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When Rabbi Shmuley Boteach traveled to the Vatican and met with Pope Benedict XVI on April 28, he implored the Church leader to join him in his campaign for a global family dinner night each Friday.

"Turn Friday Night into a Family Night" is Boteach's initiative for parents to give their children two uninterrupted hours of their attention in order to engage them "emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually."

On May 6, Boteach, the international best-selling author of 23 books and host of the TV show "Shalom in the Home," spoke to an estimated 400-person audience at the Monmouth County Library Headquarters in Manalapan as part of the county library system's commemoration of Jewish American Heritage Month.

Boteach said that the Pope was receptive to the idea, telling him "we will work on this together."

Calling marriage our culture's "single most assaulted institution," Boteach recalled that when his own parents divorced at age 8, he didn't blame the concept of marriage itself.

Instead, he learned from his parents' mistakes and determined to devote his life "to shore up this institution."

"A lot of people no longer believe in the viability of love," Boteach said, lamenting marriage's displacement with what he called "serial monogamy" or when a couple dates for a few years and then amicably moves on.

"The reason I disagree with that is I believe in love, that love is eternal," Boteach said.

Boteach also spoke about this younger generation's fixation on fame and celebrity, which he said undermines all relationships, including marriage.

"This is the first generation where celebrity doesn't enhance our dignity; celebrity comes at the expense of our dignity," he said, adding that youth often confuse love with attention.

"This is the first generation not to feel love and we make the mistake that attention can compensate for love," Boteach observed, noting that the focus on attention leads one to think that he or she must earn love whereas real love is unconditional.

"You receive love for something you are, not for anything you do," he said.

Boteach said that when he got married he swore to himself that he would be the perfect father. Since then, Boteach, who has nine children, realized that he has made "tangible and undeniable" mistakes as a father.

But, he added, his children will never be able to say: I did not know if my father loved me and that he always put me first.

On his visit to the Vatican, Boteach also met with Cardinal Walter Kasper, the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Boteach said that during the meeting he told Kasper that despite the fact that the Church has the world's largest network of charities and schools, people no longer view it as "pro-family." All people perceive, Boteach reportedly told the cardinal, is that they are anti-gay marriage and anti-abortion.

"Which are fine positions, but you need to have a positive message," he said.

Asked by an audience member what he thought about the potential beatification of Pope Pius XII, Boteach said that the Pope, who reigned from 1939-1958, should not be sainted because of his failure to publicly condemn the Holocaust.

"Let's just say that Pope Pius is no saint," Boteach said.