“People have a need for the witness of those for whom marriage represents the fundamental blessing for their adult life”, says Archbishop Kevin MacDonald of Southwark in a pastoral letter sent to the faithful of the London diocese in recent days and reported by the weekly “The Catholic Herald”. “Church and family writes the Archbishop are intimately linked. When a man and a woman celebrate their marriage, they pledge to remain faithful to each other for the rest of their life. And it is in their love that they reflect the love that God feels for them. And however much they may err, the errors they make do not negate the truth of this teaching”. It is just to the situations of marriage crisis that Msgr. MacDonald dedicates a part of his letter: “There are stories he writes that need to be known and voices that need to be heard: the voices of those, for example, who have experienced that marriage was not revealed as the blessing it promised to be, of those who have suffered the breakdown of their marriage and those who as single parents continue to raise their family with great devotion”. To ensure that the image of the family is presented more by the witnesses of Catholic faithful than by the accounts in the media, the English Bishops’ Conference has invited the dioceses to organize a diocesan day called “Church and family life”.
