Family life isn’t perfect. Still, most of us would prefer life with our families than without them. By family, I mean the original context of persons to whom you especially belong. I also mean the people you live with now in marital, communal, or more tentative commitments. Families are built of an amalgam of materials: some parts genetic and others emotional, circumstantial, institutional, or otherwise essential. Some family members are a given when you arrive on the scene. Others are chosen later by means of affection, adoption, religious profession, tragedy, or later matrimonial blendings. Whoever composes the grouping you call family, be assured it’s unique in all the world—and blessed as it is.

Let me hasten to say Pope Francis may not share this overarching definition in his 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (On Love in the Family). Then again, maybe he does. He certainly agrees that families aren’t perfect, which he repeats many times in the document. He also emphasizes that pastors and family members alike must recognize this qualifying principle and leave any temptation to judgment at the door. The pope insists families are blessed by God no matter their composition. Family life is a school of love, and the lesson plan necessarily includes plenty of forgiveness, forbearance, and compassion.

So if your particular family doesn’t square with the ideal that was held up to you as a child of what a good Catholic home should be, give yourself a respite from the lashings. According to our tradition, revered father Abraham waits a century before receiving at the hand of God the family he longs for. And it turns out to be a twisted fabrication of his wife, Sarah, and bedded maidservant, Hagar; heirs-at-odds Ishmael and Isaac; later wife, Keturah, and six more kids who, like Ishmael, get the boot to firewall Isaac’s inheritance. Abraham’s brood is a mess of a lineage that doesn’t exactly shine like the stars in the sky. As far as you can trace the biblical generations forward—through Jacob’s swollen tentful of women and children, King David’s six wives plus Bathsheba, and Solomon’s harem of a thousand unions—the ideal family doesn’t get much play outside of the gospel triad of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And that’s not a normative nuclear family any way you look at it.

So maybe what makes a family worth fighting for isn’t entirely defined by its legitimacy in courts of law or even, dare we say, the sacramental sniff test. I’m not going to pin that assessment on Pope Francis, who does his doctrinal best to toe the line in Amoris Laetitia, affirming traditional church teaching on what composes the paradigmatic family. That being: a strong, carefully considered, sacramental union of a man and a woman open to sharing their lives with children in an exclusive, lifelong, faithful relationship. This paradigm remains powerfully clear in this and every papal teaching.

If we can bear to drop fierce political posturing for a moment, many of us might agree that the paradigmatic family, living out its commitment in tenderness and mutual respect, is a good and fruitful context on which society, until recently, has been established. One can be socially progressive, dedicated to feminism, willing to acknowledge the complexity of human sexuality and still admit this much. I grew up in such a family—more or less—and have no regrets and much gratitude for its merits. Most of my siblings attempted to re-create such a family for themselves, though several were devastated when the outcome was otherwise.