Carl Anderson

The sacrament of Matrimony makes Catholic spouses and their families public signs of God’s love and thus missionaries, said the head of the Knights of Columbus.

The missionary power of the Catholic family goes beyond any commitment they make to a project of evangelization or social or political reform, Carl Anderson, the supreme knight, told the Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization.

“Love, which the family has the task of living and communicating, is the driving force of evangelization,” Anderson said.

“This love alone, when it is authentically lived in families, can be at the basis of a renewal of that genuinely human culture which Blessed John Paul II called a ‘civilization of love.’”

The sacrament of Matrimony binds couples together, forming them into “an icon of God’s own communion” of love in the Holy Trinity, Anderson said.