The Spanish Episcopal Conference has presented its 2026 campaign “Matrimonio es más”, promoted by the Episcopal Subcommittee for the Family and Defense of Life on the occasion of Marriage Week around the feast of Saint Valentine. Under the slogan “Level up! El juego de dos” and the claim “El amor, la aventura más épica”, the initiative proposes as its central axis a professional video game designed to “validate” whether a couple is prepared for a definitive commitment. The game, developed specifically for the campaign, is already available on the official website of the project.
According to the Episcopal Conference itself, it is a “vocational and propositional” campaign that seeks to show the beauty of Christian marriage and present this vocation as a response to the deep longing of the human heart. The creative proposal has been developed in collaboration with the Faculty of Communication at the Pontifical University of Salamanca and designed by professionals in the video game field.
A Vocation Is Not a Game
The problem is not in the underlying good intention—to remind that marriage is a Christian vocation—but in the method chosen to convey it. Marriage is not a playful dynamic, nor a test of sentimental compatibility, nor a “level” that is unlocked after overcoming certain screens. It is a demanding vocation, a definitive alliance between a man and a woman open to life, which involves sacrifice, self-giving, the cross, and fidelity in the midst of a deeply adverse cultural context.
In a Spain with marriage figures in free fall, plummeting birth rates, and normalized family breakdown, the question is whether the pastoral problem is really the lack of a video game or, rather, the absence of clear preaching on the truth of the sacrament, its indissolubility, and its supernatural dimension.
Infantilization as a Pastoral Strategy
Presenting marriage as a video game may aim to “enter into dialogue with a gamified society”, as the campaign itself points out. However, the risk is evident: trivializing what is sacred. When the idea is conveyed that a definitive commitment can be evaluated as an interactive experience with “virtuous options”, the message sent is that the sacrament can be reduced to an emotional journey validated by digital mechanics.
This soft and naive way of addressing fundamental issues of Christian life reflects a worrying trend in not a few ecclesial instances: the substitution of doctrinal depth for creative marketing, and of evangelical exigency for an amiable and youthful aesthetic. The result, far from strengthening the matrimonial vocation, can contribute to emptying it of its real drama and supernatural greatness.
Treating Young People as Adults
Young people do not need the faith to be simplified into entertainment. They need to be told the truth clearly. Christian marriage demands maturity, responsibility, generous openness to life, and the capacity for sacrifice. It requires serious preparation, spiritual accompaniment, and solid formation. It is not sustained by gamification dynamics, but by sacramental grace and the firm will to remain faithful “in prosperity and in adversity”.
If the definitive commitment is presented as a game, there is a risk of conveying that the vocation is reversible, optional, or experimental. And when the Church adopts an excessively light tone to speak of decisive realities, the message loses strength and credibility.
A Matter of Substance
The crisis of marriage in Spain is not a crisis of advertising creativity. It is a crisis of faith, anthropology, and coherence. It requires doctrinal clarity, convincing witness, and a pastoral approach that is not afraid to speak of exigency, sacrifice, and truth.
Christian marriage is, indeed, an adventure. But it is not a video game. It is a vocation lived on one’s knees before God and standing tall before the world. And perhaps the true pastoral “level up” consists in recovering the seriousness with which the Church has always spoken of this sacrament.