Vatican prepares two new documents on
family
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
No Vatican cause in recent years has aroused the same crusader
spirit as defense of the family, and that fervor seems set to be revived in two
new documents from the Pontifical Council for the Family.
Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, a Colombian who heads the
council, broke the news at a late November conference in Rome that his office
is preparing a treatise on The Family and Procreation.
López Trujillo told NCR that it should appear in a
few months, and will cover a wide range of perils to the family and to
life.
Meanwhile, an official of the Council for the Family, in an
exclusive Dec. 11 interview with NCR, described another new text
awaiting final approval from López Trujillo: a lexicon of 60 terms used
in debates over sexual ethics.
López Trujillo first announced that project at a
consistory, or gathering of cardinals, in May.
Fr. Jacques Suaudeau, a physician who once worked at the National
Institutes of Health in Washington, told NCR that terms such as
reproductive rights and emergency contraception have
come into popular use in recent years, but what they mean is often unclear.
Sometimes, Suaudeau asserted, the ambiguity is intentional.
Linguistic sleight-of-hand, he said, prepares the way for political and social
change that would otherwise be difficult to defend.
As a case in point, Suadeau offered the term pre-embryo,
which he said was coined in England in the 1990s to justify research on human
embryos.
Scientifically, the term pre-embryo makes very little
sense, Suadeau said. We know the embryo is in continual development
from the very beginning. But its easier to justify experiments if you
call it something else.
The goal of the lexicon is to offer clear definitions of these
terms, Suadeau said, critiquing them from the Vaticans point of view.
Other terms on the list include quality of life, sexual
rights, homophobia/homophilia, sustainable
development, and gender.
As an example of the approach taken, Suadeau said the article on
homosexuality will suggest that requests for gay marriage and adoption rights
reflect an awareness within homosexuals themselves that something is
wrong with their orientation.
Inspiration for the lexicon, he said, came from a similar
publication of the United Nations Family Planning Agency, a body with which the
Vatican frequently clashes. The idea was to answer the United
Nations.
The lexicon will likely run to some 250-300 pages, and Suadeau
said he hopes it will be of use to Catholics involved in debates on family
issues as well as to journalists.
The council drafted authors from around the world to work on the
project. From the United States, contributors include two laypersons: William
E. May, who handled the term emergency contraception, and Janet
Smith, who defined reproductive rights.
May is a conservative moral theologian with the John Paul II
Institute on Marriage and the Family in Washington. Smith is a professor of
philosophy at the University of Dallas and author of Why Humanae Vitae Was
Right, a 1993 title from Ignatius Press.
The document on Family and Procreation will likely cover some of
the same ground. If the Nov. 21-24 Rome conference where it was announced is
any indication, it will do so in strong terms.
The gathering marked the 20th anniversary of the papal document
Familiaris Consortio that followed the 1980 synod of bishops.
López Trujillo decried the corrosive effect of modernity on
the family. He warned of a contraceptive imperialism imposed by
population control ideology, also within the church itself.
Referring to unmarried couples, liberal divorce and abortion laws
and homosexual unions, López Trujillo compared this
cancellation of the traditional family to the transformation
described in The Metamorphosis, the story by Franz Kafka in which a
man awakens to discover he has become an insect.
Humanity is now in danger of this transformation,
López Trujillo said. It will be the suicide of humanity.
Archbishop Carlo Caffarra, a key Vatican adviser on family issues,
said church teaching on family and life issues has been completely
ignored by the culture, asserting that the idea of a necessary connection
between marriage and openness to life has become unthinkable.
Sydney, Australia, Archbishop George Pell criticized feminism by
associating it with the radical individualism of the West. As one
example, he quoted sociological theories to the effect that feminism in the
1960s and 70s saved capitalism by sending wives out to
work.
If families had tried to get by on one income during that period
of rising costs and declining income, Pell said, massive social unrest would
have resulted. Feminism, Pell said, thus sustained the radical
individualism of market ideology.
Pell argued that policymakers should put the market to work for
the family, for example, by reintroducing fault into the divorce process. He
also suggested a 1 percent reduction in tax for married couples for each year
they stay married and for each child under 18.
Referring to falling fertility rates in the West, Pell said,
We need to start rethinking this attitude if we want enough people around
to care for us when we are old, pay taxes to support us, and if necessary, go
to war to defend us.
John Klink, an American layman and part of the Holy See delegation
to the United Nations, warned that the abortion lobby is
manipulating U.N. conferences to push a Western, secularist, socialist
model, in part, to override pro-family policies in Latin American and
Muslim nations.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail
address is jallen@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, December 21,
2001
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