Today’s Sunday Pope Quote comes from Bl. John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. It draws an important connection between life and marriage and uses a phrase we’ve visited before: “human ecology“.
Bl. Pope John Paul II: “The first and fundamental structure for “human ecology” is the family, in which man receives his first formative ideas about truth and goodness, and learns what it means to love and to be loved, and thus what it actually means to be a person. Here we mean the family founded on marriage, in which the mutual gift of self by husband and wife creates an environment in which children can be born and develop their potentialities, become aware of their dignity and prepare to face their unique and individual destiny.
. . .
It is necessary to go back to seeing the family as the sanctuary of life. The family is indeed sacred: it is the place in which life — the gift of God — can be properly welcomed and protected against the many attacks to which it is exposed, and can develop in accordance with what constitutes authentic human growth. In the face of the so-called culture of death, the family is the heart of the culture of life.
– Centesimus Annus, no. 39, bold emphasis added
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