Bishop teaches that service to life central to marriage, family

Bishop Jose Mazuelos of Asidonia-Jerez, Spain said service to life and the human community are two elements at the heart of marriage and the family.

During a conference on the Christian family on April 20 in the Diocese of Cordoba, Bishop Mazuelos said the intimate connection between the family and anthropology “leads us to affirm that it is by looking to Christ that we can find the path for achieving the model and the fulfillment of the authentic family.”

The bishop referenced Blessed John Paul II's call to evangelize formerly Christian societies and said that “Clarifying the identity of marriage is one of the great challenges we face in bring about the New Evangelization.”

Marriage and the family are “intimately linked to anthropological and theological issues,” he noted, warning that both “cannot be equated with just any type of relationship.”

Rather, the “truth about man” demands “an intimate connection between the relationships that make up the family, which are the fruit of it being a community of persons at the service of life.”

“In Christ not only has marriage become a primordial sacrament of creation, but it has also been raised to a sacrament of the new and eternal Covenant,” he said.