A media version of reading the tea leaves fills television, radio and the social networks as people declare what Pope Francis did or did not do when he met with Kim Davis at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, but the bigger issue and story actually lies ahead. The Synod of Bishops on the family begins in Rome on Sunday, and many people think the bishops will change the Catholic Church’s understanding of marriage, and that Francis will approve.

Let me say this clearly: The Synod will uphold the clear teaching of the Catholic Church on the nature of marriage in a way that will make those disappointed with Pope Francis for meeting with Kim Davis go apoplectic. Why do I say that so confidently? For many reasons, but one of them is the way Francis spoke about his trip to America.

Let Francis Explain It

Every Wednesday, popes speak to the faithful in the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square in what is called a general audience. In this past Wednesday’s address, he explained that he took his “apostolic journey” to Cuba and the United States of America because he wanted to take part in the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. In other words, the pastor of the Catholic Church is committed to defending marriage and the family. He will not join the cultural revolutionaries who seek to change the truth about marriage as the union of one man and one woman, intended for life, open to life, and formative of the family.

The address is well worth reading if you want to know what Francis really thinks about the United States and what he called its “spiritual and ethical patrimony.” He explains that he chose to celebrate the Mass of canonization of the missionary Fr. Junipero Serra in the United States to call the Nation to “fidelity to its fundamental principles,” which “find in the Gospel their complete fulfillment.”

He affirmed that “Saint Junipero shows the way of joy: to go and share with others the love of Christ. This is the way of the Christian, but also of every man that has known love: not to keep it for himself but to share it with others.” He affirmed that the “United States of America was born and grew on this religious and moral basis, and on this basis it can continue to be a land of freedom and hospitality and cooperate towards a more just and fraternal world.”

For him, he said, the “climax of the trip” was the Meeting of Families, where “the horizon [was] extended to the whole world through the ‘prism,’ so to speak, of the family.” In fact, “the family, namely the fruitful bond between man and woman is the answer to the great challenge of our world.” Notice that “man and woman.”  “It “is the answer because it is the cell of a society that balances the personal and the communal dimension, and which at the same time can be the model of a sustainable management of the goods and resources of Creation.”

He also returned to a theme in Catholic social doctrine I wrote about recently, what the Church calls a human ecology. He explained “the family is the leading subject of an integral ecology, because it is the primary social subject, which contains within itself the two basic principles of human civilization on earth: the principle of communion and the principle of fecundity.” This is the icon the Bible presents us, he said: “the human couple, united and fecund, placed by God in the garden of the world, to cultivate and protect it.”

There speaks a man who believes in marriage and the family as God created it and human civilizations have understood it. There speaks a man who does not believe that the legal union of a man and another man, or a woman and another woman, is a marriage that creates a family. In the weeks ahead, many people will seek to use the Synod on the family to push an agenda at odds with the Bible and the teaching of the Catholic Church. As you read about this Synod, please heed the words of my dear deceased mother and “consider the source.”