Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Madrid (Fides Service) - “We must lose no time in updating and intensifying pastoral care for families” Cardinal Antonio Mª Rouco Valera archbishop of Madrid said on September 18 during his weekly Sunday address on Radio COPE. The Cardinal said that as the new school year starts the family finds itself at the epicentre of social and ecclesial upheaval. “For some time and almost unnoticed, an ideology of relativism with regard to the family has been sprouting in many sectors of society, a consequence of so-called ‘gender theory’ which has produced a culture openly anti-family”. This is robbing marriage of its fundamental significance and will cause serious damage to the very foundations of society. “The human and spiritual void deriving from the destruction of the family in its most vulnerable members, infants and children - the Cardinal said - is usually tenaciously sought and obtained by social forces anxious to occupy this void in order to dominate and manipulate the individual and the community against the personal conscience and relationship with God."
Faced with this rampant anti-family culture the Archbishop of Madrid said people “must realise the responsiblity of individual Catholics and the whole Church to promote in every sphere of human life the culture of the family with new apostolic impluse and pastoral commitment” since “our future, that of the Church and society in Spain depend on the family accepted and promoted without hesitation by all Christians”. In this sense the Cardinal said “our principal pastoral concern” must be the problems facing families, personal or external and material regarding work, profession, housing, guarantee of the right to be the first educators of children at home and to choose moral and religious education.
Lastly Cardinal Rouco Varala mentioned the 5th World Meeting of Families to be held in July 2006 in Valencia. He said the event “is bound to offer encouragement and valid support in this stuggle” and he entrusted families to the Blessed Virgin Mary that they may be “santuaries of love and generous sources of life”. (RG) (Agenzia Fides 22/9/2005, righe 27 parole 374)
