Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue has received the robust support of His Eminence Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, for his strong defence of the dignity of the human person and the sacrament of marriage in his teaching document Fit for Mission? Church.
Bishop O’Donoghue sees the Pontifical Council for the Family’s endorsement of Fit for Mission? Church as opportune in light of the recent controversy concerning the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s document on the dignity of the person [Dignitas Personae] and the misrepresentation of Pope Benedict XVI’s address to the Roman Curia about the ‘ecology of man’, and the importance of protecting the nature of human beings as man and woman from a distorted ideology of gender.
Bishop Patrick writes...
Now, more than ever, Catholics need to have a confident understanding of the Church’s teaching on marriage and family life. We need to help society resist the reduction of human nature and life to a ‘consumable’ that can be manipulated without restraint, as we see in the homosexual and transsexual culture or IVF and experiments on embryonic human beings, just to name a few. This is one of the reasons why I wrote Fit for Mission? Church, to put the fullness of the Church’s teaching in the hands of the ordinary faithful and all people of good will.
+ Patrick O'Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster
Bishop O’Donoghue is particularly pleased with the following comment made by Cardinal Antonelli in his letter of 5 December 2008:
The section on Marriage and Family Life is also well done and a good response to the perils of the philosophy of gender which is so widespread nowadays. Your underlining the importance of Self-Gift is also very pertinent as well as giving explicit example and statistics (p.69) regarding the consequences of the culture of death that surrounds us, is also useful in bringing home the point. The encouragement to deepen the notion of the Theology of the Body is also a sound idea to be encouraged.
Cardinal Antonelli (who was appointed to his present post on 7 June 2008) offers the hope that Bishop Patrick’s ‘laudable’ document will receive a ‘widespread diffusion’.
The Pontifical Council for the Family’s enthusiastic endorsement of Fit for Mission? Church follows the praise of two Dicasteries and one other Pontifical Council: earlier this year Cardinal Renato Martino, President, Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Archbishop Luis Ladaria S.J., Secretary to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Archbishop Mauro Piacenza, Secretary, Congregation for the Clergy, congratulated Bishop Patrick for his challenging document promoting an authentic Catholic identity for today’s Church. First published in August 2008, in response to popular demand Bishop Patrick issued an expanded edition with the Catholic Truth Society in October.
Bishop O’Donoghue concludes his response to this latest letter from the Holy See:
We must shout this truth from the roof tops, ‘God has made human beings in His own image, as male and female. True happiness and fulfilment in sexual love can only be found in the diversity and complementarity between a man and a woman, united in life-long marriage and open to new life. Anything else is a delusion. To live by a delusion that denies this truth not only harms individuals, it also obviously harms their families, their communities and society in general.
We must not only proclaim this truth, we must also endeavour to live by it. This is why I have insisted that Catholic Caring Services (Diocese of Lancaster) must seek legal avenues to uphold the teaching of the Church against legislation that seeks to place Catholic children with individuals in ‘same-sex’ unions. The refusal of the Trustees (of CCS) to abide by the clear moral teaching of the Church, has painfully resulted in the Diocese of Lancaster declaring that Catholic Caring Services is no longer a Catholic charity, and can no longer claim the support of Catholics.
+ Patrick O'Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster
