During a brief visit to Croatia at the end of last week, Pope Benedict addressed a crowd of over 400,000 people at the country's first annual family day in the capital, Zagreb.

“Do not give in to that secularized mentality which proposes living together as a preparation, or even a substitute for marriage! Show by the witness of your lives that it is possible, like Christ, to love without reserve, and do not be afraid to make a commitment to another person!”

The Pope also called on the nation’s families to reject contraception and to be open to children:

“Dear families, rejoice in fatherhood and motherhood! Openness to life is a sign of openness to the future, confidence in the future, just as respect for the natural moral law frees people, rather than demeaning them!”

Relativism, he said, made love superficial and transient :

“Freedom without commitment to the truth is made into an absolute, and individual well-being through the consumption of material goods and transient experiences is cultivated as an ideal, obscuring the quality of interpersonal relations and deeper human values; love is reduced to sentimental emotion and to the gratification of instinctive impulses, without a commitment to build lasting bonds of reciprocal belonging and without openness to life,” he observed.

“We are called to oppose such a mentality!”