With new words

Some 100,000 people in need of help every year: these are the figures of the activity of the Catholic Centres for Marriage, Family and Life in Germany. The Centres provide assistance to people in difficulty, especially to married and non-married couples undergoing critical situations. The centres’ future plans include up-stepping support to couple relations, despite the lack of resources. This important aspect was underlined in Berlin by Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky, President of the Commission for Marriage and Family of Germany’s Bishops’ Conference and by Erhard Scholl, President of the Federal Association of Catholic Counselling for Marriage, Family and Life, on January 13. In an interview with Germany’s Catholic news agency, Sterzinsky and Scholl drew an outline of the current situation in Germany along with upcoming challenges. Follows a brief excerpt of the interview.Bringing peace. “Some 100,000 people throughout Germany seek the help of our counselling centres”, Scholl said, referring to the counsellors’ activity. “There are waiting lists since the offer doesn’t meet the demand. Dioceses finance most of the service with 28 million Euro per year”. “There’s a lack of funds”, cardinal Sterzinsky remarked. “Even when funding wasn’t lacking as much as it is now, it was often said that for counselling on marriage, the family and life, there wasn’t enough financial support, since there is no public funding. Nonetheless, it must be said that our activity is based on pastoral care, differently from other social services. Unless couples are helped consolidate their marriage, all the appeals to faithfulness will be lacking full credibility”, he added. In addition to counselling activity, according to Cardinal Sterzinsky, the Church can help “bring peace within family life, to promote unity”. The professional life of both parents affects family communication and leads adolescents and the youth to seek it elsewhere. Thus the family is often considered only a place to sleep. I consider this the reason for difficulties”, he remarked. “This is why we ought to grant more areas of encounter for people enabling them to experience the benefits of being together as a family”. Living together. As relates to the growing divide between civil marriages and the sacrament of marriage, Cardinal Sterzkinsky said “the significance of Church marriage ought to be conveyed in a language that is understood by modern man, enabling him to understand that God is within it and that it fulfils the love covenant between God and the Church. In this direction lies my appeal to bishops and theologians: we always ought to bear in mind that ‘the serious aspect’ is not the fact of fighting and divorcing. Rather, it consists in living together an entire life. There is no marriage without a crisis and there can be no marriage without forgiveness. But ‘the serious case’ consists in overcoming crises with forgiveness and living a long happy life together”. “The Church principle of a life-long union corresponds to the need of many people”, Scholl added. “Separations mark the ending of a long period of suffering and uncertainty. When during counselling activity a couple is asked what most united them, and they are asked to describe what they perceive as being good and worthy of love in the other, people are personally touched, since these topics are rarely addressed nowadays. If the couple manages to recover communication, it will recover the roots of their relationship”. Support to everyone. “Counsellors must not exclude those couples that have already decided to divorce: we aren’t here only for those to whom things worked fine and smoothly”, His Eminence pointed out. “We’re here also for those who underwent difficult moments in life. It’s not up to us to judge whether they are responsible for the divorce. Our duty is to help them. These couples must not be stigmatised. At the same time, in granting our support to those who failed, we can’t refrain from saying: try seriously and with all possible means, to be faithful and to make the most of all occasions to resist, asking the most of yourselves before making demands to the other”.