[A Comment from Father Duncan McVicar SI] Father Kentenich felt called by God to lead the Church, with a prophetic voice, “to the new shore”. He once commented: “The Church should always be what it was at its beginning – the soul of the world’s culture. Don’t separate the Church from culture, and don’t separate the Church from the world! However, the Church should always be the soul of the world’s culture – even this confused and utterly secularised culture.” (8th December 1965)
Many were taken aback by the atmosphere created by some German bishops – including Cardinal Caspar and Cardinal Marx – regarding the burning issues within marriage and family doctrine and pastoral care in the lead-up to the Family Synod in Rome in October this year – amongst others. Pope Francis addressed the present-day crisis of marriage family in his challenging and passionate address to the international Schoenstatt Movement in Rome, after we celebrated the wonderful days of the Jubilee Year 2014. He spoke about the impact of a “throwaway culture” that reduces the covenant of marriage – which is the icon of Christ’s relationship to his Church – to a mere “association” within society, that should conform to modern-day expectations.
He encouraged the audience of Schoenstatt members from all over the world: “That the family is hit, that the family is knocked and that the family is debased as [how can this be] a way of association … Can everything be called a family? How many families are divided, how many marriages are broken, how much relativism there is in the concept of the Sacrament of Marriage. At present, from a sociological point of view and from the point of view of human values, as well as, in fact, of the Catholic Sacrament, of the Christian Sacrament, there is a crisis of the family, a crisis because it is hit from all sides and left very wounded!.. We are witnessing”, he notes, the “reduction of the Sacrament to a rite… the Sacrament is made a social event… [but] the social [dimension] covers the fundamental thing, which is union with God… What they are proposing is not marriage, it is an association, but it is not marriage! It is necessary to say things very clearly and we must say this!”