Coleridge: Get real on family

Brisbane’s Archbishop Mark Coleridge has called on this year’s Synod on the Family to find new, relevant ways of speaking about the family, writes Mark Brolly. The Church “can’t just keep mouthing the same things we have been mouthing for centuries in the same way, especially if people don’t understand”, he said.

Archbishop Coleridge, who with Bishop Eugene Hurley will represent Australian bishops at the session of the Synod in October, said on the Feast of the Holy Family: “We have to speak the truth in new ways that people understand, that are in touch with the reality of family life.

“Through the years I’ve come to see that there’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ family. Every family is odd in its own way. All families are wounded in one way or another. [Nevertheless] the family remains the prime school of what it means to be truly human.”

n The assumption that the existence of many denominations is the natural state of the Church is a major stumbling block for unity, Australia’s bishops said in a Letter marking the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II’s Ecumenism Decree, Unitatis Redintegratio.