Intervening at the ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Austrian Institute for Marriage and the Family, held in Vienna on 8 October, bishop Klaus Küng, head of the commission for the family of the Austrian Episcopal Conference, spoke of the importance of the family and current social trends, such as cohabitation and ‘marriages’ between homosexuals. “A society may be healthy only if it promotes the ideal realizable by a family with many children, based on marriage”, declared the bishop. It’s a model, he said, to which “it is worth dedicating ourselves” at the level of social policy, by supporting “the widespread desire” for a “traditional” family life. The situation of marriage and the family is, according to Küng, “dramatic” throughout Europe; births are falling and divorces increasing at a rate “unimaginable thirty years ago”. In the cardinal’s view, however, it is possible to reverse the trend: in this regard, faith has a “fundamental role”. The State too is called to play its part: “The current crisis of pension and healthcare systems can only be solved in the long term by bigger families”, he declared. But the provision of better financial support to parents “is not the only decisive factor” to obtain a growth in the birth rate: what’s needed is more fundamentally “a change of mentality towards life, relationships and love”.
