The Sixth World Meeting of Families will be held this week in Mexico City. The meeting, with the theme of “The family, teacher of human and Christian values,” organized by the pontifical council of the family, will bring together clergy and lay people from over 90 countries.
The following message from Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, president of the pontifical council for the family, reveals the tenor of the conference:
The family today must confront, with creativity and a proactive spirit, the challenge of an individualist and mercantilist culture, based on production and consumption. Unfortunately, we have a mistaken concept of freedom, understood as an autonomy closed in on itself; other forms of cohabitation are privileged that obscure the value of the family, based on the marriage of one man and one woman. With this mistaken mentality, very often laws are made—without widespread social consensus and under the impulse of small but active groups, strongly ideological and with extensive economic resources—that permit easy abortion, rapid divorce, and euthanasia. Responding to these challenges is a difficult moral obligation.
As evidenced by a recent survey conducted by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, most Catholics disagree with Church teaching on homosexuality. However, instead of taking the beliefs of the faithful into consideration and reexamining these teachings, the Vatican is rewarding the small minority of Catholics who cling to their antiquated ideals.
Their reward?
An indulgence—which, for those of you not living in Middle Ages, is “a remission of temporal punishment due to sin.”
The news of this “reward” was explained in a decree from the Apostolic Penitentiary:
…the Holy Father grants to the faithful the plenary indulgence, to be obtained by the customary conditions…on the days in which they devotedly participate in the 6th World Meeting of Families.
The truly penitent faithful who cannot participate in the event will receive the plenary indulgence, under the same conditions, if, united in spirit and in thought to the faithful present in Mexico City, they recite as a family the ‘Our Father,’ the ‘Credo’ and other devout prayers to invoke Divine Mercy for the goals indicated above, especially during the moments in which the words and messages of the Pontiff are transmitted by television and radio.
Well, I suppose medieval ideology is best rewarded with a medieval prize.
