Vatican's colloquium on marriage focuses on universal right, complementarity, anthropology, and strategy | Michael Severance | CWR
The just concluded Humanum conference featured addresses from Pope Francis and the former Chief Rabbi of the UK, and was attended by 350 interreligious leaders.
Pope Francis set a very strong tone for the intense three-day Vatican colloquium Complementarity of Man and Woman in Marriage, held November 17-19 in the same hall of last month’s Extraordinary Synod on the Family, where the Holy Father played the role of listener. During his ten-minute address to open the Humanum conference on Monday, the Holy Father told the group of 350 interreligious leaders that children have a “right to grow up in a family, with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment for a child's development and emotional maturity.”
Before the international audience invited by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in cooperation with the Pontifical Councils for the Family, Interreligious Dialogue, and Promoting Christian Unity, Francis insisted that leaders concerned about children and the long-term health of civil society must “promote the fundamental pillars that govern a nation…The family is the foundation of co-existence and a remedy against social fragmentation.”
“The contribution of marriage to society is ‘indispensable’; … it ‘transcends the feelings and momentary needs of the couple’," he said citing his Papal Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. “And that is why I am grateful to you for your Colloquium's emphasis on the benefits that marriage can provide to children, the spouses themselves, and to society.”
“In these days, as you embark on a reflection on the beauty of complementarity between man and woman in marriage, I urge you to lift up yet another truth about marriage: that permanent commitment to solidarity, fidelity and fruitful love responds to the deepest longings of the human heart.”
“I urge you to bear in mind especially the young people, who represent our future. Commit yourselves, so that our youth do not give themselves over to the poisonous environment of the temporary, but rather be revolutionaries with the courage to seek true and lasting love, going against the common pattern.”
Finally, the Holy Father asked the audience, composed of 350 marriage and family experts—theologians, social scientists, psychologists, marriage counselors, family lawyers, media experts, ministers, and pastors from 14 different faith traditions and 23 countries—to unite in an unbiased and non-partisan spirit: “Do not fall into the trap of being swayed by political notion[s]. Family is an anthropological fact—a socially and culturally related fact.”
“We can't think of conservative or progressive notions. Family is a family. It can't be qualified by ideological notions.”
Roots of Complementarity: Creation, “Given-ness” and Completion
Focusing on the fundamental human right of a child to be reared by both a mother and a father, Francis said “complementarity” is a term rich in meaning regarding the natural, interwoven and necessary roles husbands and wives play in shaping happy and healthy households. They “work together for the good of the whole; everyone’s gifts can work together for the benefit of each.” Francis said that to reflect upon complementarity “is nothing less than to ponder the dynamic harmonies at the heart of all Creation.”
Comments