This past week, there was a conference in Rome: "Loving Human Love: The Heritage of John Paul II on Marriage and the Family," sponsored by the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and the Family. John Allen reports:

Receiving the group in audience on Thursday morning, Benedict XVI said that John Paul’s special passion for marriage and the family was shaped in part by the difficulties that followed Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. Wojtyla realized, according to Benedict, the need for systematic study of these subjects.

On the subject of marriage, Benedict did not mince words:

"[The challenge of] avoiding confusion with other types of unions based on weak love presents itself today with special urgency," he said. "Only the rock of total and irrevocable love between a man and a woman is capable of founding the construction of a society that can become a home for all people," he said.

Afterwards, Melina told the conference that the pope’s personal secretary, Msgr. Georg Gänswein, had told him that he had never seen the pope "so happy, so available to the people" during a Vatican audience.

Yes, he does look happy!

( Original photo here – courtesy L’Osservatore Romano)

The text of the Pope’s remarks:

The idea to "teach to love" was already with the young priest Karol Wojtyla and subsequently energized him, as a young bishop, when he faced the difficult moments that followed the publication of the prophetic and always timely encyclical of my predecessor Paul VI, "Humanae Vitae." It was in that circumstance that he understood the need to undertake a systematic study of this topic.

This constituted the substratum of that teaching that he later offered to the whole Church in his "Catechesis on Human Love." He underlined in this way the two fundamental elements that you have tried to reflect on more profoundly in these years and that configure the very novelty of your institute as an academic reality with a specific mission within the Church.

The first element is that marriage and the family are rooted in the innermost core of the truth about man and his destiny. Sacred Scripture reveals that the vocation to love is part of that authentic image of God that the Creator willed to imprint in his creature, calling man to become similar to him precisely in the measure in which man is open to love. The sexual difference entailed in the body of man and woman is not, therefore, a simple biological fact, but bears a much more profound meaning: It expresses that way of love with which man and woman become only one flesh; they can realize an authentic communion of persons open to the transmission of life and cooperate in this way with God in the procreation of new human beings

John does something else in this week’s Word from Rome column that I’d been intending on doing – collating the remarks on DVC made by various Curial officials.