Pope Francis encouraged the leaders of Équipes Notre-Dame (Teams of Our Lady), an international association of the faithful established in 1947, in their ministry to married couples.
“Protecting marriage indeed means protecting an entire family, it means saving all the relationships generated by marriage: the love between couples, between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren; it means saving that witness of a love that is possible and forever, which young people struggle to believe in,” the Pope said.
“I see a great urgency today: to help young people to discover that Christian marriage is a vocation, a specific calling that God addresses to a man and a women so that they can fully realize themselves as generative, becoming a father and a mother, and bringing the grace of their Sacrament into the world,” the Pope continued.
The Pope also emphasized that “it is important that newlyweds experience a nuptial mystagogy, that will help them to live the beauty of their Sacrament and a spirituality of the couple.”
Warning against clericalism, the Pope then spoke of the “importance of co-responsibility between married couples and priests within your movement. You have understood and live tangibly the complementarity of the two vocations: I encourage you to take this into the parishes, so that the laypeople and priests discover its richness and necessity.”
