Children have the right to grow up with a mother and a father, Pope Francis told an interfaith conference on marriage held at the Vatican.
“Family is an anthropological fact — a socially and culturally related fact,” the Pope said. “We cannot qualify it based on ideological notions or concepts important only at one time in history. We can’t think of conservative or progressive notions. Family is family.”
“Marriage and family are in crisis,” he said, with the “culture of the temporary” dissuading people from making the “public commitment” of marriage.
The Pope made these remarks on Nov. 17 at the opening of the three-day international, interfaith colloquium entitled The Complementarity of Man and Woman, currently underway in the Vatican.
Also referred to as the “Humanum” conference, the gathering is being sponsored by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in collaboration with the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity.
Pope Francis also condemned divorce, saying it had brought “spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings, especially the poorest and most vulnerable”. There was “mounting” evidence that the decline of marriage led to increased poverty “and a host of other social ills,” particularly for women and children, he said.
The remarks came just weeks after the first session of the Synod on the Family, at the Vatican, in which cardinals and bishops discussed the Church’s pastoral care of families.
The conference also heard from the former Chief Rabbi of the UK, Jonathan Sacks, who in his address said that “Marriage and the family are where faith finds its home and where the Divine Presence lives in the love between husband and wife, parent and child.
Pope Francis warned against confusing complementarity with the notion that “all the roles and relations of the two sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern.” Rather, he said, “complementarity will take many forms as each man and woman brings his or her distinctive contributions to their marriage and to the formation of their children – his or her personal richness, personal charisma.”
In comments that echoed those of his predecessor Benedict XVI, Pope Francis said that “a new human ecology” was needed.
“The crisis in the family has produced an ecological crisis, for social environments, like natural environments, need protection. And although the human race has come to understand the need to address conditions that menace our natural environments, we have been slower to recognize that our fragile social environments are under threat as well, slower in our culture, and also in our Catholic Church. It is therefore essential that we foster a new human ecology.”