At the service of life

The fundamental task of marriage and family life is to serve life.

With the creation of man and woman in His own image and likeness, God crowns and brings to perfection the work of His hands ... "God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.´"

Thus the fundamental task of the family is to serve life, to actualize in history the original blessing of the Creator - that of transmitting by procreation the divine image from person to person.

Fecundity is the fruit and the sign of conjugal love, the living testimony of the full reciprocal self-giving of the spouses...

However, the fruitfulness of conjugal love is not restricted solely to the procreation of children, … it is enlarged and enriched by all those fruits of moral, spiritual and supernatural life which the father and mother are called to hand on to their children, and through the children to the Church and to the world."
(Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 28)