Marriage and Family in Today's Debate

Last week a bill was introduced in the National Assembly to legalize homosexual unions as marriage. Hours later I saw the main leaders of the gay lobby in Venezuela attacking each other on Twitter and Facebook, because each claimed to be the one behind this “achievement,” or because one had gathered more signatures or more media coverage than the other, and so on. These “leaders” also say Venezuela is living in prehistoric times because it does not allow laws such as abortion laws (where you kill your own child), laws allowing minors to change sex without their parents’ permission, laws allowing adoption by homosexual couples, and so on.

Pope Francis had already warned us about lobbies. He said, in substance, that when we meet a homosexual person we must distinguish between being gay and lobbying, because no lobby is good. If a person is gay, seeks the Lord and has good will, he asked, who am I to judge him? The Catechism, he noted, explains that such people must not be marginalized but integrated into society; the problem is not having this tendency, and we must be brothers. The problem, he said, is lobbying.

Last week the UN, taking advantage of the cases of child abuse that we all repudiate and condemn, told the Catholic Church to change its teaching on abortion and homosexual unions. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations, replied that in recent years the Vatican has shown zero tolerance in these abuse cases, and that the report seemed to have been written even before the talks with the Vatican’s representatives, since it took no account at all of the report the Church had submitted on the many steps it has taken to confront such abuse. Vatican experts say the document was produced under pressure from the gay and pro-abortion lobbies at the UN.

We know it is not easy to confront these lobbies, above all because they have great economic, media and power interests behind them. But we must understand how important it is to be brave in defending the dignity of the human person, the dignity of marriage and the family, and the life of the unborn. As Pope Francis said last Friday, there is a certain decline in various aspects of Christian life that calls for discernment and a search for ways to face new challenges, such as the idea of limitless freedom, a hostile or distrustful tolerance toward the Truth, and the ill humor stirred up by the Church’s just opposition to prevailing relativism.

I suppose that ill humor has to do with the irritation felt by certain lobbies that want to defend the killing of an innocent or the legalization of something contrary to nature. They may well be annoyed to find Christians a great obstacle to their plans. It may also have to do with the campaign orchestrated months ago by the abortion lobby to strip the Vatican of its permanent observer status at the UN “for representing a country with very few inhabitants”; after thousands of Catholics around the world signed petitions rejecting that move, they had to reconsider.

On marriage, Pope Francis said a few days ago that marriage today is often seen as a form of emotional gratification that can be set up any way one likes and changed according to each person’s feelings, and that sadly this view also affects the mindset of Christians.

That statement of the Pope’s is very well illustrated by the forceful, clear and masterly “Doctrinal and Pastoral Note” on the meaning of marriage that the Venezuelan Bishops’ Conference issued last week. I hope you can read it in full and share it: http://www.cev.org.ve/index.php/noticias-3/54-conferencia-episcopal-venezolana-nota-doctrinal-pastoral-sobre-el-matrimonio

Let us remember the phrase we learned at school as little children: “The family is the foundation of society.” Let us defend our families, the life of the unborn, and true marriage, which is between a man and a woman and which must be lived day by day to educate children and pass on values (not anti-values) to them.