In Weddings, Pope Francis Looks Past Tradition

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/world/europe/in-weddings-pope-francis-looks-past-tradition.html

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ROME — Cautioning that marriage is “not a television show” but a symbol of “real life” with “joys and difficulties,” Pope Francis married 20 couples from the Diocese of Rome on Sunday, some of them less than paragons of traditional Catholic values.

While the Roman Catholic Church considers sex out of marriage a sin, some of the couples married by the pope had already lived together and one had a grown child. Some couples had been previously married. But in Francis’s new, more forgiving church, these otherwise familiar domestic arrangements were not considered an impediment.

Being married by the pope had seemed “such an impossible thing that then — when we discovered that it was happening, that it wasn’t a dream — well, it transformed us,” Guido Tassaro, who married Gabriella Improta on Sunday, said in an interview on Vatican Radio. The report described them as an “older couple” with children.

Ms. Improta said she was living “a dream beyond my expectations.” The pope, she said, “is a man of conversion, a man of peace.”

He is also, it would seem, a pragmatist. The couples selected by Rome’s parishes for Sunday’s ceremony reflected an increasingly secular Italian society in which marriages — especially church weddings — have been declining even as separations and divorces are rising.

In 2012, the most recent year that figures were available, about 122,000 of the country’s 207,000 weddings were religious ceremonies, according to Italy’s national statistics agency.

Vatican watchers said the public marriages, the first by a pope since 2000, were meant to send a message, something Francis has done previously to soften the church’s image on social issues. During his return trip from World Youth Day in Brazil in July 2013, for example, the pope said he would not condemn — or judge — priests because of their sexual orientation.

“Cohabitation is a big issue, and how it is dealt with at the parish level is a big concern, so the pope is sending a signal,” said John Thavis, a veteran Vatican reporter.

He said that the couples chosen for the ceremony “seem to be normal people and not necessarily handpicked. It’s one more indication that the pope looks at things the way they really are; he’s a realist.

“It’s a pope willing to say that if you want to be married in the church, we’ll find a way to do it. It’s the ‘who am I to judge?’ pope, who doesn’t want to turn people away and instead wants to find a way to bring people in,” Mr. Thavis said.

In defending the sacrament of marriage, the pope acknowledged that it could become a challenge, that spouses could stray, or become discouraged and “daily life becomes burdensome, even nauseating.”

“The path is not always a smooth one, free of disagreements, otherwise it would not be human. It is a demanding journey, at times difficult, and at times turbulent, but such is life,” Francis said.

Francis is not the first pope to celebrate a public wedding, but Sunday’s ceremony “assumes particular significance, coming ahead of the Synod of Bishops on the family,” Bishop Filippo Iannone, vice regent of the Diocese of Rome, said in a statement on the diocesan website.

Many Catholics hope the synod will address issues like allowing divorced members who remarry to receive Communion.