David QuinnPope Francis adresses hundreds of delegates on the importance of family, writes David Quinn in Rome
Pope Francis has told a major conference on marriage and the family that children “have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother”.
The three day conference, which ended on Wednesday, was called ‘The Complementarity of Man and Woman’. It took place in the Vatican and was organised by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with Congregation head, Cardinal Gerhard Mueller acting as host.
The conference heard from religious figures from all over the world and most of the main faiths, Christian and non-Christian.
It was attended by hundreds of delegates from 23 countries.
The Pope gave the first address to delegates on Monday morning. He said that “today marriage and the family are in crisis. We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.”
He said the huge changes that have happened to family life have “often flown the flag of freedom, but in fact it has brought spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings, especially the poorest and most vulnerable capable of creating a suitable environment for the child’s development and emotional maturity”.
Pope Francis compared attacks on the family with attacks on the environment.
He stated: “And although the human race has come to understand the need to address conditions that menace our natural environments, we have been slower to recognize that our fragile social environments are under threat as well, slower in our culture, and also in our Catholic Church. It is therefore essential that we foster a new human ecology.”
He also said that the family is neither conservative nor progressive, but is simply that, a family.
The conference was co-hosted by the Pontifical Council for the Family, the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis has confirmed he will attend the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in September, making it the first confirmed stop on what is expected to be a more extensive papal visit to North America.