New laws regarding marriage and the family will “inevitably change the perceptions and attitudes of people”, a leading Irish bishop has warned.

Bishop Christopher Jones, of Elphin Diocese said that the State existed “for the family and not the family for the State”.

He made his remarks as the Government prepares to pass legislation which will give same-sex couples most of the rights currently enjoyed by married couples.

Speaking at the National Novena in Honour of Our Lady of Knock, the Bishop, who is also Chairman of the Bishops’ Committee for Family and Children, said that the family rooted in the life-long marriage of a man and woman “provides the greatest guarantee of happiness for the married couple”.

Pointing to research carried out by ACCORD, the Catholic Church’s marriage care service he said that while 12 per cent of couples in Ireland chose long term cohabitation instead of marriage the family based on marriage was “still the fundamental unit of society”.

This fact, he said, “should give us great hope at a time when soap operas night after night present promiscuity as if it were the norm and as mass media would give the impression that most marriages end in divorce”.

However, he acknowledged that “huge social and economic pressures” had led to a significant increase in the breakdown of marriage, in the number of children reared by single parents and in the number of couples who have opted for long term cohabitation.

Rejecting claims that Catholic teaching on marriage and sexuality was “narrow and negative”, he said “that sexuality in God’s plan is truly awesome”.

He continued: “The Church has always been extremely concerned about marriage and the family because the future of citizens and of civilization are so dependent on them.”

Meanwhile, a leading US bishop has said that the Catholic Church there is suffering from a marriage vocation crisis.

Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, has said that statistics showing that only 50 per cent of young Catholics are getting married demonstrated that the Church has “a vocation crisis to life-long, life-giving, loving, faithful marriage”.

He said that this was the root of the Church’s problems in attracting vocations to the priesthood and to religious life.

“We have a vocation crisis to life-long, life-giving, loving, faithful marriage. If we take care of that one, we’ll have all the priests and nuns we need for the church,” Dolan said.

Archbishop Dolan, in a speech to the Knights of Columbus, also stressed the need to “maintain and strengthen the blessed infrastructure that we have in the Catholic Church in the United States.”

This was important because the Church now more than ever needed a public face, he said, because there are “a lot of people out there who would like to exclude the Church from any type of public witness and we can’t let that happen”.

He explained that those voices will say that “religious is fine as an individual hobby… but don’t enforce it on the rest of us.”

However, Dolan argued, without the voice of the Church, “our public square is reduced if the Church isn’t part of it, and what makes America great is that religion has always had a strong, respected place at the table.” Those who want to exclude the voice of the Church, he said, are involved in “galloping secularism.”

He explained: “There are those movers and shakers in society that want to take the teeth out of religion and we can’t let that happen” because America, individuals, the world and culture would be much worse off.

“We’ve got something to say, and darn it, we want to say it,” he stated.