Families ‘are a better safety net than the state’

The coming Synod on the Family will show that in times of crisis the family is a better network for support than the state, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn said at his annual media reception in Vienna on 10 June, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

He had spoken to episcopal colleagues in Spain where one in two of the young were unemployed, he said. “They all said that when young people had families to support them everything was far less tragic,” Cardinal Schönborn said.

That was why it was so important for the state to support families, he underlined, and recalled the words of the late German journalist Frank Schirrmacher who had called the family the “survival factory of the future”. It was for this very reason that Pope Francis had chosen the family as the subject of two episcopal synods.