Love as the Principal and Power of Communion.

The family, which is founded and given life by love, is a community of persons: of husband and wife, of parents and children, of relatives. Its first task is to live with fidelity the reality of communion in a constant effort to develop an authentic community of persons.

The inner principal of that task, it's permanent power and it's final goal is love: without love the family is not a community of persons and, in the same way, without love the family cannot live, grow and perfect itself as a community of persons. What I wrote in the Encyclical Redemptorists hominis applies primarily and especially within the family as such: " Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.

The love between husband and wife and in a derivatory  and broader way, the love between members of the same family-between parents and children, brothers and sisters and relatives and members of the household- is given life and sustenance by an unceasing  inner dynamism leading the family to ever deeper and more intense communion which is the foundation and soul of the community of marriage and the family