Pope Francis: The Holy Spirit is ‘essential’ for unity in marriage

Pope Francis addresses pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’ Square for his general audience on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024, at the Vatican. / Credit: Daniel Ibañez/CNA

Vatican City, Oct 23, 2024 / 13:35 pm (CNA).

Pope Francis said the Holy Spirit plays an essential role in the unity of a husband and a wife, and advised married couples to invoke the Spirit’s help for their marriage, because the separation of spouses is a source of suffering for children.

“What can the Holy Spirit have to do with marriage, for example? A great deal, perhaps the essential,” the pope said during his weekly audience with the public in St. Peter’s Square on Oct. 23.

“Christian marriage is the sacrament of self-giving, one for the other, of man and woman. This is how the Creator intended it when he ‘created man in his own image … male and female he created them (Gn 1:27),’” Francis said to crowds gathered in an overcast square. 

In the Wednesday general audience, the pontiff continued his series of teachings on the Holy Spirit, focusing on the role of the Third Person of the Trinity in the sacrament of matrimony, including the couple as a “realization of the communion of love that is the Trinity.”

Francis said like the Trinity, “married couples, too, should form a first-person plural, a ‘we.’ Stand before each other as an ‘I’ and a ‘you,’ and stand before the rest of the world, including the children, as a ‘we.’”

“How much children need this unity — mother and father together — unity of parents, and how much they suffer when it is lacking,” he emphasized. “How much the children of separated parents suffer, how much they suffer.”

Drawing on the story of the wedding at Cana, Francis noted that for “so many couples, one must repeat what Mary said to Jesus, at Cana in Galilee: ‘They have no wine.’ The Holy Spirit is he who continues to perform, on a spiritual level, the miracle that Jesus worked on that occasion; namely, to change the water of habit into a new joy of being together.”

“It is not a pious illusion: It is what the Holy Spirit has done in so many marriages, when the spouses decided to invoke him.”

“No one,” the pope continued, “says that such unity is an easy task, least of all in today’s world; but this is the truth of things as the Creator designed them, and it is therefore in their nature. Certainly, it may seem easier and quicker to build on sand than on rock; but Jesus tells us what the result is…”

Pope Francis noted that marriage needs the support of the Holy Spirit, “the Gift,” and recommended that marriage preparation include a deeper spiritual preparation in addition to just psychological, legal, and moral information.

“Where the Holy Spirit enters, the capacity for self-giving is reborn,” he said.

Catholic News Agency