Sixth World Meeting of Families: more reports at ZENIT

ZENIT are carrying some more reports from the World Meeting of Families in Mexico.

Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Archbishop of Quebec, gave a robust talk about the cultural/political aspects of family policy: Cardinal: Laws Reflect Confusion About Man, Woman.

This anthropological crisis, he said, "particularly widespread in the West," has been promoted by the gender theory, which adulterates "the reality of matrimony and the family, re-proposing the notion of the human couple starting from the subjective desires of the individual, making the sexual difference practically insignificant, to the point of trying to equate heterosexual union and homosexual relations."

Helen Alvare, a consultant to the Pontifical Council for the Laity, spoke on Family Is a School of Love. A passage from her talk reflects something of the talk of Fr Raniero Cantalamessa.

"Recently, though, I have wondered if there is perhaps no one message or set of messages guaranteed to open up people's eyes to the entire panoply of causes on behalf of human life. Perhaps, instead of a message, there is a place.

"Perhaps there is a group of people, and a way of life, that can do this better than any message." The place, she suggests, is the family: "The family which cares automatically for both the sanctity of human life, and its dignity -- can and will mediate respect for human life at all times and in all conditions better than any verbal formula.

"In the family we practice loving the human person in his or her entirety -- their body, their soul, their gifts, their promise, their hopes -- and we love persons from the first moment of their existence to their last.

"We do not say we want our spouse or our children or our mother to have life but not dignity, or dignity but not life."

One can perhaps see a reaction to Helan Alvares talk along the lines of "that is a nice picture to paint, but real families aren't like that". I think I would respond to that in two ways. Firstly, my pastoral experience suggests that there are more families that do live out what Helen Alvares describes than one might think, and that at a very ordinary level. And if some families do not experience what Helen Alvares describes, they are nevertheless called to it and it is quite right to suggest, in all charity and understanding, that this is what they are called to do.

The links to ZENIT are to their news reports of these talks, but at the bottom of each of the ZENIT pages is a link to the full texts of the talks.