This days off/school delays are really messing with my head. No school yesterday (cold, serious bus problems for the public school buses. And since the Catholic schools just follow the public school decisions…no school for them either.) and a 2-hour delay today. So of course I forgot it was Wednesday, which means GA day in Rome!

Benedict has been focusing his catechesis on the workers in the vineyard, so to speak – he began last fall with the Apostles, and is now moving on to other important early figures. Today it was Priscilla and Aquila.

In the first half, Benedict outlines what we know about the married couple: where they lived, how they came to faith in Christ, what their role was in the early Church, and what Paul said about them. He then brings the rest of us into the picture:

In this way, the memory of a woman who has surely been an active person of great value in the history of Roman Christianity is perpetuated. One thing is certain: Together with the gratitude of those first Churches, of which Paul speaks, our own must be added, since due to the faith and apostolic commitment of faithful lay people, of families, of married couples such as Priscilla and Aquila, Christianity has reached our generation.

It was not only able to grow thanks to the apostles who announced it. In order to take root in peoples’ land, in order to develop in a living way, it was necessary that there be the commitment of these families, of these couples, of these Christian communities, of faithful lay people who offered "humus" to the growth of faith.

And it is always in this way that the Church grows. In particular, this couple proves just how important the action of Christian spouses is. When these are supported by faith and a strong spirituality, their courageous commitment to and in the Church becomes natural.

Their daily community of life is prolonged and somehow sublimated in the taking on of a public responsibility for the good of the Body of Christ, even if just a small part of it. This is how it was in the first generation and this is how it will often be.

One further lesson we cannot neglect to take from their example: Every house can be transformed into a small church. Not only in the sense that, therein, Christian love, typically made of altruism and mutual care, should reign, but even more in the sense that the whole of family life, founded on faith, is called to revolve around the sole lordship of Jesus Christ.

Not by chance, in the Letter to the Ephesians, Paul compares the relationship of matrimony to the spousal communion between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:25-33). Even more, we can maintain that the Apostle shapes the life of the whole Church on that of the family. And the Church, in reality, is the family of God.

For this reason we honor Aquila and Priscilla as models of conjugal life, responsibly committed to the service of the entire Christian community. And we find in them the model of the Church, family of God for all times.