Indulge Me

Here's the passage I was thinking of from the Pope's Q&A with priests. It's so long, I didn't want to add it to the previous post. Answering a question about young people and marriage:

We must make it clear that this is not a matter of a legal constraint, a burden undertaken with marriage. On the contrary, profundity and beauty lie precisely in decisiveness. Only in it can love mature in all its beauty. [...]

Even in crisis, in enduring moments that seem unbearable, new doors are opened, and love takes on a new beauty. A beauty made up of nothing but harmony is not a real beauty. [...] Real beauty also needs contrast. Light and darkness complement each other. Even the grape needs rain to grow, and not just sun; not only day, but also night.

We ourselves, the priests, whether young or mature, must learn the necessity of suffering, of crisis. We must endure and transcend this suffering. Only in this way does life become rich. For me, the fact that the Lord bears his stigmata for all eternity has a symbolic value. An expression of the atrocity of suffering and death, they are now the seals of Christ’s victory, of the full beauty of his victory and of his love for us.

We must accept, both as priests and as spouses, the necessity of enduring the crisis of otherness, of the other, the crisis in which its seems that we can no longer stay together. The spouses must learn together to go forward, partly out of love for the children, and so get to know one another again and love each other anew, in a much deeper and more real love. Thus over a long journey, with its sufferings, love really matures.

It seems to me that we priests can also learn from spouses, and precisely from their sufferings and sacrifices. We often think that celibacy alone is a sacrifice. But, in getting to know the sacrifices of married persons – we think of their children, of the problems that come along, the fears, sufferings, illnesses, rebellion, and even of the problems of the first years, when the nights bring no sleep on account of a baby’s crying – we must learn, from them and from their sacrifices, the nature of our own sacrifice. And we must learn together that it is beautiful to mature amid sacrifices, and thus work for the salvation of others. [...]