Some things about marriage never change
Photo by CNA
Like its nature, says the constant teaching of the Church from its beginning. Pope Benedict brought up the natural law and moral order in most of his addresses in the US recently. And he said the family is the building block of society.
In his address to the US bishops, Benedict recalled that his World Day of Peace Message spoke of “the essential contribution that healthy family life makes to peace within and between nations.”
But…
How can we not be dismayed as we observe the sharp decline of the family as a basic element of Church and society? Divorce and infidelity have increased, and many young men and women are choosing to postpone marriage or to forego it altogether.
To some young Catholics, the sacramental bond of marriage seems scarcely distinguishable from a civil bond, or even a purely informal and open-ended arrangement to live with another person. Hence we have an alarming decrease in the number of Catholic marriages in the United States together with an increase in cohabitation, in which the Christ-like mutual self-giving of spouses, sealed by a public promise to live out the demands of an indissoluble lifelong commitment, is simply absent. In such circumstances, children are denied the secure environment that they need in order truly to flourish as human beings, and society is denied the stable building blocks which it requires if the cohesion and moral focus of the community are to be maintained.
Today in Rome, he addressed the subject again.
Pope Benedict, speaking a day after a California court ruled in favour of same-sex marriage, firmly restated on Friday the Roman Catholic Church’s position that only unions between a man and a woman are moral.
Benedict made no mention of the California decision in his speech to family groups from throughout Europe, but stressed the Church’s position several times.
“The union of love, based on matrimony between a man and a woman, which makes up the family, represents a good for all society that can not be substituted by, confused with, or compared to other types of unions,” he said.
The pope also spoke of the inalienable rights of the traditional family, “founded on matrimony between a man and a woman, to be the natural cradle of human life”.
He’s doing what he encouraged the bishops to do.
As preachers of the Gospel and leaders of the Catholic community, you are also called to participate in the exchange of ideas in the public square, helping to shape cultural attitudes…
In the United States, as elsewhere, there is much current and proposed legislation that gives cause for concern from the point of view of morality, and the Catholic community, under your guidance, needs to offer a clear and united witness on such matters. Even more important, thought, is the gradual opening of the minds and hearts of the wider community to moral truth.
He’s doing what he can from St. Peter’s Square. It’s up to the US bishops to follow the lead.
Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George opened Benedict’s meeting with the bishops in Washington by naming obvious challenges to the Church in America, and this was one of them.
How to include and love all the faithful while being clear about the demands of discipleship, especially when those demands seem restrictive of sexual freedom, is a constant pastoral challenge to the bishops and other pastors. The Episcopal Conference has recently identified the strengthening of marriage and of family life as one of five priorities for our common attention in the next several years.
The California Supreme Court moved up that urgency considerably.