Pope’s powerful challenge to married couples
KCO Reporter - June 2025
At the Jubilee of Families, Leo XIV challenged married couples to a unity that reveals Christ's love, like the marriages of the saints.
We live in a world of widespread brokenness þ broken hearts, broken homes, broken familiesþ in direct contrast to Christ's deep desire that his followers "be one."
Pope Leo XIV encouraged all of us to embrace unity in a divided world with his homily on June 1 for the Jubilee of Families. He urged all Christians to live with an integrity and love that makes our unity something to “proclaim to the world.” His message was clear: Keep fighting for unity, even when it's hard. Don't give up on it as an unattainable ideal.
He issued a special challenge to married couples, whose unity is a witness to the communion in love Christ desires for us. He urged us to look to and imitate the examples of married couples who were canonized together, making their own marriages a “sign of peace” in a troubled world:
Today’s world needs the marriage covenant in order to know and accept God’s love and to defeat the forces that break down relationships and societies.
Death to self
Anyone who is married knows that this kind of deep unity is not possible without hard work. G.K. Chesterton called marriage “a duel to the death, which no man of honor should decline.”
Before marriage, I thought that was a joke about spouses battling each other. But now, 12 years into marriage, I’ve come to see that the real duel is against myself - against my selfishness, stubbornness, and pride.
It cannot be won without an interior death, until I let die the things that come between my husband and me, preventing us from full communion.
Beacons in the storm
Real unity þ not Hollywood or fairy-tale romances, but the love borne of sacrifice and selflessness and commitment to each other’s good - can feel elusive or even impossible in a culture that puts individual autonomy over sacrificial love, convenience over commitment.
But that’s exactly why the Pope’s challenge to couples is so important. He told us:
In recent decades, we have received a sign that fills us with joy but also makes us think. It is the fact that several spouses have been beatified and canonized, not separately, but as married couples. I think of Louis and Zélie Martin, the parents of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus; and of Blessed Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi, who raised a family in Rome in the last century. And let us not forget the Ulma family from Poland: parents and children, united in love and martyrdom.
I said that this is a sign that makes us think. By pointing to them as exemplary witnesses of married life, the Church tells us that today’s world needs the marriage covenant in order to know and accept God’s love and to defeat, thanks to its unifying and reconciling power, the forces that break down relationships and societies.
Each marriage founded on “a love that is total, faithful and fruitful” is a beacon of hope. Like lighthouses guiding ships through treacherous waters, loving marriages show a skeptical world that this kind of love is real and possible.
When spouses choose to commit to what T.S. Eliot called “a lifetime’s death in love,” they give others hope that the unity Christ calls us to is not an impossible dream.
Each marriage then strengthens those around them in a powerful ripple effect, inspiring other couples to love each other as Christ did.
The saints show us the way
Pope Leo’s encouragement to make your marriage a “sign of peace to the world” can feel daunting. But the Pope's naming of these powerful examples — Louis and Zélie Martin, Blessed Luigi and Maria Beltrame Quattrocchi, and the Ulma family from Poland — are a reminder that it can be done, and has been done.
Let’s take up the Pope’s challenge with a joyful spirit, pursuing the unity of Christ, working anew each day to make our marriages like those of the saints.
(Courtesy: aleteia.org)
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