Appealing Ecumenically to the Catholic Bishops’ Synod on the Family

on October 2, 2014

A significant group of both Catholic and Protestant thinkers and luminaries are urging the upcoming Catholic bishops’ synod on the family in Rome to robustly address threats to church teachings on marriage and family.

Pastor Rick Warren is a signer of the appeal, along with Catholic philosopher Robert George of Princeton University, an IRD emeritus board member. IRD board member Tom Farr, a Catholic layman and former diplomat who now heads the religious liberty project at Georgetown University, was an organizer. Another signer is former IRD president Kent Hill of World Vision.

Their appeal was released early this week in time for the Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, which runs October 5-19. There will be 253 participants, including scores of Catholic bishops and clergy, some lay people, and some Protestant and Orthodox “fraternal” delegates, called by Pope Francis to examine the “pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization.” Pope Paul founded the Synod of Bishops in 1965, and a session is deemed “extraordinary” if addressing issues meriting “immediate attention.”

Clearly the state of the family and marriage in the world of 2014 earns such “immediate attention.”

This ecumenical appeal to the Synod notes that “marriage and the family are indispensable, both as vehicles of salvation and as bulwarks of human society.” And it observes that this Synod is an “opportunity to express timeless truths about marriage” that exemplify “true love, not ‘exclusion’ or ‘prejudice,’ or any of the other charges brought against marriage today.”

The appeal cites cohabitation, divorce, pornography and illegitimacy as threats to marriage, family and children, spiritually, socially and economically. It urges the church to research pornography’s and no fault divorce’s impact on declining marriage rates, to educate seminarians on the dangers that cohabitation and divorce pose to children and society, include more prayers in worship for the family, train priests to preach on marriage’s social benefits, create networks of married couples as mentors, nurture reconciliation for estranged couples, support laws affirming natural marriage, and defend religious freedom in divorce courts.

Read the rest of the appeal here. And there’s more info on the Synod here.

Much of organized Christianity in the West, especially among Protestants and Evangelicals, is reconciled to radical individualism, neglecting the providential vocation of marriage and family in the created order, for the benefit of all. Fully empowered, actualized and atomized individuals, pursuing their own vision of reality, divorced from the larger cosmos in which marriage and family are central, are not part of Christianity’s understanding of joy and life.

Yet much of the church is silent, whether through ignorance, intimidation, or indifference. Perhaps this Synod of Bishops will inspire much of the universal church to recall what is intrinsic to every branch of Christianity, that God ordained family and marriage, centered on the union of man and woman, because of His love for lost humanity.

  1. Comment by Aliquantillus on October 4, 2014 at 6:02 pm

    Let’s hope the best for this appeal. If the Roman Catholic would be so insane to make concessions here, then the end of Western civilization is imminent. It would lead to a total collapse of the Church, and subsequently to secular persecution of the tiny faithful groups who still dared to defend biblical morality. In the current crisis the Catholic Church can still be an important factor against the tendency of an ever increasing and strong tendency to state supported secularist totalitarianism.

  2. Comment by Mack on October 4, 2014 at 7:20 pm

    Rick Warren is just another 501C3 look-at-me, look-at-me, look-at-me pray-chur who made up his own Fisher-Price Play Church. The woods are full of ’em, Aime Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday, and all the rest. Given 2,000 years of apostolic succession and certain promises made my our Lord Himself, why should anyone need to point this out?

  3. Comment by fredx2 on October 5, 2014 at 8:04 pm

    Way too harsh.

  4. Comment by charles.hoffman.cpa on October 5, 2014 at 2:18 am

    society may have evolved beyond the ability of organized religion to contain it

  5. Comment by fredx2 on October 5, 2014 at 8:04 pm

    You mean sustain it.

  6. Comment by Carlos IMG on October 7, 2014 at 7:54 am

    Tell that to the millions of new Christians in Africa and Asia.

  7. Comment by David Tiffany on October 5, 2014 at 1:05 pm

    2 Corinthians 6:14-18, Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:

    “I will live with them
    and walk among them,
    and I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.”

    Therefore,

    “Come out from them
    and be separate,
    says the Lord.
    Touch no unclean thing,
    and I will receive you.”

    And,

    “I will be a Father to you,
    and you will be my sons and daughters,
    says the Lord Almighty.”

  8. Comment by David Tiffany on October 5, 2014 at 1:08 pm

    Following is a link in which Rick Warren has signed onto an alliance with Rome, addressed to the “Holy Father.”
    First, as we see in the verses above, God’s children are not to make alliances with unbelievers. Second, it is God who is our Father, not the Pope.

  9. Comment by fredx2 on October 5, 2014 at 8:08 pm

    And what causes you to believe that Catholics are unbelievers? Christ did not come to teach narrow sectarianism, that’s for sure.

    As for Rick Warren calling someone by their honorific title, big deal. Being courteous was not something Christ came to eliminate, either.

  10. Comment by James Sundquist on October 8, 2014 at 9:44 am

    Here are three investigations on RICK WARREN:

    http://www.perfectpeaceplan.com/post/is-rick-warrens-claim-that-his-book-is-the-best-selling-non-fiction-hardback-book-in-history-true/

    http://apprising.org/2011/05/23/kay-warren-rick-warren-praising-mother-teresa/

    And here is Ken’s last article he posted before his death last week on the very same subject:

    http://apprising.org/2014/09/27/the-papacy-of-the-roman-catholic-church/

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