SALT LAKE CITY - At the Vatican on Monday, Pope Francis spoke at Humanum, an international colloquium on "The Complementarity of Man and Woman."
Complementarity "refers to situations where one of two things adds to, completes, or fulfills a lack in the other," he said.
As I listened to the webcasts and watched the six 15-minute videos released during the conference by the Catholic Church, I rejoiced to absorb these Catholic teachings on marriage and identity and sexuality.
So many religions and faith traditions — 14 from 23 countries were represented at last week's conference — believe that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. Yet we can be isolated within our own faith traditions and take the truth about complementarity in marriage for granted.
Precisely because Sikhism, Protestantism, Judaism, Jainism, Mormonism, Islam and Catholicism brought their different world-views about life and about marriage, this interfaith colloquium helped unlock the language we need to speak about this great blessing.
I was struck by the power of the language of natural law. It emerged from six moving videos that told of the meaning of marriage, of how a mother and a father serve as the cradle of life and love, and of fundamental truths so intuitive that they have defied articulation.
Consider this segment from the third video, on "Understanding Man and Woman:" "My youngest daughter will come up to me wearing a princess costume, and my son will be playing with a sword and wearing a knight costume. Even educated children that live in these modern times also re-enact these stereotypes,” said Therese Hergot-Jacob, a psychologist at teacher at College Stanislas in Paris.
"In reality, behind these stereotypes that are ridiculous, it's true that there is an emotional aspect that needs to be recognized. She wants to be told, 'but sweetie, you are beautiful.' Psychologically speaking, she will understand that she is worthy of love … worthy of being a unique individual.
"And when a little boy comes to you with his sword and his Spiderman outfit or whichever superhero, what he expects from this stereotype is for [his parents] to say, 'You are an extraordinary person. You can save the world. You can protect people. That's what superheroes do.' We must understand the child or the adolescent's fundamental need so that he or she can feel complete as a woman or as a man or a person able to be loved."
Or this observation, from philosophy professor Peter Kreeft of Boston College, on the difference between stereotypes and archetypes: "We rightly reject stereotypes, because they are artificial, they are invented by society. Society’s greatness is creativity: It changes, it improves. But archetypes are built into the nature of things. Masculinity and femininity are archetypes. Archetypes are inescapable, just as the air and the light and darkness are inescapable, because they are part of the cosmos."
The "hidden sweetness" of marriage is the subject of the fourth movie, and it is followed by a movie consisting of interviews with young men and women throughout the world. A black youth from Boston is interviewed as saying: "The entire basis of human organization is the nuclear family. Everything traces back to people taking care of their nuclear family. So without that permanence, without a serious version of marriage to continue the species, the idea of getting something done is, in my estimation, laughable."
Recounting "La Manif Pour Tous" ("Demonstration for All"), when hundreds of thousands of French citizens last year protested the government's redefinition of marriage, Tugdual Derville, an activist with Alliance Vita, recounted that "children are at the heart of these protests, because they have the right to not be deliberately deprived of a father or a mother. They can be deprived because of separations or death, and in these cases, we do whatever we can to compensate.
"But to say, in advance, that we can go without a mother or a father, and that we can deliberately conceive a child who will be automatically deprived of a mother or a father, we consider this a serious violation of human rights,” said Derville. “More and more French people joined the protest, who had initially seen the slogan of 'marriage for all' as a slogan of equity, without understanding that it actually discriminated against children."
Or consider these closing words from Dr. Jacqueline Cooke-Rivers, director of the Seymour Institute and a doctoral student at Harvard University: “Families are a source of strength. Families are God’s way. So whatever is happening right now, in the end, because it is how we are designed to operate, families are going to re-emerge.”
Drew Clark can be reached via email: drew@drewclark.com, or on Twitter @drewclark, or at www.drewclark.com.