Pope to US Bishops: Evangelize American Culture, Defend Marriage

3/11/2012

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your 2009 Letter Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan. I also appreciate all that your parishes, schools and charitable agencies do daily to support families and to reach out to those in difficult marital situations, especially the divorced and separated, single parents, teenage mothers and women considering abortion, as well as children suffering the tragic effects of family breakdown.

In this great pastoral effort there is an urgent need for the entire Christian community to recover an appreciation of the virtue of chastity. The integrating and liberating function of this virtue (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2338-2343) should be emphasized by a formation of the heart, which presents the Christian understanding of sexuality as a source of genuine freedom, happiness and the fulfilment of our fundamental and innate human vocation to love.

It is not merely a question of presenting arguments, but of appealing to an integrated, consistent and uplifting vision of human sexuality. The richness of this vision is more sound and appealing than the permissive ideologies exalted in some quarters; these in fact constitute a powerful and destructive form of counter-catechesis for the young.

Young people need to encounter the Church's teaching in its integrity, challenging and countercultural as that teaching may be; more importantly, they need to see it embodied by faithful married couples who bear convincing witness to its truth. They also need to be supported as they struggle to make wise choices at a difficult and confusing time in their lives. Chastity, as the Catechism reminds us, involves an ongoing "apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom" (2339).

In a society which increasingly tends to misunderstand and even ridicule this essential dimension of Christian teaching, young people need to be reassured that "if we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, absolutely nothing, of what makes life free, beautiful and great" (Homily, Inaugural Mass of the Pontificate, 24 April 2005).

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. Children are the greatest treasure and the future of every society: truly caring for them means recognizing our responsibility to teach, defend and live the moral virtues which are the key to human fulfillment.

It is my hope that the Church in the United States, however chastened by the events of the past decade, will persevere in its historic mission of educating the young and thus contribute to the consolidation of that sound family life which is the surest guarantee of intergenerational solidarity and the health of society as a whole.

I now commend you and your brother Bishops, with the flock entrusted to your pastoral care, to the loving intercession of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. To all of you I willingly impart my Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of wisdom, strength and peace in the Lord.

- - -

Pope Benedict XVI's Prayer Intentions for January 2013
General Intention: The Faith of Christians. That in this Year of Faith Christians may deepen their knowledge of the mystery of Christ and witness joyfully to the gift of faith in him.
Missionary Intention: Middle Eastern Christians. That the Christian communities of the Middle East, often discriminated against, may receive from the Holy Spirit the strength of fidelity and perseverance.

Keywords: Pope, US Bishops, ad limina, Marriage, Family, evangelization, faith and culture

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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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