Bishop Swain on Pope's address to U.S. Bishops

Bishop Paul Swain of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is making his first ad limina visit to Rome. On Friday morning, Bishop Swain, with the other Bishops from Regions VII-IX of the U.S. Episcopal Conference, met with Pope Benedict XVI . Bishop Swain spoke to us about the Pope’s message for the visiting prelates.

He said the Pope’s address on marriage and the family focused on two areas: education and the virtue of chastity. “I think two things [the Pope] said is that we [bishops] need to be better teachers, and to form those who haven’t been formed yet… The message is the same: We need to teach better, and to form, particularly the young.”

Bishop Swain said the Pope also spoke about marriage and family: “The underpinning of healthy families and strong marriages is a healthy understanding of human sexuality. And [the Pope] focused a bit on the necessity to raise up, in perhaps a new way, the virtue of chastity. And if we live the virtue of chastity, it affects so many other areas, particularly in family and married life.” Chastity, the bishop explained, “comes down to respecting one another in families and out of families.” Within families, he said, “there also needs to be respect for the spouses, one for the other.”

Pope Benedict also warned about “the powerful political and cultural currents seeking to alter the legal definition of marriage.” Bishop Swain said, “Certainly in many states, and in many different ways, there’s this political pressure to endorse same-sex marriages as being equivalent to the marriage of one man and one woman for life, which is the teaching of the Church.” He said the political battles can confuse the issue: “It’s dynamic, it’s become so political. We sometimes miss what the real element is, which is, ‘How are we respectful of what God has created for us for our own good?’ And it’s a very difficult challenge because of the media and the political tensions that are part of this discussion.”

Finally, Bishop Swain spoke about his own experience of coming to Rome to meet with the Holy Father: “What has happened here, at least for me, is to recognise that it isn’t about me at all. It isn’t about what I have to deal with. It’s about being faithful to the office of bishop to which I have been called, even though I am unworthy… we’re called to be faithful to the office that we have been invited to by Christ, through His Vicar. So it kind of broadens the sense of what being a bishop is all about. It isn’t about me, it isn’t about us, it’s about being faithful.”

Listen to the interview of Sioux Falls Bishop Paul Swain with Christopher Wells: