SW News: Pope Francis in a message to the Pontifical Theological Institute John Paul II for Marriage and the Family Sciences said that the family is not an ideology, but a reality. The Holy Father warned against “imprisoning” the family in ideological stances.

“We must preserve the family but not imprison it, make it grow as it should grow. Beware of ideologies that interfere to explain the family from an ideological point of view. The family is not an ideology, it is a reality,” the Holy Father said.

“And a family grows with the vitality of reality. But when ideologies come to explain what the family is, everything is destroyed. Ideologies ruin things!”

He highlighted that "It is the responsibility of both the State and the Church" to listen and support families to help build a "more human world, that is, more supportive and more fraternal. Marriage and family will always be imperfect and unfinished until we are in Heaven.”

The mission of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family is to undertake significant research and publication regarding nature, person, marriage, and family, and the implications of the Church’s teachings on these matters for broader problems in theology, philosophy, and culture.

The institute prepares laypersons, priests, and religious for teaching, research, and pastoral work in academic, seminary, or diocesan and parish contexts; for work in legal, medical, and other professional occupations; and for the evangelization of the family as the original cell of society to build truly human culture.

Responding to the 1980 Synod of Bishops’ recommendation, the late Polish pope established the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome. Before his death in 2005, John Paul II expressed his wish to be remembered as “the Pope of the Family.”

Pope John Paul II devoted his early Wednesday audiences (1979-1984) to an extended reflection on the theological meaning of the body, marriage, love, and their relationship with the whole sacramental order of the Catholic faith. This body of work would come to be known as “the Theology of the Body.”

Continuing the legacy of Pope John Paul, II, the current Pope Francis reiterated the importance of family and said the family remains an irreplaceable "anthropological grammar" of society. “When this grammar is neglected or upset”, he said, “the entire order of human and social relations suffers its wounds”.