Christians are witnesses. And one aspect of our witness is that we point to the goodness of creation and of our place in it. We point out that creation is made up of many creatures and persons who are different from ourselves. We acknowledge how different they are, and that we rely on them to be different from ourselves. We do not attempt either to absorb them or to substitute for them. Individually we do not try to be everything. We do not try to replace all others and so do without them. We do not try to make them redundant, or make ourselves entirely autonomous. We do not cut them out of our lives and insist that we will not miss them. We acknowledge that we live in a world made up of many other persons whom we do not determine, and we affirm that they are good, just as they are. So we are witnesses to the independent existence of beings other than ourselves, and we affirm that it is good so.

God loves us.  And God loves those who are not us. We are witnesses to his love. We hope we can love whoever comes our way. We hope for great relationships of love, that over time will blossom out into further great relationships of love. Meanwhile we wait. We do not go to bed with the first man or woman who comes along, and then, bored or fearful, pack them off. We do not glue ourselves to one another only in order to tear ourselves away from one another again. We wait,  sometimes contentedly, sometimes impatiently. Nevertheless, we wait. We are witnesses to what we do not yet have. Hope is our thing.

So a man can wait for a woman. A woman can wait for a man. Perhaps that waiting will stretch out to the end of their lives and they will not meet the woman or man who can become their one and only partner and companion. But in this waiting, they are nonetheless witnesses to love, the love of God they do have and the love of one particular person that they don't have.

And so it is with women and ministry. They can wait. They can do so because they are Christians. Christians serve and wait and look forward to what they do not yet have. They are witnesses to the future. Hope is our thing, and waiting and looking forward to what we do not yet possess is our distinctive way. If we cannot wait, we do not act as Christians and so are not good models of the Christian life, and the Church cannot choose us to be its ministers for other more particular purposes.  We must be content to watch many people go ahead of us.  We may not see why there should be a difference between them and us, but we can affirm that there always will be, and should be, differences between us. This waiting and pointing to what we do not yet possess is itself the ministry of every Christian. The Christian who does not grasp this, and attempt to be faithful in this way, is certainly not ready for any other ministry.

You are a man or you are woman. You are a witness to the particular charism of being either one or the other.  We are able to live together by giving to one another and by receiving from one another. We are able to receive from others because we do not already have everything. They have what we don't.  We are able to receive from them whatever they have  and  are able to contribute, because we cannot provide it for ourselves. We need what only they can give us, and so we need them, and they need us. Given differences, of age and of experience and of sex orient us towards one another. Sexual difference brings us together, and make us look to other, appeal to them and wait for them to provide whatever we cannot provide for ourselves. Our need makes us receptive, prompting us to make them  welcome. What is more, we may not know what they have to contribute; they may surprise us, and thus we cannot control them, or insist that they make only the contribution that we demand and allow. What they bring may not be entirely determined by us, and this means that to some degree they are free of us. We are witnesses that differences, and sexual differences in particular, are not subject to our determination. We cannot entirely define and control them. Attempts to deny or reduce differences are untruthful, and in the long term fruitless. Attempts to  expunge sexual difference are futile and an assault on the truth.

God did not intend a unisex human. God does not make everything identical to everything else, for then there would only be one thing, and there would be no one to see it and marvel at it. God brings order, not confusion; God brings what is new, but what is new supplements what is given, it does sweep it aside as though it were all a mistake. God made man, male and female he made them.  God saw that they were good, both individually and together. Christian doctrine says that creation is good, our sexual differences and complementarity are good, and for the health of our society it is the job of Christians to say so.

As Pope John Paul the Great wrote in his historic message Evangelium Vitae (the Gospel of Life) the culture of death goes all the way back to that fateful afternoon when Cain struck down his brother Abel, and the Lord said to Cain,  Where is Abel your brother? And Cain answered,  ??Am I my brotherâ??s keeper? And the Lord said to Cain, ??The voice of your brothers blood is crying out to me from the ground. The voice of the blood of brothers and sisters beyond numbering cry out from the slave ships and battlegrounds and concentration camps and torture chambers of the past and the present. The voice of the blood of the innocents cries out from the abortuaries and sophisticated biotech laboratories of this beloved country today. Contending for the culture of life has been a very long journey, and there are still miles and miles to go.

The contention between the culture of life and the culture of death is not a battle of our own choosing. We are not the ones who imposed upon the nation the lethal logic that human beings have no rights we are bound to respect if they are too small, too weak, too dependent, too burdensome. That lethal logic, backed by the force of law, was imposed by an arrogant elite that for almost forty years has been telling us to get over it, to get used to it. But We the People?? who are the political sovereign in this constitutional democracy, have not gotten over it, we have not gotten used to it, and we will never, we will never ever, agree that the culture of death is the unchangeable law of the land.

Richard Neuhaus

Whether we like it or not as British citizens and residents of this country -- and whether we are even prepared as Catholics to accept this reality and all it implies -- the fact is that historically, and continuing right now, Britain, and in particular London, has been and is the geopolitical epicenter of the culture of death. Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years or more have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage, in essence one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes culturally speaking than even those places where Catholics suffer open persecution.

England itself nevertheless has a unique Christian heritage: St. Augustine, the apostle to the English appointed by Pope Gregory, defied the temptation to despair of ever converting the pagan Britons by reminding the degenerate race of the beauty, truth and dignity of marriage. St. Bede's chronicle of English Christianity recounts this strategy, and, as he put it, "England recovered." England is also the "Dowry of Mary," an ancient title going back to the 14th century and even further in the spiritual language of the people. This title signified the fact that from the earliest times English Catholic Christians revered the person of the Mother of Christ with such a singular and wholehearted devotion that the very nation itself was attributed with having a supernatural role (metaphorically-speaking) in the "marriage" between the Holy Spirit and his spouse -- the Virgin of Nazareth. That is to say, English Christianity, in the plan of God, has a unique role to play in being a secure foundation (like a dowry in a marriage) to the work of redemption and salvation history globally. England was the first Christian nation to bestow upon the Church the formal solemnizing of marriages, which found expression in the Sarum Rite of Marriage.

Edmund Adamus speaking to Zenit Edmund runs Pastoral Affairs at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster

A five step neo-Darwinian refutation of neo-Darwinism:

1. A person is, in Richard Dawkinsâ?? beautiful phrase, â??a geneâ??s way of making another geneâ??. So forget religion, forget values, forget ideals, its all about reproduction; handing on our genes to the next generation.

2. Europe today is the most secular region in the world.

3. Europe today is the only region in the world which is experiencing population decline. As you know, zero population growth â?? a stable population â?? requires an average of 2.1 children for every woman of child-bearing age in the population. Not one European country has anything like that rate today. Here are the 2004 figures: In the United Kingdom: 1.74, in the Netherlands: 1.73, Germany: 1.37, Italy: 1.33, Spain: 1.32 and Greece: 1.29.

4. Wherever you turn today anywhere in the world, and whether you look at the Jewish or Christian or Muslim communities, you will find the more religious the community, the larger, on average, are its families.

5. The major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians.

From which it follows, as night doth follow day, that if you are a true neo-Darwinian believer you want there to be as few neo-Darwinians as possible. QED.

Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: of money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification â??because youâ??re worth itâ??, in that culture, where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born? Europe, at least the indigenous population of Europe, is dying, exactly as Polybius said about ancient Greece in the third pre-Christian century. The century that is intellectually the closest to our own â?? the century of the sceptics and the epicureans and the cynics. Polybius wrote this:

The fact is, that the people of Hellas had entered upon the false path of ostentation, avarice and laziness, and were therefore becoming unwilling to marry, or if they did marry, to bring up the children born to them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two.

That is why Greece died. That is where Europe is today. Now, that is one of the un-sayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it. The only serious philosophical question is â??Why should I have a child?â??

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs

Cardinal Keith Patrick O’Brien Homily preached at Mass for Pentecost 2009 St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh

Before any society can prosper and endure it must give support and encouragement to the institution of marriage and the place of the family. As a society we have failed utterly to do this and have instead in recent years acted again and again to undermine marriage and weaken the family: in abolishing tax benefits for married couples; creating tax credits which favour couples who are not married; giving legal status to cohabitees; speeding up divorce and creating same sex marriages. In these and other ways we have attacked and damaged the foundation stone of our society, the foundation on which any stable society is built. I think of the tuition and support available to young people as they prepare to sit their driving test. Our government knows that a stringent test and structured tuition at the start will pay dividends later in better driving standards and fewer accidents. I would hope that we will now try to see marriage preparation in the same light; and encourage those who are living together outwith marriage to consider preparing for that great Sacrament. What we require is nothing less than a nationwide programme of marriage preparation courses and ongoing reconciliation services to help couples who inevitably face difficulties and strains in their relationship. This must all be funded at public expense as a far sighted investment in future stability and will offset the multi-billion pound cost of family fracture, divorce, breakdown, depression and social collapse we currently pay for. I see this as not a competition between morality and money, but rather a recognition that embracing morality can potentially save us vast amounts of money.

The Church-State relationship in Scotland is very different from England. Here the bishop talks as a bishop must, like a schoolmaster, with the directness that comes from compassion. He reasons pragmatically, from common good, even from the common purse. Of course O'Brien is a Roman Catholic bishop and Cardinal. So, my dear bishops of the Church of England, can you do likewise? Or shall we leave you and follow the Cardinal?

While many factors have contributed to this truly diabolical, bureaucratic onslaught against the family, we might begin by looking within. The churchesâ?? failure or refusal to intervene in the marriages they consecrated and to exert moral pressure on misbehaving spouses (perhaps out of fear of appearing â??judgmentalâ??) left a vacuum that has been filled by the state. Clergy, parishioners, and extended families have been replaced by lawyers, judges, forensic psychotherapists, social workers, and plainclothes police.

Family integrity will be restored only when families are de-politicized and protected from government invasion. This will demand morally vigorous congregations that are willing to take marriage out of the hands of the state by intervening in the marriages they are called upon to witness and consecrate and by resisting the power of the state to move in. This is the logic behind the group Marriage Savers, and it can restore the churchesâ?? authority even among those who previously viewed a churchâ??s role in their marriage as largely ceremonial.... We all need to atone.

Stephen Baskerville Divorced from Reality

The current reference in legislation to a child’s need for a father is being removed because of the alleged offence such a clause is causing to single women. Removing this reference, for the sake of a tiny minority that currently does on the whole have access to assisted reproduction, sends a powerful signal to the whole population that fathers can be dispensed with in children’s lives. This is in spite of a wealth of social research showing the importance of engaged fathers for families and communities. Fathers matter to children but fatherhood itself is essential for drawing men into dependable and responsible adulthood... By ignoring the benefits fathers bring to children in order to accommodate childless adults, the [Human Fertilisation and Embryology] Bill [which has since become an Act] places the rights of adults at the centre, rather than the best interests of children.

Centre for Social Justice Fathers not included - summary

Whatever the origins and convolutions of the (complex and often incoherent) intellectual and emotional background that implicitly, if not explicitly, endorses atomisation and household fragmentation, the foremost element has been the animus against marriage and two-parent families. Anti-family activists have expressly sought to undermine any economic, social and legal need and support for marriage by getting any privileges granted to married couples, including tax allowances, withdrawn, and recognition extended to different types of households and relationships. This has reached the Orwellian stage of editing references to marriage out of the lexicon, led by government removing the term ‘marital status’ from official documentation and replacing husband/wife/spouse with ‘partner’, which assimilates them with cohabiters and flatmates. Since the control of language brings the control of thought, which brings the control of action, so there is (hopefully) the perception, acceptance and practice of a world of provisional and fluid relationships, where men move around siring and ‘parenting’ children as ‘partners’ of essentially lone mothers. This is just about the most adverse environment for child welfare one could create.

Patricia Morgan The War between the Family and the State

Melanie Phillips on the economic crisis

I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the montary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is ‘militant atheism’ which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda -- and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.

The financial crisis was brought about essentially by a public which threw away all notions of prudence and committed itself to spending today what it could never afford to pay back tomorrow, and a banking, regulatory and political sector which ruthlessly and cynically exploited and encouraged such catastrophic irresponsibility with a criminal disregard of the ruinous consequences for the poor. The financial crisis and our social meltdown are thus combining to form a perfect cultural storm.

And on Mary Warnock, who suggested that dementia sufferers may have a duty to die

On Planet Warnock, it seems that ties of family and kinship, acts of selfless love, the deep satisfaction from bringing comfort to those who are helpless or who are so poignantly leaving us — essential aspects of our common humanity — mean nothing at all.

Phillips on Warnock

Church teaching, reflected in Scripture and Tradition, affirms that it is a man and a woman, united in marriage, who, together with their children, form a family. This community is the basic cell of society and the foundational and determinative point of reference according to which all other forms of family relationship can be assessed (CCC 2202). It is certainly true that the qualities of love and care which are intrinsic to the family may not always be adequately realised, sometimes with devastating consequences. Equally, aspects of the values particular to family life can be found outside of the familial unit composed of husband, a wife and their child or children. There are, however, unique and indispensible characteristics of the accepted understanding of family which make it the rightful and preferred context in which to raise children, namely the diverse and yet reciprocally enriching nature and contribution of both male and female parents, exercised within the security and the permanence of marriage. The Church teaches that God created man and woman and thereby established the fundamental constitution of the human family (cf. Gen 2:24; CCC 2203). While the traditional notion of family is not immune from breakdown and difficulty, this is no reason for it to be abandoned or replaced as the primary building block of society. On the contrary, more effort should be made to support families, whether the children within them are genetically the offspring of their father and mother or have been placed in their care through adoption. Because of this constant teaching and the Church’s adherence to it, I find it unthinkable, indeed heart-breaking, that Catholic Caring Services, so linked to the Catholic Church since its inception, would abandon its position and capitulate to recent same-sex adoption legislation. Again, it is abundantly clear to me that you are adamant in your pursuit of an Open Policy, at variance with the Church’s teaching. As your Bishop, I cannot give permission to an agency of the Catholic Church to act in opposition to her teaching and her long and rich experience of the placement of children with adoptive parents.

Patrick O'Donohue, Bishop of Lancaster Letter to 'Catholic Caring Services'

The Berlin Gemaeldegalerie appears if anything to be one of the most user-friendly artistic sites in Europe. So why â?? unlike other museums in cutting-edge Berlin â?? isnâ??t it crawling with culture vultures?

Itâ??s hard to avoid the obvious here: given the centuries in question, the galleryâ??s collection is inevitably, ineradicably, inescapably Christian. Such is true not only of the majority of paintings, whose subjects are overtly Biblical or otherwise religious, but of many â??non-religiousâ?? pieces too. Even the Dutch masterpieces by Steen, Brueghel, and others portraying â??ordinary life,â?? for example, are often hortatory comments on the gaps between Christian morality and Christian practice.

Might the overall Christian character of these artworks somehow account for the seeming lack of public interest?... growing religious illiteracy might help to explain something of the Gemaeldegalerieâ??s relative emptiness. But I wonder if another, perhaps less obvious factor - the simultaneous disappearance of something known as the human family in the lives of many Europeans â?? may turn out to explain a lot, too. Thatâ??s one disappearing act at which the Germans, even more than any of their neighbors, have excelled. Almost a third of the German women born in 1960 have had no children. Only half as many children were born last year in Germany as in 1964 â?? and thatâ??s even throwing in the Turks. And this empty cradle may be just the human backdrop against which the empty Gemaeldegalerie makes best if perverse sense.

After all: how do you explain the sublimity of Raphaelâ??s Madonna with the Infant Jesus to someone whoâ??s never held a baby? Or whatâ??s so perfect about Botticelliâ??s adolescents in The Virgin and Child with Singing Angels to people who havenâ??t seen real teenagers up close for decades? How to convey what is throat-tightening about Grienâ??s Mourning of Christ to a fit, childless man or woman of any age who has never seen death?

In cutting-edge Germany as elsewhere in Western Europe, increasing numbers of people can no longer be assumed to have hands-on experience of any of these things. This familial illiteracy may yet turn out to be more connected to religious illiteracy than weâ??ve so far understood.

Mary Eberstadt Empty Cradle, Empty Gallery Here is more by Mary Eberstadt

Finally I am getting to see the point of the Virgin Mary - Maria, das Kind verehrend - she rightly adores this child from whom our future comes.

The British, never fond of children, have lost all knowledge or intuition about how to raise them; as a consequence, they now fear them, perhaps the most terrible augury possible for a society. The signs of this fear are unmistakable on the faces of the elderly in public places. ..

The British may have always inclined toward harshness or neglect (or both) in dealing with children; but never before have they combined such attitudes with an undiscriminating material indulgence. My patients would sometimes ask me how it was that their children had turned out so bad when they had done everything for them. When I asked them what they meant by â??everything,â?? it invariably meant the latest televisions in their bedrooms or the latest fashionable footwearâ??to which modern British youth attaches far more importance than Imelda Marcos ever did.

Needless to say, the British stateâ??s response to the situation that it has in part created is simultaneously authoritarian and counterproductive. The government pretends, for example, that the problem of child welfare is one of raw poverty... But after many years of various redistributive measures and billions spent to reduce it, child poverty is, if anything, more widespread.

A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences, makes childhood in Britain a torment both for many of those who live it and those who observe it.

Theodore Dalrymple Childhood's End

The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study from the independent think-tank Civitas.

In Licensed to Hug Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues that children need to have contact with a range of adult members of the community for their education and socialisation, but 'this form of collaboration, which has traditionally underpinned intergenerational relationships, is now threatened by a regime that insists that adult/child encounters must be mediated through a security check' The scope of child protection has become immense. Since its formation in 2002 the Criminal Records Bureau has issued 15 million disclosures, but the whole operation has now been ratcheted up several notches by the passage of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006. This has led to the creation of the Independent Safeguarding Authority which, when it is rolled out in October 2009, will require CRB checks of 11.3 million people - over one quarter of the adult population of England.

Whereas adults would once routinely have rebuked children who were misbehaving, or helped children in distress, they now think twice about the consequences of interacting with other people's children. A culture of fear pervades what should be ordinary relationships.

Civitas Licensed to Hug: How child protection policies are poisoning the relationship between the generations and damaging the voluntary sector

The central role of intra-family gifts This leads us to the other essential feature of family economics, but one which Becker's "neoclassical" theory omits. Like Adam Smith, Becker presumes that all economic transactions, including those within marriage, are essentially self-interested efforts to maximize one's own utility or satisfaction. Now, family members do acquire their incomes mostly by exchanges with those outside the family. But the "division of labor" within the family, as Aristotle and Augustine pointed out, occurs mostly by personal and joint gifts, not exchanges. We all need to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and transported, whether or not we earn income. Our income therefore typically exceeds our consumption during parenthood and the "empty nest" (i.e. after children have left home), while consumption exceeds income during childhood and old age. This involves extensive gifts, not only from parents to dependent children but also between husbands and wives and from adult children to aged parents. ... Without government social benefits, the retirement gap could be bridged only by love: a gift from someone (most often one's adult children) whose own consumption and utility are thereby reduced.

Why do people have children? Becker answers that children provide parents satisfaction as producer or (in modern economies) consumer durables. But this theory is not very accurate. In what I call "neo-scholastic" economic theory, parents have children for one of two reasons: because they love the children for their own sakes, and/or love themselves and expect some benefit from the children. ... Becker's theory cannot accommodate this fact, since worship, like marriage and fertility, involves another kind of sacrifice of valuable resources by the giver.

John D Mueller Demographic Winter

A contributing factor to post-abortion trauma is silence from the Church. The common reluctance to preach on the matter because there are some women in the Church who have had abortions and it will hurt them is misguided and harmful. There is a crying need to acknowledge the grief of abortion - silence pushes this grief underground and prevents forgiveness and reconciliation.

Since, sadly, the rate of abortion among Catholic women is about the same as the rate in the general population, there is no question that there will be many women in our parishes who have had abortions. They need the grace of the sacrament of penance, the understanding of the Church and the clear and unambiguous commitment of their priests to preaching compassionately against this evil - and indeed the reaffirmation of the virtue of chastity for their own children.

Tim Finigan

A mother and daughter, both of whom had had abortions, and became pro-life. They went to the parish priest with a pro-life poster asking him to display it in their church. He politely took the poster and folded it, saying to them: "You know, I can't put this up. Don't you know there might be women in my congregation who have had abortions?" Our silence denies these women the right/opportunity to grieve for their child. Silence means that their child's existence is denied.

There are prayer vigils regularly outside the abortion mill at Bedford Square.

John Boyle

Last weekend, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a wonderfully concise and eloquent statement on embryonic stem cell research. When printed out, it comes to barely more than six double-spaced typewritten pages, but within that relatively small compass may be found all of the elements essential to a well-formed Catholic conscience on this important question. Even more remarkably, the statement marshals its argument in a manner that can be grasped by a person of ordinary intelligence.

Given the complexity of the subject and the continual stream of disinformation propagated by the mainstream media on the question, this is no small accomplishment. The bishops deserve a hearty round of applause for piercing to the heart of the matter in such a thoughtful and accessible fashion. The pity is that it hasn’t been done before, but now that the statement is out, every effort should be made to ensure wide dissemination throughout the nation’s parishes. A rough estimation suggests that its fifteen paragraphs would fit nicely onto a single two-sided page for insertion into weekly bulletins. But there’s no reason why the effort to educate the laity should end there. Homilists should be encouraged to expound upon its themes from the pulpit.

Michael Uhlmann The bishops get it right

Karl Barth Church Dogmatics III.4 3.

1. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command it is surely evident that the decision for the way of marriage is for some, as the choice of the unmarried state is for others, the matter of the supremely particular divine vocation. (p.183)

2. When marriage is seen in the light of divine command and it is plain to men and women united in marriage that here too and especially that they are called to be obedient to God then the fulfilment of this life-partnership becomes for them a task (p. 187)

3. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is apparent that it is full life- partnership. It is this fact which differentiates marriage from other relations between human beings and between man and woman. (189)

4. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is clear that it is an exclusive life-partnership. With or without a family it builds and shapes a home where many may go in and out… The man who thinks it is possible or permissible to love many women simultaneously or alternately has not yet begun to love. (195)

5. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is clear that it is a lasting life-partnership. It is the full and exclusive union of a man and a woman for the whole of the time which is still before them and which is given to them in common. To enter upon marriage is the of renounce the possibility of leaving it. (p.203)

6. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, this is decisive for the question of its genesis. It is now made manifest that to be concluded and lived out in freedom, marriage requires from both participants free and mutual love. And we further maintain that it is not their love for each other but God’s calling and gift which is the true basis of marriage. (213)

This essay represents what might be called a radical friendly amendment to the revisionists by exploring a hitherto unexamined logical leap in the famous story line. To be fancy about it for a moment, what secularization theory assumes is that religious belief comes ontologically first for people and that it goes on to determine or shape other things they do — including such elemental personal decisions as whether they marry and have children or not. Implied here is a striking, albeit widely assumed, view of how one social phenenomenon powers another: that religious believers are more likely to produce families because religious belief somehow comes first.

And therein lies a real defect with the conventional story line about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe. For what has not been explained, but rather assumed throughout that chain of argument, is why the causal relationship between belief and practice should always run that way instead of the other, at least some of the time. It is as if recent intellectual history had lined up all the right puzzle pieces — modernity, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking and absent families — only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but leaves something critical out. This essay is a preliminary attempt to supply that missing piece. It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over secularization.

In brief, it is not only possible but highly plausible that many Western European Christians did not just stop having children and families because they became secular. At least some of the time, the record suggests, they also became secular because they stopped having children and families. If this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it.

Mary Eberstadt How the West really lost God

And this is the sevenhundred post on this blog. Fecund in more than one sense then.

Not only do we have an entirely novel definition of marriage that excludes procreation from its purview. That would be dramatic enough, since it shifts the focus of our most basic social institute from inter-generational concerns to those of present personal gratification, and in doing so eliminates many of the responsibilities that belong to marriage. But we also have the novel idea that the state has the power to re-invent marriage by adopting and enforcing this definition. By claiming such a power the Canadian state has drawn marriage and the family into a captive orbit. It has reversed the gravitational field between the family and the state, putting itself at odds with the founding principles of Canada and with the notion of free men and free women. It has effectively made every man, woman and child a chattel of the state, by turning their most fundamental human connections into mere legal constructs at the state’s disposal. It has transformed those connections from divine gifts into gifts of the state.

Douglas Farrow Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage. Yup, this is the Douglas Farrow of Ascension and Ecclesia.

Read lots more Farrow at the wonderful Institute for for the Study of Marriage, Law and Culture

Anastasia de Waal argues that while Labour thinks it is being liberal, its position on the family is actually highly conservative. Its policy is currently determined not by its own priorities, but by Conservative policy and past notions of the repressive ‘traditional’ family. Labour therefore considers family structure to be solely Conservative moralising territory and marriage irrelevant to 21st century policymaking. Instead, the government has focused on celebrating so-called ‘diversity’. But Labour’s nominally inclusive stance is actually blurring the lines between the poor family and what Labour imagines to be the ‘modern’ family:

‘What are construed [by Labour] as positive manifestations of diversity are in fact very often negative manifestations of deprivation and limiting circumstances. This is not to deny that new opportunities to end unhappy relationships and a greater freedom of choice in family life have positively affected families right across the socio-economic spectrum. However, non-marriage and parental separation in the UK today disproportionately represent the problematic, as opposed to the progressive, elements of family diversity.’

Labour’s misjudged resistance to acknowledging the importance of family structure is undermining its equalising agenda, perpetuating inequality between both the classes and the sexes.

Lower marriage rates and greater numbers of cohabitating parents are strongly connected to what Anastasia de Waal terms ‘structural poverty’, that is, unemployment-related poverty incurring further poverty through parental separation. The relationship between unemployment and parental separation is hugely significant because child poverty in Britain is concentrated in single-parent households.

Labour’s treatment of fathers as ‘optional extras’ is exacerbating difficulties for women and children. Whilst the aim has been to be non-judgemental to mothers and children in separated families, in reality the effect has been to legitimise irresponsible fathers.

Civitas Marriage in modern Britain: out of reach, not out of fashion

The Bible gives one consequential answer to these two queries: the human being is created in the image of God, and God himself is love. It is therefore the vocation to love that makes the human person an authentic image of God: man and woman come to resemble God to the extent that they become loving people.

This fundamental connection between God and the person gives rise to another: the indissoluble connection between spirit and body: in fact, the human being is a soul that finds expression in a body and a body that is enlivened by an immortal spirit.

The body, therefore, both male and female, also has, as it were, a theological character: it is not merely a body; and what is biological in the human being is not merely biological but is the expression and the fulfilment of our humanity.

Likewise, human sexuality is not juxtaposed to our being as person but part of it. Only when sexuality is integrated within the person does it successfully acquire meaning.

Thus, these two links, between the human being with God and in the human being, of the body with the spirit, give rise to a third: the connection between the person and the institution.

Indeed, the totality of the person includes the dimension of time, and the person's "yes" is a step beyond the present moment: in its wholeness, the "yes" means "always", it creates the space for faithfulness. Only in this space can faith develop, which provides a future and enables children, the fruit of love, to believe in human beings and in their future in difficult times.

The freedom of the "yes", therefore, reveals itself to be freedom capable of assuming what is definitive: the greatest expression of freedom is not the search for pleasure without ever coming to a real decision; this apparent, permanent openness seems to be the realization of freedom, but it is not true. The true expression of freedom is the capacity to choose a definitive gift in which freedom, in being given, is fully rediscovered.

In practice, the personal and reciprocal "yes" of the man and the woman makes room for the future, for the authentic humanity of each of them. At the same time, it is an assent to the gift of a new life.

Therefore, this personal "yes" must also be a publicly responsible "yes", with which the spouses take on the public responsibility of fidelity, also guaranteeing the future of the community. None of us, in fact, belongs exclusively to himself or herself: one and all are therefore called to take on in their inmost depths their own public responsibility.

Marriage as an institution is thus not an undue interference of society or of authority. The external imposition of form on the most private reality of life is instead an intrinsic requirement of the covenant of conjugal love and of the depths of the human person.

His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Ecclesial Convention of Rome 2005

On May 15 the California Supreme Court â??overturned the gay marriage ban,â?? according to news media reports. What the court really did was command a radical redefinition of marriage, the most basic institution of any society. It brought same-sex â??marriageâ?? to the largest state in the union and front and center into the presidential campaign.

The arrogance of this judicial fiat cannot be overstated.

The 4-3 decision directly overrules the will of the people of California expressed in a 2000 referendum, when 61.4 percent voted that â??[o]nly a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.â?? The justices seem to have forgotten that they are merely interpreters of the law. Instead they styled themselves as Platoâ??s philosopher kings stooping to undo the will of those they deem less enlightened than they are.

As Heritage Foundation scholars Jennifer Marshall, Daniel Patrick Moloney, and Matthew Spalding wrote, the decision â??is long on public policy preferences, and extremely short on law.â??

According to E.J. Dionne writing in the Washington Post, Carol Corrigan, one of the dissenting justices, is a supporter of same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, she sees such judicial overreach as the breaking of the courtsâ?? â??covenantâ?? with the people of California. According to Dionne, Corrigan:

â?¦argued that in a democracy, â??the people should be given a fair chance to set the pace of change without judicial interference.â?? She added: â??If there is to be a new understanding of the meaning of marriage in California, it should develop among the people of our state and find its expression at the ballot box.â??

God bless her!

Alan Wisdom & Jim Tonkowich California Same-Sex â??Marriageâ??: The Arrogance of the Judges, and the Silence of the Churches

and see James D. Berkley High Priests of Secularity