Livio Melina

“[T]he Christian family . . . is the place where anthropology and faith are mediated, the crucial space where the human fitness of the Gospel is verified, the terminal where, in capillary form, the mission of the Church is realized.”

“Only the family, born from the marriage between a man and a woman, ensures that a person is ‘wanted for his own sake,’ as a person to be welcomed and not as a thing to be possessed. Only the family allows the person to be educated in the logic of gift.”

“Since the body, too, is called to participate in the final resurrection to the vision of God, . . . it is a living organ that allows us to see God better.”

“[S]pouses [do] not only exchange their own human love, but also the most precious thing God has given them—which is the gift of the Spirit—in a process of gradual growth in charity and expansion of their capacity to receive and give divine love.”

“Hope is therefore not purely waiting for a future intervention by God that is yet to take place, but rather it is a trusting expectancy and the active cooperation of one’s freedom with a gift already initially given and straining towards its fulfillment.”

“Christian moral theology will . . . acquire a personalistic and responsorial character: it will arise as a response to the totally gratuitous encounter with Christ.”

"The issues relating to the difference between the sexes are not trivial ones, but indicate epochal shifts in culture and the spiritual history of humankind."