Denver Catholic

2 I PASTORAL LETTER JULY 2, 2014 I DENVER CATHOLIC REGISTER On June 29, solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, Archbish- op Samuel Aquila published a pastoral letter titled "Fami- ly: Become What You Are." Ex- cerpts from it are published here. To read the entire letter and find additional resources, visit: www.archden.org. Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, P ope St. John Paul the Great wrote in 1981: "The future of humanity passes by way of the family. It is there- fore indispensable and urgent that every person of good will should endeavor to save and foster the values and require- ments of the family." The truth and timeliness of this statement is as relevant now as it was more than 30 years ago. In fact, many of the challenges our society is facing today can be tied to the break- down of the family. This is because, as St. John Paul explained, the family "is the basic cell of society. It is the cradle of life and love, the place in which the individual 'is born' and 'grows.'" Our Church will be focusing on the family in a particularly intense way between October 2014 and October 2015. This period will begin with the Ex- traordinary Synod of Bishops meeting in Rome to discuss the challenges to the family in the context of the new evange- lization. It will continue with the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in September 2015, and conclude with the Ordinary Synod of Bishops in October 2015. Pope Francis has not de- clared an official "year" dedi- cated to studying and support- ing the family, but I believe that God, in his providence, has given us this period of time to build up family life and re- double our efforts to support "the cradle of life and love." Because the family and its future are so vitally import- ant for our society and for the Church, I have decided to write this pastoral letter on the na- ture and mission of the family to help you "stand firm in your faith, be courageous, (and) be strong." Family life is a great gift of God. Yet many families today feel weak and demor- alized. Family life through- out the world is wounded, broken in many cases, and misunderstood. My hope is that this letter will provide a solid foundation for the faithful of the Archdio- cese of Denver, and all people of good will, to effectively re- spond to the challenges that families experience today. The letter is comprised of three sections. The first part is dedicated to explaining how the family's mission and mean- ing comes from the Holy Trinity. The second section addresses the numerous challenges that the family and marriage are fac- ing today. In the final section, I offer practical ways that fami- lies can live out their mission to be a place of love and life. PART I: THE FAMILY'S MEANING AND MISSION The Original Family and the Trinity The first human family was formed by the union of Adam and Eve. In the story of creation we hear, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful, and multiply ….'" Then we hear, "Therefore a man leaves his fa- ther and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh." To "be fruitful and multi- ply" is a blessing bestowed by God on man and woman for the sake of their unity and it was not lost in the fall! Since God created mankind "male and female, their mu- tual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man." But our ability to reflect God's love was damaged with the fall from grace that our first parents suf- fered when they chose to doubt God's goodness and love and disobey his commands. The truly good news is that with his death and resurrection Jesus Christ restored families' ability to reflect the union in knowledge and love that is pres- ent between the three Persons of the Trinity. With his sacrifice of love, he "opened up vistas closed to human reason, for he implied a certain likeness be- tween the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity." Here, we are given a window into the origin of our desire to love and be loved, to know others and to be known. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council explained that the rea- son man "cannot fully find him- self except through a sincere gift of himself" is that he is created in God's image and likeness. That means we are made for a level of communion that we can only attain through an ex- change of love and truth, and we won't be satisfied with less. The Role of Marriage in the Family The family is called to great- ness! But today there is much confusion about the nature and purpose of marriage, which is the foundation of every family. Why are people experiencing this confusion? Many interme- diate causes can be cited, but the root problem is that married couples and families are not liv- ing according to their created purpose and are not embracing the fulfilling but challenging truths revealed to us by Christ through his Church. When a husband and wife give of themselves and share love and truth with each other, they are able to reflect the image of the Holy Trinity. This sharing in life and love is in turn echoed in the hearts of their children and helps bring the Kingdom of God to earth. God created the world and the human race through the gift of his Word and the breath of the Spirit. In a similar way, men and women are able to participate in creation by bringing children in- to the world through their mutu- al consent and one flesh union. Sadly, our society has lost this understanding of marriage. In- stead, the culture has dramati- cally shifted to promoting the in- dividual and his or her supposed rights, often at the expense of the family. The idea of a "sincere gift of self"—even in the context of marriage—seems irrelevant and a distant reality. In contempo- rary Western culture, marriage and the family have suffered the consequences of this shift, and no one has been hurt more by it than children, who deserve the committed, selfless love of their mother and father. PART II: CHALLENGES TO THE FAMILY The Goods of Marriage and Modern Attacks Because marriage is the cor- nerstone upon which a family is built, it is necessary to spend some time examining what mar- riage is and the various attacks or distortions present in our society. St. Augustine taught that there are three goods which define marriage. They are: the good of children, the gift of fi- delity between the spouses, and the good of the unbreakable bond. This final good can be understood as the witness given by the permanent bond of mar- riage, which points toward the heavenly marriage of Christ and his bride, the Church. I encour- age you to commit these goods to memory, since they can help you discern what is a marriage from what is not. [S]ame-sex unions are not marriages because a true con- jugal union cannot take place between people of the same sex. They cannot realize the three goods of marriage and thus can- not realize between themselves a genuine one-flesh communion of body and soul. They can form a union of hearts and minds, as in any friendship, but marriage is more than this. Marriage involves not only a spiritual and emotional union but also a bodily union. This union is founded on the comple- mentarity of male and female, which the book of Genesis teach- es is a type of human differentia- tion willed by God for the benefit and fulfillment of human beings. This complementarity is the foundation of a wholly unique kind of "human partnership" (so- cietas) that has as its goal the for- mation and perfection of a hus- band and wife's interior life, so that together they might increas- ingly grow in virtue and in true love of God and their neighbor. A central point, perhaps the central point of the Christian teaching, without which we can neither understand the nature of man and woman, nor the God-given institution of mar- riage, is that this partnership and the love that binds it together are "ordained for the procre- ation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate crown." This is the embodiment of St. Augustine's first good of marriage. Even if for reasons be- yond their control, a couple can- not conceive, they still share and can realize this uniquely com- prehensive type of human com- munion, founded upon human bodily complementarity and the commitment to permanency of the spouses. There is nothing wrong with friendship and love between two people of the same sex. It can even be a great gift. Disorder enters in when same-sex friend- ships become sexualized. But since marriage is defined by its full bodily and spiritual self-giv- ing—by its "one-flesh" na- ture—sexual activity is reserved to those who are married. This Christian teaching is unchanging and unchangeable. Another difficult area today for Catholics is what Vatican II refers to as "the responsible transmission of life." Many today are fearful of child-raising. They fear the expense and the com- mitment. They fear bringing children into a world of sin, self- ishness and suffering. And they fear losing their freedom. This tempts them to use methods of avoiding pregnancy that in- flict spiritual damage and harm their marriage. Rather than seeing contraception for what it is, namely, a barrier to married love and an enticement to self- ishness, as well as something that can have serious health con- sequences for women, they see it as a solution to a problem. When couples intentionally render their sexual union ster- ile through contraception, they rewrite God's plan for sexual in- timacy and make it no longer unitive and procreative. Sadly, whether the couple realizes it or not, they are degrading them- selves and their sexuality by making their union one that is less than a "total" self-gift. Their bodies' language of mu- tual, total self-giving is overlaid, through contraception, with the inherently contradictory language of withholding their fertility. This leads not only to a refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the nature of married love, which is meant to be a personal and total exchange of the gift of self. The Church teaches parents to be responsible and generous with the gift of their fertility. That is why it advocates the use of natural family planning, which utilizes an awareness of a wom- an's fertility cycle to allow a cou- ple to prayerfully decide whether God is calling them to potentially bring forth life or to refrain from intimacy. A couple must have se- rious reasons to postpone having a child, and they must always be open to the gift of life if they un- expectedly conceive a baby. One final good that has come under attack is the permanent bond of marriage. Since 1960, the divorce rate in the United States has nearly doubled, rising to around 50 percent. This has led to countless broken families, with both spouses and children suffering the fallout that accom- panies divorce. The permanent character of marriage can be traced to the be- ginning of creation, as Jesus ex- plains when the Pharisees ques- tion him about Moses allowing divorce. Christ responds, "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female … 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall be- come one?' So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." Furthermore, in the same passage of the Gospel when the Pharisees noted to Jesus that Mo- ses permitted divorce, he replied to them, "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to di- vorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so." These words are important for us to- day as the hearts of many are more formed by the society and Family: Become What You Are

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