The Synod on the Family Meets in Rome

By Dr. Christopher Manion

Population Research Institute 

As the Extraordinary Synod on the Family begins its deliberations in Rome, the media propaganda has subsided as the issues truly important to the faithful have come to the fore.

While the Church’s teachings on the Sacrament of marriage are timeless, the challenges to these teachings vary from age to age. The virulent campaign against marriage in our own day can be traced to what Professor Charles Rice long ago called the “contraceptive mentality” – the rebellious assertion that confers upon the individual and his ego the right to replace God’s plan for life and love with his own.

In his encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI described the beauties of marital love and the Sacrament of Matrimony, and warned the world about the powerful cultural forces that, half a century ago, were already eroding those timeless principles. Faced with the sad fact that Pope Paul’s predictions have come to pass, and spurred on by the widespread abandonment of divine and natural principles by the secular culture, Pope Francis convened the Synod in order to revitalize the Church’s teaching on love and marriage in a manner capable of reaching out and healing the disordered spirit of a material world.

That will not be an easy task. “American civil law has done much to weaken and destroy what is the basic unit of every human society, the family,” writes Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I, in his last column as Archbishop of Chicago. And America is not alone.

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The pro-life Population Research Institute is dedicated to ending human rights abuses committed in the name of "family planning," and to ending counter-productive social and economic paradigms premised on the myth of "overpopulation." Find us at pop.org.