Leo XIV: Marriage is not an ideal, but the canon of true love between man and woman
By Roberto de Mattei | 4 June 2025

“Marriage is not an ideal, but the canon of true love between a man and a woman: a love that is total, faithful and fruitful”. This is what Leo XIV said on 31 May 2025, in the homily of the Mass for the Jubilee of Families, emphasising that this love “enables you, in the image of God, to bestow the gift of life”.
The meaning of this statement must not be overlooked, because too often today the moral law is reduced to an ideal difficult to achieve. The word “canon”, in religious language, indicates an official rule of the Church, a legal and moral norm, an objective law, that all Christians are bound to observe.
Marriage, one and indissoluble, formed by a man and a woman, is a divine and natural institution, willed by God himself and elevated by Jesus Christ to the dignity of a Sacrament. The family, founded on marriage, is therefore a true society with a spiritual, moral and juridical unity, whose constitution and rights God has established. Whoever observes this law receives from God all the graces necessary to observe it.
Presenting marriage as an ideal, and not as a law to which a grace is linked, is equivalent to affirming that this model does not belong to the world of reality, but to that of desires, sometimes unattainable. It therefore means falling into moral relativism. Men, in order to live, need principles that can and must be lived: one of these is marriage. The idea, instead, that “marriage is an ideal” runs through the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia of 2016, in which Pope Francis insisted on the fact that this ideal must be proposed gradually, accompanying people on their journey. But Catholic morality is not gradual and does not admit exceptions: either it is absolute or it is not. The possibility of “exceptions” to the law arises precisely from the idea of an impracticable ideal. This was the thesis of Luther, who maintained that God has given man a law impossible to follow. Luther therefore developed the concept of a “fiducial faith” that saves without works, precisely because the commandments cannot be observed. To the Lutheran concept of the impracticability of the law, the Council of Trent replied that one is saved through faith and works. The Council anathematised anyone who said that “for the man justified and constituted in grace, the commandments of God are impossible to observe” (Denz-H, no. 1568), and affirmed, “God in fact does not command the impossible, but when he commands he admonishes you to do what you can, to ask for what you can not, and he helps you so that you may be able.” (Denz-H, no. 1356)
One may find oneself before seemingly insurmountable problems, but in these cases one must do all one can, with one’s own strength, to observe the natural and divine law and ask God for help to overcome the problem. It is of the Catholic faith that this help will not be lacking and that every problem will be resolved. In exceptional cases God will offer us an extraordinary help of grace, precisely because he has not given us an impracticable law. Doctrine is not an abstract ideal, and the life of the Christian is nothing other than the practice of the commandments, according to the teaching of Jesus: “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them; he it is that loveth me.” (Jn 14:21).
For this reason, in a 2019 interview reported on by Corrispondenza Romana, Cardinal Burke explained:
“One said we have to realise, finally, that marriage is an ideal that not everybody can meet and therefore we have to accommodate the Church’s teaching to people that just can’t live their marriage promises. But marriage is not an “ideal’. Marriage is a grace, and when a couple exchange vows, they receive the grace to live a faithful lifelong procreative bond. Even the weakest person, the most poorly formed person, receives the grace to live the marriage covenant faithfully.”
But let us read carefully the words of Leo XIV:
“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 canonised, 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.
“For this reason, with a heart filled with gratitude and hope, I would remind all married couples that marriage is not an ideal but the measure of true love between a man and a woman: a love that is total, faithful and fruitful (cf. Paul VI, Humanae Vitae, 9). This love makes you one flesh and enables you, in the image of God, to bestow the gift of life.
“I encourage you, then, to be examples of integrity to your children, acting as you want them to act, educating them in freedom through obedience, always seeing the good in them and finding ways to nurture it. And you, dear children, show gratitude to your parents. To say ‘thank you’ each day for the gift of life and for all that comes with it is the first way to honour your father and your mother. (cf. Ex 20:12)”
At the beginning and end of his homily, the pope returned to a theme that is dear to him: Jesus’ prayer to the Father, taken from the Gospel of John: “That they all may be one” (Jn 17:21). Not an indistinct uniformity, but a profound communion, founded on the love of God himself; uno unum, as St Augustine says (Sermo super Ps 127): one in the one Saviour, embraced by the eternal love of God. “Dear friends, if we love one another in this way, grounded in Christ, who is ‘the Alpha and the Omega’, ‘the beginning and the end’ (cf. Rev 22:13), we will be a sign of peace for everyone, in society and the world. Let us not forget: families are the cradle of the future of humanity.”