The Catholic Church is doing whatever it can to strengthen the family, including families often considered nontraditional, said Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, the theologian who reviewed Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation on the family.
"Favouring the family does not mean disfavoring other forms of life - even those living in a same-sex partnership need their families," the cardinal said during a visit to Ireland, which next year hosts the World Meeting of Families.
The family is "the survival network of the future" and "will remain forever the basis of every society," Cardinal Schonborn told journalists on 13 July ahead of addressing a conference, "Let's Talk Family: Let's Be Family."
The cardinal told the conference at Mary Immaculate College that people should not be discouraged about the future of the family, despite the many social and economic threats and policies that disregard it.
"Today, everybody can get married," he said, but acknowledged "so many choose not to get married." He suggested that the number of so-called irregular situations has increased enormously because the "framework of society has changed so much."
"But let us not forget that marriage, as we have it today, is a privilege that was fairly rare in previous centuries, (when at most) a third of the population were able to get married."
He said his great-grandmother, a wealthy widow who lived in what today is the Czech Republic but then was part of the Austrian empire, had six servants who remained unmarried because of laws against marriage for people of their status. "Marriage was a privilege," he said.
The cardinal, a former student of retired Pope Benedict XVI, also noted that his German professor's grandmother was the "illegitimate daughter of a maiden, who was not permitted to marry."
He said if he had to sum it up for Twitter, he would say, "'Amoris Laetitia' tells you marriage and family are possible today." "Amoris Laetitia" is Pope Francis' 2016 apostolic exhortation after two synods of bishops on the family.
PICTURE: Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna talks to journalists on 13 June outside St. John's Cathedral in Limerick, Ireland
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