Respect marriage and unborn if you want civil harmony, Pope tells diplomats

The Catholic Herald• May 16, 2025

Pope Leo XIV has said that peaceful civil societies cannot be built up and maintained without investing in traditional marriage and protecting the lives of the most vulnerable, including unborn children.

In an address to the Diplomatic Corps to the Holy See, the American pontiff gave his first major indication that he would end prevailing doctrinal ambiguity over marriage in the Catholic Church.

The Chicago-born Pope’s comments also reveal the importance to him of the role of marriage in regenerating dissolute western societies in particular.

The Holy Father’s defence of the unborn child and the elderly also suggests a strong continuity with the teachings of Pope St John Paul II, the author of the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the Gospel of Life, which explicitly and systematically condemned abortion, euthanasia and other grave sins against the inviolability and sanctity of human life.

Pope Leo said: “It is the responsibility of government leaders to work to build harmonious and peaceful civil societies.

“This can be achieved above all by investing in the family, founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman, a small but genuine society, and prior to all civil society.

“In addition, no one is exempted from striving to ensure respect for the dignity of every person, especially the most frail and vulnerable, from the unborn to the elderly, from the sick to the unemployed, citizens and immigrants alike.”

Expanding his theme of building peace, Pope Leo XIV also warned his audience against viewing “peace” as a “negative” word, which only means an absence of war and conflict.

He said using it negatively means “opposition is a perennial part of human nature, frequently leading us to live in a constant ‘state of conflict’ at home, at work and in society.”

“Peace then appears simply as a respite, a pause between one dispute and another, given that, no matter how hard we try, tensions will always be present, a little like embers burning beneath the ashes, ready to ignite at any moment,” the Pope said.

Leo said from a Christian perspective – but also in other religious traditions – “peace is first and foremost a gift”.

“Yet it is an active and demanding gift. It engages and challenges each of us, regardless of our cultural background or religious affiliation, demanding first of all that we work on ourselves.

“Peace is built in the heart and from the heart, by eliminating pride and vindictiveness and carefully choosing our words. For words too, not only weapons, can wound and even kill.”

The pontiff said religions and interreligious dialogue can make a fundamental contribution to fostering a climate of peace.

Leo said: “This naturally requires full respect for religious freedom in every country, since religious experience is an essential dimension of the human person.

“Without it, it is difficult, if not impossible, to bring about the purification of the heart necessary for building peaceful relationships.”

He continued: “This effort, in which all of us are called to take part, can begin to eliminate the root causes of all conflicts and every destructive urge for conquest. It demands a genuine willingness to engage in dialogue, inspired by the desire to communicate rather than clash.

“As a result, there is a need to give new life to multilateral diplomacy and to those international institutions conceived and designed primarily to remedy eventual disputes within the international community.

“Naturally, there must also be a resolve to halt the production of instruments of destruction and death, since, as Pope Francis noted in  his last Urbi et Orbi Message, no peace is ‘possible without true disarmament [and] the requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament’.”

The pontiff said working for peace requires acting justly, bringing up the fact he chose his name after Leo XIII, the pope of the first great social encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

The Pope said: “In this time of epochal change, the Holy See cannot fail to make its voice heard in the face of the many imbalances and injustices that lead, not least, to unworthy working conditions and increasingly fragmented and conflict-ridden societies.

“Every effort should be made to overcome the global inequalities – between opulence and destitution – that are carving deep divides between continents, countries and even within individual societies.”

Pope Leo then spoke about the word truth, saying that “truly peaceful relationships cannot be built, also within the international community, apart from truth”.

He said: “Where words take on ambiguous and ambivalent connotations, and the virtual world, with its altered perception of reality, takes over unchecked, it is difficult to build authentic relationships, since the objective and real premises of communication are lacking.

“For her part, the Church can never be exempted from speaking the truth about humanity and the world, resorting whenever necessary to blunt language that may initially create misunderstanding. Yet truth can never be separated from charity, which always has at its root a concern for the life and well-being of every man and woman,” the pontiff continued.

“Furthermore, from the Christian perspective, truth is not the affirmation of abstract and disembodied principles, but an encounter with the person of Christ himself, alive in the midst of the community of believers,” he said.

Leo said truth does not create division but enables the people of the world to confront all the more resolutely the challenges of our time, mentioning migration, the ethical use of artificial intelligence and the protection of the planet Earth.

“These are challenges that require commitment and cooperation on the part of all, since no one can think of facing them alone,” the pontiff said.

(Photo: © Mazur/cbcew.org.uk)