I would like to repeat the President’s welcome to what I consider to be a very important meeting, because its subject is of great interest, and it is also the first time that the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, founded in 1994 by Pope John Paul II, studies the question of the family, which is really central in the vision of the Church and in the vision of Christ.
I don’t want to use up the time to express my idea, but in relation to what the President has just said, my study is founded on two very important texts. Perhaps, if we have time, I can expose it in clearer way. The first is by Pope Benedict, the theologian Pope, who says that the essence, the substance of the social order is to communicate the grace of Christ to each other. The second is by Pope Francis, who says concretely in Amoris Laetitia that the common life of husband and wife, the entire network of relations they build with their children and with the world, is a sort of extension of the grace of the sacrament. For me this is the great news that we have in Amoris Laetitia, which, however, also contains sentences by Pope Benedict.
Concretely, the social order that we have today, especially, for example, with globalization, is completely different from the social order that we had in Medieval times, when we had the structure of the sacrament that we have today. So, if we need to sanctify the family, that is, the cell of the social order, we also need to sanctify all of the social order, and to sanctify this we need the grace of Christ, because the grace of Christ has the power to heal the original sin and all the other sins, and it has the power to elevate to a new life so that, with the grace of Christ, we become children of God.
Therefore, what could be the way to elevate the social order in our time? Is it by an extension of the sacrament of matrimony? Perhaps the Pope can declare this, because St Thomas Aquinas said that the Church has the power to build the sacrament – and history proves this – or maybe we need a new sacrament, a new extension of the grace of Christ to all the social law. This is my argument. Thank you very much. If there is time later, I can elaborate further.