Archbishop Cordileone: Q&A about marriage in SFGate
San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, chairman of the USCCB Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, was interviewed by a San Francisco paper about marriage on the cusp of the Proposition 8 and DOMA Supreme Court decisions.
When asked what his “next move” would be if the Supreme Court overturns Proposition 8, the Archbishop took the conversation back to the fundamentals: “The basic question is: does our society need an institution that connects children to their mothers and fathers, or doesn’t it? The only institution that does this is marriage. Redefining marriage will mean that our society will have given its definitive answer: “no”; it will mean changing the basic understanding of marriage from a child-centered institution to one that sees it as a temporary, revocable commitment which prioritizes the romantic happiness of adults over building a loving, lasting family. This would result in the law teaching that children do not need an institution that connects them to the mother and father who brought them into the world and their mother and father to each other.”
And when asked whether the Church should be spending its time and money on fighting poverty, for example, instead of defending marriage, Archbishop Cordileone responded, “Marriage and poverty are deeply intertwined concerns: an extremely high percentage of people in poverty are from broken families, and when the family breaks up it increases the risk of sliding into poverty, with single parents (usually mothers) making heroic sacrifices for their children as they struggle to fulfill the role of both mother and father. And beyond material poverty there is that poverty of the spirit in which kids hunger for their missing parent, who often seems absent and disengaged from their lives. We all have a deep instinct for connectedness to where we came from, and we deeply desire it when we do not have it. Promoting stable marriages is actually one of the best things we can do to help eradicate poverty; in fact, it is a necessary, even if by itself alone not a sufficient, part of the solution – that is, we cannot hope to fix the problem without it.”
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Archbishop Wenski: "If you call a tail a leg…"
The Supreme Court’s decisions on the two marriage cases before it, one involving California’s Proposition 8 and the other the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), are expected tomorrow (Wednesday).
In the meantime, here is an excellent column from Miami’s Archbishop Thomas Wenski, on the impossibility of so-called same-sex “marriage.”
An excerpt:
“If you call a tail a leg, then how may legs does a cow have? Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.” So said Abraham Lincoln, thus showing a greater grasp of the reality of things than many in our culture today, including not a few Harvard law school graduates and possibly even a majority of the Supreme Court should they decide to overturn DOMA and California’s Proposition 8, and thus effectively impose “same sex marriage” on the nation.