Married couples have been urged to help makes each other saints.

That was one of the messages from John Wilson, the Archbishop of Southwark, who was in Edinburgh on Saturday to speak on marriage and family life.

He told the audience at the Gillis Centre: "One of your principal vocations is to make your spouse a saint.

"One thing I say in wedding homilies is that if you don't do anything else from this day forward, you pray for your wife and you pray for your husband.

"Pope Francis says that moments of family prayer and acts of devotion can be more powerful than any class or sermon."

He added: "After the love that unites us to God, conjugal love - married love - is the greatest form of friendship that exists.

"St Pope John Paul II knew the transformative power of the vocation to marriage and family when he wrote 'the future of humanity passes by way of the family'. So if we get marriage and the family right, we get society right, we get the world right, we get the future right.”

Archbishop Wilson also spoke of the many challenges to traditional marriage in today's society, saying: "There's less support from our social structures, there's increasing fragmentation and individualism, there's an abandonment of any traditional understanding of marriage and family, of gender, of sexuality, of relationships.

"Pope Francis says our mission is clear - we can hardly stop advocating marriage simply to avoid countering contemporary sensibilities or out of a desire to be fashionable.

"If we did we deprive the world of values that we can and must offer. Our reply has to be a more responsible and generous effort to present the reasons and motivations for choosing marriage and the family, helping them to respond to the grace that God offers them."

(Images: Catriona Atkin)