Marriage and family life is the basic unit of every society. A society is only as healthy, as stable, as energetic, and as imbued with moral values as its families. Raised to the dignity of a sacrament by Christ at the wedding at Cana (Jn. 2:1-12). Christian marriage has the ability and responsibility to raise children in the knowledge and service of the true God, who created them to know, love and serve Him.

Both Church and state must link efforts to promote the institution of marriage between a man and a woman and cultivate fruitful family life. We support public policies that edify the importance of mothers and fathers in society and their distinct tasks in raising and nurturing healthy children as well as the insolvability of marriage.

Additionally, we seek to educate Catholics on the fullness of marital love by providing resources for strengthening marriages and families in the home, and at the parish and community level. When we have a better understanding of marital love, we see more clearly the nature of authentic social justice and what public policy, on whatever issue, we can and cannot faithfully support.

As Pope Leo XIII wrote on Christian marriage: "Our wish is rather to speak about that family union of which marriage is the beginning and the foundation. The true origin of marriage, venerable brothers, is well known to all.

He continues: "Though revilers of the Christian faith refuse to acknowledge the never-interrupted doctrine of the Church on this subject, and have long striven to destroy the testimony of all nations and of all times, they have nevertheless failed not only to quench the powerful light of truth, but even to lessen it. We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. God thus, in His most far-reaching foresight, decreed that this husband and wife should be the natural beginning of the human race, from whom it might be propagated and preserved by an unfailing fruitfulness throughout all futurity of time. And this union of man and woman, that it might answer more fittingly to the infinite wise counsels of God, even from the beginning manifested chiefly two most excellent properties - deeply sealed, as it were, and signed upon it-namely, unity and perpetuity" (Arcanum, Feb. 10, 1880)