VATICAN CITY, OCT. 22, 2004 (Zenit.org).- On the 10th anniversary of the 1994 “Year of the Family,” Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo wrote an article energetically defending the role and future of the family.
“The family is at the center of the decisive battle for humanity (…), at the center of the great battle between good and evil, between life and death, and to the family is entrusted the task to fight first of all to liberate the forces of good, whose source is found in Christ, redeemer of man,” the president of the Pontifical Council for the Family wrote in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
The Cardinal recalled that even in 1994 there was an attempt to envision the end of families, in plural, avoiding the use of the singular, the family.
“The plural use of families opened the door to different and capricious concepts of the family, dissolving its ‘truth.'” Then, the Cardinal recalled, “tendencies were already announced, in some parliaments and institutions, which in these ten years have introduced notable ambiguities of concept, in a real confusion of a philosophic, juridical, anthropological, and cultural nature, whose harmful effects are evident.”
“The divine plan for marriage and the family, fundamental pillar of society and the Church, which must found a ‘civilization of love,’ is opposed to a destructive anti-civilization,” noted the president of the dicastery.
There is, at present, “[a] sort of cultural eradication, which is the gravest danger, characterized by progressive de-humanization in the name of ‘modernization,’ and sheltered by a secularism that leads to neo-paganism,” he explained.
The cardinal also emphasized that “man is unique and one-and-only, he cannot separate himself from this path, the family. He comes into the world through the family and to the latter owes the fact of existing as a person.
In marriage between man and woman, Cardinal Lopez Trujillo sees “the love of the spouses, who give themselves reciprocally to one another, being instruments of the love of God in procreation.”
In this context, “the new life of the children is not limited to a purely biological level that does not imply an integral procreation which calls for the real education of the children,” he continued.
The president of the Pontifical Council for the Family expressed surprise over the fact that “some government leaders and parliamentarians see progress, the conquest of freedom, of democracy in a superficial hypothesis which does not see man and woman as they are and as God has willed them to be.”
The Cardinal criticized utilitarianism that drives people to use one another “as things are used. (…) Woman can become an object for man, children an obstacle for parents, the family an institution that hinders the freedom of the members that make it up.”
Instead, Cardinal Lopez Trujillo pointed out respect for the family, whose “public and political importance, central to social life, must be preserved.” The family must be “recognized in its identity and accepted in its social subjectivity.”
“In such an historical battle, the family maintains an immense reserve of energies, and there are millions and millions of homes that give splendid testimony. (…) The family, source of humanization, is offering an immense answer to give soul to the world,” the cardinal said.
