Five Challenges on Marriage and Family for Pope Leo, by Eduardo J. Echeverria

In light of Pope Leo XIV’s statement that the family is founded on the “stable union between a man and a woman,” the responses of the critics and boosters of the late Pope Francis’s view of conjugal marriage are striking. The former imply that Leo’s view of conjugal marriage as the two-in-one flesh union of a man and a woman reaffirms what Francis had denied, and the latter defend the continuity between Francis and Leo on marriage.

On the one hand, the critics are wrong. Throughout his pontificate, Pope Francis consistently taught – even if his teaching was not in the limelight compared to his teaching on environmental issues – the conjugal view of marriage: marriage as the two-in-one-flesh union between a man and a woman. And sexual differentiation being the fundamental prerequisite for the two to become one flesh. Furthermore, St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis all affirmed the moral and sacramental significance of the two-in-one-flesh bodily unity as foundational to the marital form of love. …

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