Pope to US Bishops: Evangelize American Culture, Defend Marriage

By Catholic Online
3/11/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Defending the institution of marriage as a social reality is ultimately a question of justice,

Particular mention must be made of the powerful political and cultural currents seeking to alter the legal definition of marriage. The Church's conscientious effort to resist this pressure calls for a reasoned defense of marriage as a natural institution consisting of a specific communion of persons, essentially rooted in the complementarity of the sexes and oriented to procreation. Sexual differences cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the definition of marriage. Defending the institution of marriage as a social reality is ultimately a question of justice, since it entails safeguarding the good of the entire human community and the rights of parents and children alike

Pope Meeting with US Bishops

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VATICAN CITY (Catholic Online) - On Friday morning, March 9, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI addressed another panel of US Catholic Bishops undergoing their ad limina visit. He spoke with clarity and urgency concerning the need for the evangelization of the American culture and their charge concerning what he called the "contemporary crisis of marriage and the family" and presenting a "Christian vision of human sexuality". We present the full text of the message with appreciation to Rocco Palmo and Whispers in the Loggia :

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Dear Brother Bishops,

I greet all of you with fraternal affection on the occasion of your visit ad limina Apostolorum. As you know, this year I wish to reflect with you on certain aspects of the evangelization of American culture in the light of the intellectual and ethical challenges of the present moment.

In our previous meetings I acknowledged our concern about threats to freedom of conscience, religion and worship which need to be addressed urgently, so that all men and women of faith, and the institutions they inspire, can act in accordance with their deepest moral convictions.

In this talk I would like to discuss another serious issue which you raised with me during my Pastoral Visit to America, namely, the contemporary crisis of marriage and the family, and, more generally, of the Christian vision of human sexuality.

It is in fact increasingly evident that a weakened appreciation of the indissolubility of the marriage covenant, and the widespread rejection of a responsible, mature sexual ethic grounded in the practice of chastity, have led to grave societal problems bearing an immense human and economic cost.

Yet, as Blessed John Paul II observed, the future of humanity passes by way of the family (cf. Familiaris Consortio, 85). Indeed, "the good that the Church and society as a whole expect from marriage and from the family founded on marriage is so great as to call for full pastoral commitment to this particular area. Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself" (Sacramentum Caritatis, 29).

In this regard, particular mention must be made of the powerful political and cultural currents seeking to alter the legal definition of marriage. The Church's conscientious effort to resist this pressure calls for a reasoned defense of marriage as a natural institution consisting of a specific communion of persons, essentially rooted in the complementarity of the sexes and oriented to procreation.

Sexual differences cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the definition of marriage. Defending the institution of marriage as a social reality is ultimately a question of justice, since it entails safeguarding the good of the entire human community and the rights of parents and children alike.

In our conversations, some of you have pointed with concern to the growing difficulties encountered in communicating the Church's teaching on marriage and the family in its integrity, and to a decrease in the number of young people who approach the sacrament of matrimony.

Certainly we must acknowledge deficiencies in the catechesis of recent decades, which failed at times to communicate the rich heritage of Catholic teaching on marriage as a natural institution elevated by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament, the vocation of Christian spouses in society and in the Church, and the practice of marital chastity.

This teaching, stated with increasing clarity by the post-conciliar magisterium and comprehensively presented in both the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, needs to be restored to its proper place in preaching and catechetical instruction.

On the practical level, marriage preparation programs must be carefully reviewed to ensure that there is greater concentration on their catechetical component and their presentation of the social and ecclesial responsibilities entailed by Christian marriage. In this context we cannot overlook the serious pastoral problem presented by the widespread practice of cohabitation, often by couples who seem unaware that it is gravely sinful, not to mention damaging to the stability of society.

I encourage your efforts to develop clear pastoral and liturgical norms for the worthy celebration of matrimony which embody an unambiguous witness to the objective demands of Christian morality, while showing sensitivity and concern for young couples.

Here too I would express my appreciation of the pastoral programs which you are promoting in your Dioceses and, in particular, the clear and authoritative presentation of the Church's teaching found in ...

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1 - 7 of 7 Comments

Sara Palen
1 year ago
Bai, my priest is teaching out of the Baltimore Chatechism every Wednesday night. It has been one of the most attended of his classes of all time(as he is known around the area for many good apolgetic classes over the years). Of course we still use the big green book, but that old book he is teaching out of is very user friendly. His class is a big hit!
jh
1 year ago
Lovely.
Faith Thomas
1 year ago
The truth is - lucifer has alot of agents here in d world with Us. Bt we have to keep living the faith nd preach the truth. Satanic attacks everywhere nd anyhow. Lets rise brethren from our slumber.!
American Firefighter
1 year ago
to my bishop Sirba in Rome, I will stand by you and the Pope on these things. My union has choosen in the wrong on the marriage issue, some wish to curtail my freedom of speech, but you know where I stand. Remember the Italian prayer I gave to you-"a day without risk is not lived"-a prayer to a saint for firefighters and bomb diffusers,( but works well for a bishop too). I must truly live by those words in so many ways.they cannot make me leave my faith at the door before my shift starts (p.s. if you stop by one of the local firehalls in Rome, could you pick me up one of their polo shirts-any size will do-I'll trade you a bowl of chili for it).
Bai Macfarlane
1 year ago
The Pope said, "Let me conclude by recalling that all our efforts in this area are ultimately concerned with the good of children, who have a fundamental right to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships."

Couples say in Church weddings, “I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.” Such people are only willing to start a family under certain conditions: if bride and groom both agree to be together until death, remain sexually faithful, and promise to support the children and each other in a marital home for life.

The Catholic Church, our culture, and the civil laws used to recognize that keeping these vows was a good thing, but with no-fault divorce, that has all changed. Don’t we all know a faithful spouse and good parent who had been a defendant in a no-fault divorce? These faithful spouses are separated from their own children most of the time and ordered to pay child support for a second household in which they are not even allowed to live.

I’m not shocked that the animalistic sexual liberation ideologues don’t lift a finger to try to protect children and faithful spouses from typical no-fault divorce. But I’m disappointed at the indifference of the Catholic pastoral leadership that celebrates all these church weddings. Catholic leaders are silent bystanders when members of their own flock force no-fault divorce on their families, against the will of the other spouse who has been faithful.

There is now a formal way to get the Catholic Church off the sidelines and involved. Mary’s Advocates, our non-profit, pro-marriage organization, is offering a “Vindicate Rights Petition” so a faithful spouse can use canon law to formally ask the Church to intervene.

For those who profess to be faithful Catholics, forcing no-fault divorce on one’s family is untenable, according to The Catholic Code of Canon Law. In the U.S.A., however, the Church response is commonly to offer the ‘pastoral care’ of giving annulments. An annulment, a decree of invalidity of marriage, is an official statement from a Catholic Tribunal in which they say the couple was never married in the first place. What child of divorce wants that kind of ‘pastoral care’ when one parent chooses to abandon marriage and force a family break-up?

Two forward thinking Catholic Canon lawyers are supporting the “Vindicates Rights Petition.” Canon Lawyer, Fr. Chuck Zmudzinski, C.P.M., J.C.L of the Fathers of Mercy in Auburn Kentucky describes the pastoral landscape from his perspective. “Now that almost every marriage that appears before the Church's tribunals in the U.S. ends up being declared invalid, I fear that many pastors take the side of the spouse who wants to divorce and remarry and actually encourage divorce and annulment, leaving the abandoned spouse with little or no recourse, and the children of the broken home are the greatest victims of this injustice.” … “There should be a serious effort by the pastors to bring the offending spouse to repentance and save the marriage.”

Canon lawyer, Philip C. L. Gray, J.C.L, from Hopedale, OH, describes what he sees happening to Catholics when one wants divorce, “In the vast majority of cases today, divorce has become an 'easy out' to avoid responsibility, pass blame, obtain revenge, or somehow justify problems in the marital relationship or between parents and children.” After Gray reviewed the Vindicate Rights Petition, he says, "The legal and doctrinal foundations for these petitions are well established. In my opinion, unless a petition in a particular case suffers from a defect identified in law, these cases should be accepted and heard. Not doing so would express a departure from the expectations of the Natural Law and the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church."

Natural laws are the life-principles that we are all ordained to follow, whether we consciously think about it or not. It is natural for every married couple to have disagreements and challenges, but it is not natural for one unsatisfied spouse to force the permanent break-up of his or her own family. Children, by nature know this, and the Vindicate Rights Petition is a way to involve the Catholic Church in keeping families together. Dissatisfied spouses should work on bettering their marriage, rather than abandoning them, and it is time for the Catholic Church to start formally telling
Joseph
1 year ago
Wise words of encouragement form Pope Benedict - as always. However, one point: catechising people as they approach the age of marriage is far too late. We have to get back to catechising youngsters from the age of about 7-8, using for example the Baltimore cathecism in America, or the old Penny Catechism in England, and similar texts in other English speaking countries. The move away from traditional catechism teaching in the 60s and 70s has borne its inevitable fruit - whole generations of catholics who haven't got the foggiest notion of fundamental truths like the Trinity, Grace, Redemption, and Sin - not to mention the awareness all catholics used to have of the finer distinctions - things like the 4 cardinal virtues, 3 theological virtues, 7 deadly sins, mortal and venial sin and the difference between them, vincible and invincible ignorance etc. etc. All knowledge that used to be ready to hand to ordinary catholics, aiding them to live Godly lives, but which has been trashed by modern catechetics, leaving us with the social and religious desert we see around us. For this the Church must take responsibility. I know for a fact that the trashing of the old catechisms in the UK was directly ordered by Cardinal Heenan, the head of the Catholic Church in England, back in the early 1970s. Trendy modernist 'feel good' catechetics followed, - with predictably disastrous results for our families, communities and Church. But when oh when will the Church ever demonstrate the humility it preaches to others and openly admit and confess it made such a terrible, appalling mistake? Becuase until the mistake is openly admitted there is little possibility of our moving forward, with a recovery of the best from the past, opening up the way for us into the future, through a more robust grounding of our youngsters in the funamentals of the Faith.
abey
1 year ago
When GOD created the family, the man & from him the woman, each in their own uniqueness to man as man & woman as woman in their differentiation of their roles, the problem arise when the roles gets interchanged & in the artificiality trying to reverse the sexes in corresponding to a Darwinian type of evolutionary change, even unto proving it, when even "one strand of hair color cannot be changed", the origins of this relate to the false gospels like that of Simon Magus & the Manicheans, having pushed the heresies with the Gospels of Jesus which falseness are unto the day, from ancient pagan beliefs of which the Bible says sitting "on the right hand of the mount of corruptions" to this are the gay & other agendas of today demeaning to the family & basic family structures.The duty of the Church is not to soften on the Gospels but to preach & teach in the Spirit & truth of it, like it was told to Ancient Israel "Neither to the left or right , neither add or subtract, but by the word in spirit & in truth".

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