“Attention to the Wounds of Humanity”

“This synodal season has led the Church to renewed awareness of the Gospel of the Family and of new pastoral challenges that the Christian community is called on to answer. The centrality of the family on the path of our communities’ ‘pastoral conversion’ and the Church’s missionary transformation requires us never to lose sight—in the reflection on marriage and the family at the academic level—of the pastoral perspective or of the need for attention to the wounds of humanity.” Pope Francis stated this in the Apostolic Letter in the form of Motu Proprio “Summa Familiae Cura,” published today but dated 8 September, with which he has created the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for the Sciences of Marriage and Family that succeeds the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.

Wanting the “farsighted intuition of St. John Paul II,” the Institute’s founder, to be “even more clearly recognized and valued for its fruitfulness and importance today,” Pope Francis decided to expand the academic institution’s field of interest to include “new dimensions of the pastoral task and the ecclesial mission, as well as developments in the human sciences and anthropological culture, in this field which is crucial for the culture of life.”

“The special bond of the new Theological Institute with the ministry and the magisterium of the Holy See will be further promoted—as Francis writes—by the privileged relationship that it will establish, in forms to be mutually agreed upon, with the Congregation for Catholic Education, the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, and the Pontifical Academy for Life.”