Love is Greater because God Is Its Source

“It is in the family that life is enkindled. There, in a school of ever richer and more complete humanity, one learns to share, to rejoice and to suffer, to experience illness and to face death. Love makes it the most concrete utopia. Spouses who do not retreat in the face of Alzheimer's disease or the humiliation of betrayal. Families that welcome their children, even those with disabilities, who adopt them precisely because they are the home of the elderly parents, who open their homes to migrants. Parents who welcome the abandoned child or the pregnant girl, who cooperate in the redemption of a person who has fallen into addiction.”

This is one of the strong passages from the testimony given by Anna and Alberto Friso, of the Focolare Movement, during the panel session on the theme “And the Greatest is Love: Pope Francis on 1 Cor 13” at the Dublin World Meeting of Families. In the course of over fifty years of marriage, “we have gotten to know each other and to entrust ourselves, to welcome others and to hope, to suffer, and to struggle. We have cried and we have celebrated, experiencing that the most important thing of all is love.”

Anything but easy sentimentality; if the Crucified and Risen Christ is the model, then, between the spouses and in the family “Love must reach the paradox of knowing how to do nothing in order to live with the other person and, so, reflect its original design which springs from the Trinity,” as St. John wrote II in his Letter to families.