Family breakdown ‘hurts poor most’

The breakdown of marriage and family has led to an “ecological” human crisis that is harming the poor above all, Pope Francis warned on Monday. In a brief address opening a Vatican-hosted interreligious colloquium in support of the concept of male-female complementarity, he said the collapse had brought “spiritual and moral devastation to countless human beings”, especially children, the elderly and women.

Pope Francis described marriage as “a unique, natural, fundamental and beautiful good for persons, communities, and whole societies” and said children had a right to grow up with a father and a mother. He warned against seeing complementarity as a static notion – “let us not confuse that term with the simplistic idea that all the roles and relations of the two sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern,” he said. He also warned against politicising marriage. It was “an anthropological fact”, neither “conservative” nor “progressive”. He confirmed at the end of his address to 300 delegates in the synod hall that he will visit the United States in September 2015 for the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia.

The three-day colloquium, “Humanum: The Complement­arity of Man and Woman”, was sponsored by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as well as the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and Christian Unity. It brought together speakers from 14 different faiths and Churches, including rabbis, evangelical pastors, Anglican bishops and representatives of Islam, Jainism and Buddhism, as well as cardinals and Catholic theologians. The best-received speeches were by Jews and evangelicals, in comparison to which Catholic speakers were considered dry and formal. One of the most popular was the evangelical pastor Rick Warren, who referred to Pope Francis as “the Holy Father” and quoted his speech to the bishops at the conclusion of last month’s Synod on the Family, adding: “Wow! Wow!”

Speeches were interspersed with powerful videos of couples and families, many featuring ordinary people in poor parts of the world. One of the film-makers said the purpose of the videos was to rediscover “an ancient ecological wisdom which has spanned through all of time and history”.

Speeches continually returned to the cultural collapse of marriage in the West and the way ideologies of gender have driven the state to redefine it as mere partnership.

Speakers rejected the idea that the divine design of male-female bonding was in some way to denigrate other kinds of relationship, arguing that all faiths and cultures contained the notion of maleness and femaleness as twin aspects of nature and the divine, and that in reflecting this design, conjugal marriage was more than a mere partnership. As the former Chief Rabbi to the UK, Lord (Jonathan) Sacks, said in a richly rhetorical speech that produced a standing ovation, “our compassion for those who choose to live differently should not inhibit us from being advocates for the single most humanising institution in history”.

Illustrating Pope Francis’ remarks with detailed evidence of the impact on children of the collapse of marriage in the UK, Lord Sacks referred to a social divide between those born to married parents and those born outside marriage. He said the former will be healthier physically and emotionally, do better at school and at work, have more successful relationships, and be happier and live longer.