Introduction
Here I intend to present the Bishops’ teaching in Part Two of the Pastoral Letter, which they call “Marriage in the Order of the New Creation: The Sacrament of Marriage,” from the perspective of a husband, father, and grandfather. I want to do so because I have now been married more than fifty-one years to a wonderful, loving wife, and God has blessed us with seven loving children, four boys and three girls. Six of them are now married to great daughters- and sons-in-law whom God has blessed with fifteen children and in doing so has blessed us with fifteen grandchildren, ten girls and five boys ranging in age from twenty to seven months. I think this puts me into a position to appreciate the message our Bishops want to communicate in this fine document.

This Pastoral Letter of November, 2009, presents Church teaching on marriage and family life in light of the documents of Vatican Council II, the encyclicals, apostolic exhortations, and other writings of Pope John Paul II, in particular in his celebrated Wednesday “catecheses” on the “theology of the body,” and the writings of Pope Benedict XVI.

“First, the family must be remade as an expression of communion.”
Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture (2009), 23.

The Archbishop of Chicago, Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I., has written a wonderful book containing (among many other good things) some highly useful ideas for speaking about the family in America. Marriage and the family are not featured topics in the book; communion with God and among all human beings is its theme. Cardinal George explores this theme widely throughout the book as it applies, for example, to members of the Catholic Church, to interfaith dialogue, to all members of the human family.  Yet he notes in Chapter One how our work to transform culture -- in order to “remake ourselves” in the “paradigm of the heavenly communio” -- needs to begin with our remaking the “family ….as an expression of communio.” (23)  In Chapters Two and Three, he offers ways of approaching and evangelizing American culture in particular, which I would like to consider from the point of view of this family project.  I should note here that Cardinal George’s work is theologically rich, and important for anyone who wishes to join him in pursuing John Paul II’s project to “evangelize culture.”  I can only hope in this essay to draw out a few of its implications for the culture of the family.

Every presidential administration in Washington DC does some things that appear stupid in hindsight.  It gets caught up in the moment, pandering to this or that political constituency, or reacting too precipitously to some big or newsworthy event.  In our 24-hour-news-cycle world, and especially if we’re sophisticated news consumers, we simply discount the importance of poor presidential decisions and move on, even as we might grow incrementally more cynical over time about government in general.

The Catholic Church in the United States and globally, can ordinarily count on praise for its services to and teachings about the poor, and jeers for its interventions about sex, marriage and abortion. Now, it appears as though the Church can kiss even this limited approval goodbye.  The Archdiocese of Washington DC has announced that its charitable institutions will no longer be able to partner with the District of Columbia’s (DC) government due to the absence of conscience protection for religious actors in DC’s proposed “Religious Freedom [sic] and Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act of 2009.”  This bill would redefine marriage as the “legally recognized union of 2 people…regardless of gender.”  The bill fails to protect individual religious persons or enterprises who serve the public, from cooperating with same sex marriages. It also has the effect of requiring Catholic institutions to provide the same benefits to employees who enter a same-sex union, as those provided to an employee with an opposite-sex marriage.  The accreditations and/or licenses of Catholic educational institutions, and professionals are also at stake.

“Jon and Kate plus Eight.” “Kate plus Eight.” “Jon and the Other Kate.” If there was ever a time we wanted to shield our eyes from supermarket tabloids, this must be it.  Yet, while their story is topping the pop culture charts, it seems fitting to look more closely at it in order to acknowledge not only the emotional wreckage involved, but also the light it sheds on the travesty we call our divorce laws.

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births.  By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and  5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. [1]  Reactions to our predicament are suitably alarmist, but still terribly predictable. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy will push for both more abstinence, and higher rates of contraceptive usage among the unmarried. They will call for less complacency and more parental involvement.[2]  Planned Parenthood took the occasion to bash abstinence programs while abstinence programs linked the rise to the fact that 68% of public schools employ contraceptive instruction, which has a 4 to 1 funding advantage over abstinence in the United States. [3]

Men and Women: Diversity and Mutual Complementarity is the title of an important and helpful book published by Libreria Vaticana Editrice in 2006 containing papers given at the Study Seminar held in Vatican City 30-31 January 2004. It contains 12 essays divided into 4 major parts. I will try to summarize the thought of some of the major papers in two articles.

Here I will take up the following essays: (1) Lucetta Scaraffia’s “Socio-cultural changes in women’s lives”[1] ; (2) Vincente Aucante’s, “Fatherhood”[2] ; (3) Maria Teresa Garutti Bellenzier’s “The identity of women and men according to the teaching of the Church”[3] ; and Carlo Caffarra’s “Benchmarks, problem areas and issues for debate.”[4]  In another article I will consider the contributions of Karna Swanson, Manfred Lutz, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, and Marguerite Peeters.

Occasionally, there is a flurry of media attention to the issue of “responsible fatherhood.”   Promise Keepers will gather thousands of men at a rally or Bill Cosby will call on Black men to get more involved. But there’s much more to the modern “fatherhood” issue than these discrete news items.  The federal government has its own fatherhood initiative, which sponsors studies and projects intended to encourage men to be stable, involved fathers. States, cities, and churches too, are participating in these efforts. Sociological and other scientific journals – including the journals Fatherhood  and Sex Roles – are monthly publishing the results of empirical studies about the role of the father, or about the relationships between fathering and child outcomes. Chances are, too, that the sociology or psychology department at your local university is participating in one or more of these.

I recall sitting at a breakfast table at a large pro-life banquet years ago with Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago. Ten to fifteen times over the course of the meal, guests came over, with the same introduction: “Don’t want to disturb your breakfast, Your Eminence, just wanted to thank you for being here and tell you …..”  Near the end of the “meal,” I noticed the Cardinal hadn’t even picked up his fork and I mentioned this. “I always eat before I come,” he replied, (and here, I’m paraphrasing, but accurately) because it’s so important to every person who comes to speak to me that I give them my full attention, and reply personally and kindly. If I don’t, they’ll leave this banquet --  this may be one  opportunity to speak to a bishop directly -- believing that ‘the Church’ doesn’t care about them.”

In your recent book “The Temperament God gave your Spouse” you review the four classic temperaments as a way of understanding how people naturally react; could you explain these and tell us how you came to be interested in this age-old concept in the present day?

 
We were introduced to the classic four temperaments (originally proposed by Hippocrates) by a priest who shared with us how temperament (the way we naturally tend to react to our environment) influences our spiritual lives; subsequently, we discovered that understanding temperament is not only a great way to get to know ourselves better (and therefore improve ourselves) but also it has a great bearing on our relationships—with God, with our spouse and with our children. Art discovered in his marriage counseling that many couples who came in for counseling were often arguing or fighting about a temperament issue!

Part II Interview with Psychologist  P. Alex Mabe, Ph.D.

1.    Dr. Mabe, thank you for agreeing to provide a follow-up interview regarding your publication on the treatment of childhood conduct disorder. In the first interview, you described the essential features of Conduct Disorder as repetitive and persistent patterns of behavior in which the basic rights of others and major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated. Further you noted that a variety of factors represent risk factors, discussing the impact of biological, socio-cultural, and early life experiences. I would be interested in hearing what the research shows about the other factors you presented: peer experiences, social experiences in various institutions; and early exposure to violence on television or videogames?

July 25 1968 is the date of Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, in which he affirmed: “there is an inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning and the procreative meaning” (no.12).  This meaning is severed by contraception and also by the new modes of generating human life in the laboratory: artificial insemination by a donor (better expressed as “artificial insemination by a vendor”),  in vitro fertilization, cloning, and other artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs).

Denise M. Burke is the Vice President & Legal Director, Americans United for Life

Over the last few decades, abortion advocates and others have launched a concerted campaign to force hospitals, healthcare institutions, health insurers, and individual healthcare providers to provide, refer for, or pay for elective abortions, abortifacient drugs, contraceptives, assisted reproductive procedures such as in vitro fertilization, and sterilizations.  Their determined effort to eviscerate the concept of individual conscience and the freedom to follow one’s religious, moral or ethical beliefs from the medical profession has resulted in the following:

The on-going court battle in Illinois over the state’s permanently-enjoined parental notification law has once again brought parental involvement laws to the forefront of the cultural and legal fight against abortion.

Interview with Art A. Bennett, M.A., Director of Alpha Omega Clinic and Consultation Services and founder of its Unity Restored website for those seeking freedom from sex based addictions, compulsions and pornography.

Culture of Life speaks with Dr. Paul Vitz, Professor and Senior Scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, VA and author of the recent book, “Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism” on the role of fatherhood in faith, family and culture. 

If you have ever found yourself up late at night staring at the television, you’ll likely be familiar with Joe Francis’s work. Joe Francis is the brains (?) behind “Girls Gone Wild,” that lovely, $40 million a year series of videotapes or DVDs that provide a historical record of the varieties of undergarments worn and removed by mostly drunken old girls and young women of the early twenty-first century.