the adoration of that divine fatherhood “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph 3:15).
To eliminate the mediation of the conjugal act as the place where a new human life originates both degrades procreation from cooperation with God the Creator to a technically controlled “re-production” of an exemplar of the species, and denies the unique personal dignity of the child (cf. Donum vitæ II B/5). Indeed, only when there is integral respect for the essential characteristics of the conjugal act as a personal gift of the spouses, at once corporeal and spiritual, is the person of the child also respected and expression given to his origin in God, the source of every gift.
When the body itself, the sexual difference inscribed in it, and its proper procreative faculties, are treated instead as merely subordinate biological elements to be manipulated at will, one ultimately denies the limit and the vocation present in bodiliness and shows a presumption which, whatever one’s subjective intentions, indicates a misunderstanding of one’s own being as a gift from God. In the light of these problems which are so widespread today, I reaffirm with even greater conviction what I taught in my Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris consortio: “The future of humanity passes by way of the family” (§86).
In view of these challenges, the Church has no other option than to turn her gaze to Christ, the Redeemer of humanity and the fullness of Revelation. As I said in the Encyclical Fides et ratio, “Christian Revelation is the true lodestar of men and women as they strive to make their way amid the pressures of an immanentist habit of mind and the constrictions of a technocratic logic” (§15). This direction is offered to us precisely through the revelation of the foundation of reality—that Father who created it and continually maintains it in being.
A deeper reflection on God’s plan for the person, marriage and the family is therefore a task that should engage you with renewed vigour at the beginning of the third millennium.
At this point I would like to propose a few matters for reflection. The first concerns the foundation of our deliberations, the Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, the very source of being and, therefore, the ultimate foundation of anthropology. In the light of the mystery of the Trinity, sexual difference reveals its complete nature as an expressive sign of the whole person.
A second matter which I invite you to consider is the vocation of man and woman to communion. It is also rooted in the Trinitarian mystery, is fully revealed to us in the Incarnation of the Son of God—in which the human nature and the divine nature are united in the Person of the Word—and is historically inserted into the sacramental dynamism of the Christian economy. The nuptial mystery of Christ, Bride-groom of the Church, is expressed in a singular way through sacramental marriage, the fruitful community of life and love.
The third point that I would like to offer you is that the theology of marriage and the family must in this way be founded upon contemplation of the mystery of the Triune God, who invites all people to the wedding feast of the Lamb accomplished in the paschal mystery and eternally offered to human freedom in the sacramental reality of the Church.
Furthermore, reflection upon the person, marriage and the family is deepened by devoting special attention to the person-society relationship. The Christian response to the failure of both individualistic and collectivistic anthropologies is to offer an ontological personalism rooted in the analysis of primary family relationships. The rationality and relationality of the human person, the unity and difference in communion, and the constitutive polarities of man-woman, spirit-body and individual-community co-essential and inseparable. Reflection on the person, marriage and the family can thus be ultimately integrated into the Church’s social teaching and become one of its strongest roots.

Revelation offers a sacramental vision of marriage and the family
These and other perspectives for the Institute’s future work must be developed in accordance with the twofold method that can also be inferred from your meeting.
On the one hand, it is essential to start from the unity of God’s plan for the person, marriage and the family. This unitary starting point alone enables the teaching offered at the Institute not to be a mere juxtaposition of what theology, philosophy and the human sciences tell us about these subjects. An adequate anthropology flows from Christian Revelation, as does a sacramental vision of marriage and the family, which can engage in dialogue with the researches of philosophical reason and the human sciences. This original unity is also at the root of the joint work between teachers of different subjects and makes possible interdisciplinary research and teaching which have as their object the "unum" of the person, marriage and the family studied from different and complementary viewpoints with specific methodologies.
On the other hand, the importance of each of the three thematic areas around which the Institute’s curricula are organized should be emphasized. All three areas are necessary for your work of research, teaching and study to be complete and consistent. Indeed, how is it possible not to consider the “human phenomenon” as it is presented by the different disciplines? How could we neglect the study of freedom, the centre of every anthropology and the gateway to the fundamental ontological questions? How could we forgo a theology in which nature, freedom and grace are seen in an articulated unity, in the light of Christ’s Mystery? This is the point of synthesis for all your work, since “in reality, it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear” (Gaudium et spes §22).
The originality of the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family is not only linked to the content and method of its research, but is also expressed through its specific juridical-institutional structure. The Institute in a certain sense has a unique status among the Church’s academic institutions. In fact, it is one (with a single Grand Chancellor and a single President), and at the same time, it is many (being juridically organized into branches on the various continents).
Thus we have a juridical-institutional expression of the normal dynamism of communion that flows between the universal Church and the particular churches. In this way the Institute lives, in an exemplary way, the twofold Roman and universal dimension that marks the city’s university institutions and, in particular, the Pontifical Lateran University, where the central branch is located and which is described by Article 1 of the Statutes as “the university of the Supreme Pontiff in a special sense”.
If we look at the Institute and its history, we see how fruitful is the principle of unity in multiplicity! It is not only made concrete in a unity of doctrinal orientation which makes research and teaching effective, but is expressed above all in the real communion of the teachers, students and staff. This is so both within the individual branches and in the mutual exchange between branches, so different from one another. In this way you collaborate in enriching the Church’s life and, in the final analysis, the Catholica itself!

The Son of God chose to be a member of a human family
So that men and women could share, as members of the Church, in his very life, the Son of God wanted to become a member of a human family. For this reason the Holy Family of Nazareth, as the “original Church in miniature (Ecclesia domestica)” (Redemptoris Custos §7), is a privileged guide for the Institute’s work. It clearly shows the involvement of the family in the mission of the incarnate and redemptive Word and sheds light on the Church’s own mission.
May Mary, Virgin, Wife and Mother, protect the teachers, students and staff of your Institute. May she accompany and support your reflection and your work, so that God’s Church can find in you diligent and valuable help for her task of proclaiming to all humanity God’s truth about the person, marriage and the family.

My thanks and my Blessing to you all.

Given at Castel Gandolfo,
27 August 1999

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