Public representatives must “protect marriage and family rooted in marriage between a man and a woman as 
the best possible environment for the children” a Catholic bishop has said.
Bishop Christopher Jones (pictured) told Elphin diocesan pilgrimage to Knock that Irish people, through the Constitution “have entrusted to the State a great responsibility when it comes to marriage and family”.
He said he believed that with the loss of faith and the breakdown in family life, many young people were “experiencing a great sense of loneliness and of not belonging”.
He said that, since the 1960s faith and family life had “experienced rapid social change and huge challenges”.
Bishop Jones said: “We have seen how the pursuit of wealth and property can generate such greed and possess the minds and hearts of people. For so many people God and faith in God were pushed from the centre of hearts and homes to the side-lines.”
And he said that marriage and family life were “the single most indispensable foundation for happiness in all societies and in most individual lives”.
Marriage, he said, was “the fundamental building block for all other human relationships. If there is a single cause for most of today’s malaise both religious and secular it is the weakening of marriages and families”.
Bishop Jones said: “Marriage is a unique union different from all others. In it a woman and man promise fidelity to each other for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health as long as they both shall live.
“This committed married love provides a uniquely stable and nurturing environment for children. It is here that children receive the most important and lasting education of all. It is in the family that our basic attitudes to love, caring, forgiveness, sexuality and community living are acquired. It is here that we learn how to be responsible, ethically conscious, members of society.
“Marriage is not a private institution. When marriage and families break down the whole of society suffers.”
He quoted the British Secretary for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith in saying that the role of marriage and family life had become “an important topic because any Government must understand the effect family breakdown can have on the wellbeing of both adults and children”.
He cited research showing that those not growing up in two parent families were 75pc more likely to fail at school, 70pc more likely to become addicted to drugs and 50pc more likely to have an alcohol problem.
Bishop Jones continued: “Research has shown that marriage and family rooted in marriage is the best environment for children, their parents and for future citizens of our society.
“In the end, marriage and family are always about relationships – the couple’s relationship with God in prayer, with themselves and with their children.
“The happiness of marriage and family life is rooted not in things but in relationships. So many young people today invest all their energy in their job, their house, their garden and invest very little time in their relationship with God through prayer or in their love for each other and their children every day.
“Yet our greatest joy in life will come from our relationship and our greatest pain and suffering will come from broken and betrayed relationships – this is true perhaps most of all when it comes to family.”
He called on Catholics to give more time to personal prayer and on families “to rediscover Sunday and Sunday Mass as the weekly highpoint of their relationship with God and with the wider Christian community”.
“Make Sunday special as a family and make the family attendance at Sunday Mass the highlight of the day. Let Sunday Mass be a celebration of who we are as a people who belong to God and to each other and let us bring that sense of belonging in our hearts to our homes for the rest of the week,” he said.