Counter cohabitation by faithful witness to marriage, Pope urges Catholics

Simon Caldwell• June 3, 2025

Cohabiting couples can be enlightened to the truth and beauty of Christian marriage by Catholics who bear witness to the sacrament in their own lives, Pope Leo XIV has said.

In an address to the seminar organised by the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, the American Pontiff said that many young people were “longing for authentic relationships and guides in life” and that the soaring numbers “who choose cohabitation instead of Christian marriage in reality need someone to show them in a concrete and clear way”.

He said the most effective witness Catholic couples could offer to cohabitees was “the example of their lives”.

Catholics can demonstrate “what the gift of sacramental grace is and what strength derives from it”, Pope Leo said, and be “someone to help” other young couples “understand the beauty and grandeur of the vocation to love and the service of life that God gives to married couples.”

He said that without such witness the young often fell prey to an “increasingly widespread privatisation of faith” that often prevented them from “knowing the richness and gifts of the Church, a place of grace, fraternity, and love”.

The Pope said: “As a result, despite their healthy and holy desires, while they sincerely seek ways to climb the exciting upward paths to life and abundant joy, many end up relying on false footholds that are unable to support the weight of their deepest needs and cause them to slip back down, away from God, shipwrecked on a sea of worldly concerns.

“Among them are fathers and mothers, children, young people and adolescents, who find themselves at times alienated by illusory lifestyles that leave no room for faith, and whose spread is facilitated by the wrong use of potentially good means – such as social media – yet prove harmful when used to convey misleading messages.”

Leo said it would be a mistake to overlook the gift of the person of Jesus Christ and instead present the young with a “set of rules to be kept … a moralistic, burdensome and unappealing religion that, in some ways, is impossible to live in concrete daily life”.

“It is not a matter of giving hasty answers to difficult questions, but of drawing close to people, listening to them, and trying to understand together with them how to face their difficulties,” he told the seminar called “Evangelising with the Families of Today and Tomorrow: Ecclesiological and Pastoral Challenges”.

“This requires a readiness to be open, when necessary, to new ways of seeing things and different ways of acting, for each generation is different and has its own challenges, dreams and questions.”

He continued: “Yet amid all these changes, Jesus Christ remains the same yesterday and today and forever. Consequently, if we want to help families experience joyful paths of communion and be seeds of faith for one another, we must first cultivate and renew our own identity as believers.”

The day earlier, Pope Leo also preached about marriage and the value of the family in a homily at the Sunday Mass in St Peter’s Square for the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and the Elderly.

The Pope said it was significant that married couples are being increasingly canonised together as saints.

He said: “I think of Louis and Zélie Martin, the parents of St 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.”

Quoting Pope St Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, the 1968 papal encyclical that forbade married Catholics from using contraception, he added: “This love makes you one flesh and enables you, in the image of God, to bestow the gift of life.”

Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht has meanwhile also spoken about the challenges of evangelisation in the fields of marriage and family life.

But he was emphatic that there was no room for ambiguity and equivocation when there was a demand for authentic Church teaching to be presented with clarity.

Cardinal Eijk said: “It may not be easy to witness Catholic morality. People may have difficulties with it, but we should be clear and unambiguous about the basic truths of our faith.

“Though also in this field, things are changing,” he said in an interview with The Pillar.

“We introduced in our diocese marriage preparation courses as a series of five evenings. We explain the theology of the body. We speak about the Church’s doctrine on contraception, we talk about natural family planning. And the reaction is mostly ‘Oh, that is that beautiful. We’ve never heard that’.

“And that makes it very clear to me, we have to transmit the truth about marriage, about sexual life. That may be difficult, but it is possible. In our most recent course, we had 12 couples, so 24 young people who heard this message and are open to it.

“I also explained this issue last Saturday to groups of young adults in the Diocese of Den Bosch, and they were all very open to it. There were some older people who were more critical, they were the rebels of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, people of my age. This shows a generational change.”

In the UK, marriage rates have collapsed as divorce rates have rocketed in recent years, with the number of marriages in England and Wales tumbling by 61 per cent following the covid pandemic of 2020.

Increasingly, young heterosexual people are now giving up on marriage in favour of cohabitation, even though the lifestyle is a poor and fragile substitute, and one in three say they never want children, leaving the population replacement rate perilously low in the face of an aging demographic pyramid. Those children who are born are increasingly disadvantaged by the separation of their parents.

One of the most recent studies by the Marriage Foundation has revealed that by the age of 14 years, some 46 per cent of children in the UK are today not living with both natural parents. While a third of these children have experienced the collapse of their parents’ marriages, almost half (46 per cent) have witnessed the separation of parents who were unmarried.

Among teens whose natural parents are still together, the majority of parents are married (84 per cent) with only a small minority unmarried (16 per cent).

(Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)