Posted on 06/22/2014 6:52:45 PM PDT by Kaslin
"All day long, some of them tended to the dying and to their burial, countless numbers with no one to care for them. Others gathered together, from all parts of the city, a multitude of those withered from famine, and distributed bread to them all."
At a recent event in Washington, D.C., San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone quoted from Eusebius, a historian who chronicled pagan Rome. Having Christians around (the "them" in the above quote,) wasn't the worst thing in the world. They'd stick around and care for you when you were sick and forgotten.
In today's outrage-fueled media cycle, human stories often get lost unless used they're for propaganda. This is a predominant reality of our current culture. We opine about decisions or activities without ever having facts. This is who we are as a tweeting, blogging, status-updating people.
And so during what has become an annual March for Marriage in our nation's capital, Cordileone made a plea: "Please do not make judgments based on stereotypes, media images and comments taken out of context. Rather, get to know us first as fellow human beings."
He was responding to a group of politicians and activists protesting his involvement in the march.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who took to excoriating Cordileone, too, might not agree, but her city's archbishop is worth taking a moment to listen to, whatever you make of the ongoing marriage debate.
At the event he also said: "Every child comes from a man and a woman, and has a right, a natural human right, to know and be known by, to love and be loved by, their own mother and father. This is the great public good that marriage is oriented towards and protects. The question is then: does society need an institution that unites children to the mothers and fathers who bring them into the world, or doesn't it?"
That's not hate speech. That's taking a moment to pause and consider why government should have anything to do with marriage in the first place.
Cordileone suggests that there can be "no justice, no peace, no end to poverty, without a strong culture of marriage and the family." He points to our modern reality: "All we have to do is look around and see that our society is broken and hurting in so many ways ... We need to fix our economy; we especially need to pay a living wage to working-class families; we need to fix our broken immigration system; we need to improve our schools, especially those that are failing children from poorer families."
But to fix these things, Cordileone insists that we must first "rebuild a marriage culture, a culture which recognizes and supports the good of intact families, built on the marriage between a man and a woman committed to loving faithfulness to each other and to their children." That's what this country should be about. Individually, we may wind up choosing something else, wanting something else, doing something else. But can we reflect on what's common about human nature and what's good for a society?
The Catholic Church's teaching about the true nature of marriage is no condemnation of people who are gay. We simply believe that two people of the same sex should be unable to marry. That is not to say that gay people cannot experience deep friendships, commitment, loyalty, generosity and love, just like anyone else. It is to say that men and women were made for each other in a unique and complementary way by God. Such a union is something that we believe cannot occur between two people of the same gender.
The capacity of a man and woman to procreate gives their union special and unique significance. This complementarity and the capacity that exists for the creation of a new person are essential to marriage, even when this potentiality is not fully realized, as in the case with couples who divorce or couples are unable or choose not to have children.
We live in a fast-paced time. So if we can take a news event -- in 140 characters, or a short video, or a quick conversation -- to draw people into something deeper, we might impart a bigger picture than our computer screens, news debates, and certainly political campaigns typically show. If we try to encounter people instead of bludgeon them, we might be surprised whom we meet and what good, beauty and truth we're drawn to.
What the old mother-father marriages are now competing against is these newfangled pasted-together me-too “families.”
With society as badly fractured as it is, maybe it follows reality more closely for secular government to recognize households rather than marriages. Maybe marriages should be kept within the auspices of houses of religious worship. Maybe. One virtue of that is that churches, rather than governments, would be charged with such questions as what is “cheating too bad” to be married.
God’s design for marriage cannot be changed nor altered in opposite manner nor can the perversion of that design be claimed as a basic human right. Its a human wrong both morally and biologically for same gender seeking so-called marriage rights and benefits.
No way should the church sanction it since scripture is clearly in opposition to it.
BTTT
Marriage and the family is the bedrock of civilization. It took thousand of years of hard work by ancient jews to make it happen.
Marriage makes proper channels for sexuality and fertility. A woman is constrained to give her children only one possible father, and a man is constrained to acknowledge his children and provide for them. Not equal but complementary. I believe it was a rabbi who wrote an essay that explained that so well. As much as I hate to admit it, it allows for polygyny, although the Christian West decreed that polygyny is not compatible with what society ought to be.
Now the West seems to think that marriage is a public acknowledgement of romantic attachment and personal fulfillment.
But I can't read that headline and not have the wedding scene from The Princess Bride come to mind.
Self-fulfillment, which it can’t ever truly do. Both partners would be sucking the other emotionally dry.
“Now, since the family and human society at large spring from marriage, these men will on no account allow matrimony to be the subject of the jurisdiction of the Church. Nay, they endeavor to deprive it of all holiness, and so bring it within the contracted sphere of those rights which, having been instituted by man, are ruled and administered by the civil jurisprudence of the community. Wherefore it necessarily follows that they attribute all power over marriage to civil rulers, and allow none whatever to the Church; and, when the Church exercises any such power, they think that she acts either by favor of the civil authority or to its injury. Now is the time, they say, for the heads of the State to vindicate their rights unflinchingly, and to do their best to settle all that relates to marriage according as to them seems good.”
Pope Leo XIII, 1880
People accepting ‘gay marriage’ is a result of them being conditioned to think the state defines marriage, that if the state accepts such a thing, no matter how impossible, then of course it must be able to exist. It’s to the point that although a religious group might actually believe that ‘gay marriage’ is somehow theologically possible, they won’t perform ceremonies for their gay members unless the state they are in accepts it first.
Freegards
This speech is 50 years too late.
A "contractual household" could serve many needs, if the contracts were enforced. This would be a big improvement over the present legal status of marriage, which is a "relationship at will."
Please explain picture. Who is this?
Thanks
Unsure what that means.
50 years ago this particular demon hadn’t raised its head.
Divorce. Unwed parenthood. The pulpits have been SILENT on these issues for decades as the family was destroyed. Abortion was condemned but the begetting and raising children in the context of Sacramental marriage has not been a topic in the majority of Catholic churches as it should have been. Only now are they speaking up for marriage and family. Too few, too little, too late.
There are many beauties in the Lord’s arrangement of families that go unrecognized in far too many churches both Catholic and Protestant. Leave and cleave to be sure, but the multifarious beauties in the cleaving are not much aired — maybe because Christian marriages have gotten more superficial too. A factoid of recent times keeps on bugging my head, that the divorce rates of people who say they are committed Christians are virtually the same as those who have no committed faith. This is a p*ss-poor reflection of Christ’s love, if I may be pardoned the blunt language.
With society as badly fractured as it is, maybe it follows reality more closely for secular government to recognize households rather than marriages.
...whatever families end up being called, it won’t change the basic, and really the only reason, supporting same sex marriage...estate tax law...
...the vigorous push to recognize same sex marriage was launched by ‘partners’ who considered themselves entitled to their significant other’s assets at death, in complete contravention to traditional tax law...so they worked to develop a mechanism to make the law work for them, without having to pay an onerous estate tax burden...
...et voila! Same sex spouses, spouses who could inherit assets free of tax consequence...mere civil unions could no no such thing, it had to be a marriage...thanks to state governments infringing on private estate settlements, and establishing a hierarchy of tax burden, based on familial relationship...
...pure, unadulterated greed, both by government and private citizen, has led us down this primrose path, whereby we see lechery elevated to routine status...
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