TEXAS

Dear brothers and sisters,

 

I am forwarding below, a number of pro-family and life excerpts that Zenit had highlighted, from the talks delivered at the World Meeting of Families, in Mexico, that is underway until Sunday, January 18. This major Church event was organized by the Pontifical Council for the Family, where our Servant General, Frank Padilla and his beloved Gerry Padilla, are members. Frank was also asked to deliver an intervention in one of its forums.

 

Bishop Soc Villegas is also one of the speakers of this event.

 

We take these articles below as an affirmation of how the Pontifical Council for the Family takes to heart the exhortations on the family by Pope John Paul II: "as a sanctuary of life; and that the future of humanity passes by way of the family".

 

Thus, CFCFFL's identity and mission is also being confirmed: "Renewing the Family and Defending Life".

 

May Christ's grace and mercy be upon us, as we do our mission.

 

Sex Education Best Kept at Home
Bioethicist Presents Chastity as Love's Defender

MEXICO CITY, JAN. 15, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Sex education is chastity education -- and these are lessons best taught in the family, said an expert at the 6th World Meeting of Families.
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talian Doctor María Luisa Di Pietro, associate bioethics professor at Rome's Sacred Heart University and president of the Science and Life Association, affirmed this during her address today to some 10,000 participants in the family meeting theological congress.

The family, she said, creates a "favorable climate" for sex education in a "culture strongly conditioned by the effects of the far-reaching wave of the sexual revolution."

Above all, Di Pietro contended, there is a need to "clarify the concept of chastity." She called this virtue a "spiritual energy, which knows how to defend love from the dangers of egotism and aggressiveness, and knows now to promote it toward its total fulfillment."

"The reduction of sexuality to the merely instinctual dimension has favored, moreover, in its most extreme and lowest manifestations, the spread of pornography and sexual violence," she said. Thus, the professor contended, it is urgent for families to take on the primary role that they have in the affective and moral formation of their children.

"The haste to skip steps is making the affective maturing of kids ever more difficult and is even putting their health at risk," she cautioned.

Self-esteem
According to Di Pietro, sex education "should have as a principal objective that of motivating and indicating how to reach big goals, [including] strengthening of the 'I,' self-esteem, the sense of one's own dignity, the capacity to possess and control oneself, openness to plan, coherence, and interior balance, the acquisition of full attention to the values of procreation, life and the family."
She added: "A true formation directed toward the education of the will, the sentiments and the emotions is necessary.

"To know oneself means having one more reason to serenely accept the reality of man and woman, and to demand greater respect for oneself and for the others."

Thus, said the bioethicist, parents "have the moral obligation to educate the person in his masculinity or femininity, in his affective and relational dimension: to educate in sexuality as a gift of self in love, that true love that knows how to protect life."

Pillars
Di Pietro suggested that the two pillars for a love-based education are the concept one has of the person and the human project that is being endeavored.

"If the truth of man is rejected -- love for the truth -- there is the risk of endangering precisely the educative task," she said. "If freedom is not introduced and rooted in an integral truth of the person, it can lead man to behaviors and choices that reduce him, or it can become an instrument of deliberate neglect and pure will or lead to attitudes of resignation and dangerous skepticism."

Thus, Di Pietro affirmed, there is a simultaneous need for education in affectivity and education in the moral sense, or in other words "education for freedom."

"The person is formed," she said, "only when he is capable of responding to the question of what kind of person I should be. The commitment should be, then, that of helping the subject to grow as a virtuous person, that is, to acquire a permanent possibility for doing the good and for doing it well."

Parents should be aware, Di Pietro stated, that the duty to give a moral education is "inalienable" -- and can neither be entirely delegated nor entirely usurped.

"In fact," she concluded, "to fail to give children a family environment that can permit an adequate formation in love and chastity, means to fail in a strict duty."

No Anathemas for the Media
But Discernment Is Crucial, Says Communicator

MEXICO CITY, JAN. 15, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Are you as oblivious as Humpty Dumpty when it comes to the media, naively considering yourself a critical thinker when in actuality, you meekly swallow the preaching of today's opinion-makers?
This was the question posed by Dr. González Gaitano, dean of the faculty of institutional communication of Rome's Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, in an address he gave today at the 6th World Meeting of Families. The world meeting, under way through Sunday in Mexico City, has gathered some 10,000 participants, including today Mexico's First Lady, Margarita Zavala.
In his address about the need for discernment in the use of media, González Gaitano developed what he calls the "whole enchilada" of the media, formed by technology, its content and culture.

He reflected on how media's progress through the centuries has generated both a cultural gain and loss.

"For example," he said, "the printing press expanded reading to all social groups and made universal compulsory education possible, but this in turn overshadowed oral culture with its enormous riches. Television changed the way of imagining, learning and reasoning in the audiovisual generation, as the Internet is changing media consumption habits and the mental circuitry of the digital generation."

Distorted
Subsequently, González Gaitano went deeper into the content to which children and young people are exposed through the media, which he called an educational challenge for the family.
Violent content promotes violent actions, he said, citing numerous studies. "The same is true for TV programs with sexual content," the pontifical university dean affirmed.

What is worrisome is not limited to what is shown but "how it is presented," he said, noting a study that showed 80% of adolescent programming included sexual content. The media's presentation of reality, González Gaitano suggested, is like a set of crazy mirrors in front of a deranged society. He explained that this phenomenon leads to cognitive and psychological social effects.

Syndromes
He first described the Jabberwocky Syndrome. "The media gives us a fragmented or partial vision that is often contradictory and always a kaleidoscopic vision of the world and of man." This, he said, causes cultural uprooting with regard to moral reasoning and behavior.

Instead, the professor invited the media to present "in such a way that what is good 'seems' good and what is bad 'seems' bad" without creating confusion in the moral realm.

González Gaitano also commented on the Humpty Dumpty Syndrome, or the generation of the functionally illiterate. Like Humpty Dumpty, the egg who was oblivious to his fragility, people are impoverished in their capacity to grasp reality due to the effects of media. At the same time, there is the phenomenon of "disinformation." In the end, there is an overwhelming lack of criteria for processing information, he said.

The professor continued to explain how the creation of public opinion has become the responsibility of so-called opinion makers who "impart from the pulpits of their newspaper columns or radio/television talk shows a new creed that public opinion absorbs meekly while still thinking they are critical."

The expert then wondered if the media could bring us a happy world. He answered with a phrase of Einstein: "The problem is not the atomic bomb, the problem is the heart of man."

What Would Make Society Fall
Social Scientist Explains World's Total Dependence on Families

MEXICO CITY, JAN. 15, 2009 (Zenit.org).- There are certain virtues that keep society working, things like honesty and participation -- and without families, those virtues would cease to exist.

Doctor Pierpaolo Donati, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, today at the 6th World Meeting of Families, contended that society utterly depends on families for the virtues it needs to continue existing.

The World Meeting of Families, which has brought together some 10,000 people for the pastoral-theological congress, is under way through Sunday in Mexico City.

Donati's address today considered if the family is a source of social vices or virtues.

He centered his discourse on an analysis of the important role of the family in social well-being and the formation of virtuous citizens.
In the first half of the conference, Donati reviewed the social virtues that depend on the family, such as participation, disinterested relationships, and honesty.

These virtues are themselves a justification of the necessity for social and civil organizations to offer their support to the family, so that families can give society the "additional social value" that can only be developed within them, he contended.

"The family does not have a working substitute for generating social virtues," Donati emphasized.

More than friends
The social scientist went on to explain his view that familial relationships are different than friendship because they imply a relationship of interdependence (complementarity and reciprocity), which generates specific virtues linked to an unconditional reciprocal belonging.

When a friendship is betrayed, he clarified, it's legitimate to end it. But given that in the family, the spousal and fraternal bond cannot be cancelled, the people who are in these relationships must more easily come to forgive, at least potentially, which is the social virtue on which peace rests.

"The social value produced together with this by the family cannot be generated outside of families," he reiterated. "The family produces a unique and irreplaceable social capital."

"As much as the meaning of the term 'family' can vary from one culture to another, universally it is recognized that to 'make a family' means to get married and have children," he said, adding that it is in this unique family environment that the irreplaceable social capital is developed.

"The future of humanity is linked to the factor of the family being recognized as a generator of social virtues," Donati concluded.

 

"When the opposite happens, it means that our path has turned toward a new barbarism. To avoid barbarism, it is necessary that the corporal virtues of the family are connected with its natural virtues."

Clarification of Statement on Homosexuality
"Desire Cannot Be the Foundation for the Law"

MEXICO CITY, JAN. 15, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of a press statement released today by Monsignor Carlos Simón Vazquez, subsecretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
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Various interpretations have been made regarding the reference Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, made in his words at the opening of the Theological-Pastoral Congress of Mexico. The cardinal wanted to underline three important aspects:

1. Homosexuality is not a necessary component of society, as is the family. Society is organized around the relationship of the couple that is formed by a man and a woman. They find each other in conjugal life and in family life. In this sense, the couple and the family enter into the sphere of social life, and because of this, of civil law. The relationship between two persons of the same sex is not the same as the relationship of a couple that is based on the sexual difference. These two situations depend on structures that are not of the same nature. The homosexual relationship does not enter into this social sphere. It is, as such, a private question. Legislators make an anthropological error when they want to socially organize homosexuality. They run the risk of provoking an intellectual confusion, as well as confusion of identity and relationships. It should not be forgotten that confusion frequently favors insecurity, unstable relationships and violence, when legislators don't respect the fundamental sense of human relationships. The family is a common good of humanity that is not at the free disposition of legislators to respond to the subjective and problematic demands of today. The individual desire cannot be the foundation for the law. Here we find ourselves in the presence of a confusion between the law, which is of the public domain, and the desire, which is subjective.

2. Affirming that homosexuality is a private fact, the president of the Pontifical Council of the Family is not justifying it. The cardinal simply underlined that homosexuality does not contribute favorably to the organization of individuals and of society. The exercise of homosexuality does not reflect the truth of friendship. Friendship is inherent to the human condition in that it offers relationships of proximity, help and cooperation, in a courteous and amiable climate. Friendship should be lived chastely.

3. The Church maintains its preoccupation of welcoming and accompanying homosexual persons. Every person that has difficulties to live their sexuality properly is called to find Christ and to live, consequently, in accord with the demands of liberty and responsibility of faith, hope and charity. On the other hand, it is contrary to the truth of the human identity and the design of God to live a homosexual experience, a relationship of this type, and even more to attempt to demand same-sex marriage. It is contrary to the true interests of the persons and of the needs of society. It constitutes a transgression of the sense of love as God has revealed to us through the message of Christ, of which the Church is a servant, as an expression of love toward the men and women of our time.