Message for the World Day of Peace on the Defense of the Family
In his message for the World Day of Peace, January 1, 2013, entitled “Blessed are the Peacemakers”, two themes more particularly occupy the pope’s attention: the defense of traditional marriage and the defense of human life, from its beginning to its natural end.
The “natural structure” of marriage, that is, the union between one man and one woman, must be acknowledge and promoted “in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union,” Benedict XVI declares. These attempts “actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society”.
The pope also considers it unjust “to introduce surreptitiously into legislation false rights or freedoms which, on the basis of a reductive and relativistic view of human beings and the clever use of ambiguous expressions aimed at promoting a supposed right to abortion and euthanasia, pose a threat to the fundamental right to life”.
The principles that defend life and traditional marriage are not truths of faith, the Supreme Pontiff emphasized. “They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity.” This is why “the Church’s efforts to promote them are not therefore confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation.”
Moreover the pope considers that peacemaking comes about through a new model of development and economics. As opposed to the economic model founded on maximizing profits and excessive consumption, the pope proposes a perspective based on the principle of gratuitousness. “True and lasting success is attained through the gift of ourselves, our intellectual abilities and our entrepreneurial skills,” he argues. In concrete terms, peacemakers “establish bonds of fairness and reciprocity” with their neighbors. “They engage in economic activity for the sake of the common good and they experience this commitment as something transcending their self-interest, for the benefit of present and future generations.”
Benedict XVI regrets the spread of the ideologies of radical liberalism and of technocracy. According to these ideologies, “economic growth should be pursued even to the detriment of the state’s social responsibilities and civil society’s networks of solidarity, together with social rights and duties.” The pope concludes his message with a warning against “that false peace promised by the idols of this world along with the dangers which accompany it, that false peace which dulls consciences, which leads to self-absorption, to a withered existence lived in indifference”.
The Message for the World Day of Peace was made public on December 14; the previous day, on the occasion of the traditional Mass for France that was celebrated in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, in the presence of the Ambassador of France to the Holy See, Cardinal Agostino Vallini, Vicar of Rome, had declared in his homily: “The decision to welcome Jesus in our days is not easy. There are many forces that place obstacles in the way of adhering to Christ.” One of them is contemporary culture, which “denies the existence of any objective truth and the values inscribed in creation”, and “the difference between male and female from which proceeds the family, founded on marriage as a definitive contract between a man and a woman”.
The December 14 edition of L’Osservatore Romano comments on the reactions elicited by the expression “natural structure” of marriage employed by Benedict XVI. The editor of the Vatican newspaper, Giovanni Maria Vian, affirms that the message indicates “explicitly” that the “battles” being fought by the Church are not over truths of faith and are not derived from the primordial right to religious liberty, but rather are bound up with principles that are “inscribed in human nature”. He explains that “the presupposition of peace is recognition of the natural moral law by tendencies that wish to codify in legislation free choices such as the alleged right to abortion and euthanasia, which are actually threats to the fundamental right to life.” He goes on to denounce attempts to make various forms of union legally equivalent to the natural structure of marriage, even though they in fact destabilize it and “are harmful to its irreplaceable social role”. The perplexity of Giovanni Maria Vian is palpable. He is trying to affirm the natural law without seeming to call into question “the primordial right to religious liberty” promoted by Vatican II. In order to do this, he criticizes the attempt to codify free choice into law when choice is opposed to the natural moral law. This amounts to making the “primordial right to religious liberty” a secondary right when it contradicts “the fundamental right to life”.
The next day, December 15, Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Press Office of the Holy See, insisted once again on the meaning of the message of the pope, who “says urgent and fundamental things for humankind today, which cannot be obscured by the mere fact that he also asks Catholics to oppose a legal equivalence between the marriage of one man and one woman and certain ‘radically different forms of union’.” The Jesuit religious thinks that a “brief passage” was taken out of context, the one that considers marriage between a man and a woman to be profoundly different from other radically different forms of union. He reiterated that this principle is identifiable by human reason. He also considers the media reaction “inappropriate and disproportionate, made up of shouts rather than arguments, as though they were trying to intimidate someone who wants to defend such a view freely in the public arena.”
Commentary: One may wonder whether this attempt at media intimidation is not based partly on the observation that the Catholic reaffirmations themselves have become timid ever since Vatican II recognized the “primordial right to religious liberty”. Indeed, in his Enquête sur la chritianophobie [Investigation of Christianophobia], the French journalist Michel De Jaeghere wrote: “In a speech given in 1988 to the European Parliament in the Council of Europe, on the occasion of his trip to Strasbourg, John Paul II solemnly rejected the ‘integralist” temptation of the Christian state in favor of an ideal defined by the reign of civil liberty in the political order and of religious liberty in the order of faith.... In this system (the pope declared) and ‘given this diversity of viewpoints, the noblest function of the law is to guarantee equally to the citizens the right to live according to their conscience and not to contradict the norms of the natural moral order that are recognized by reason.’
“The problem is [1] that the Church is alone, today, in defending the existence of ‘a natural moral order recognized by reason’ that would oblige the civil law. And [2] that her adversaries hold a trump card: they can claim that this idea is one of the beliefs that the Church has forbidden herself to impose on citizens who consider disorderly morals as an integral part of their ‘right to live according to their conscience’. In rallying to the independence of the temporal order, the Church herself has thus been muzzled.” (pp. 204-205). (Sources: news.va/IMedia/Apic/L’Osservatore Romano – DICI no. 267 dated December 21, 2012)
