Archbishop of Sydney

Marriage Sunday

Saint Mary's Cathedral, Sydney
2 Kg 5:14-17; 2 Tim 2:8-13; Lk 17:11-19

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
14/10/2007

Today we celebrate Marriage Sunday and 35 couples, especially those whose marriages were blessed in the Cathedral and those celebrating important anniversaries are with us, to thank God for the blessings they have received and to ask God’s continued protection on them and on their children, grandchildren and possibly even great grandchildren. One couple has been married 69 years. At the other extreme one couple was married 7 months ago.

The gospel story today is about the ten lepers who were cured by Our Lord and the fact that only one of them, a foreigner and Samaritan, came back to say thanks.  The incident does not tell us something about the Jews, but reveals human nature to us. Probably most or all of the cured were grateful. They were too busy and preoccupied to go and say thanks!  Obviously the incident was remembered and included in the gospel to remind us of the duty to be grateful to all our benefactors ranging from God himself to our neighbours (if they are good neighbours! Should we be grateful in any sense for bad neighbours?), and leprosy was significant only because it was then incurable and remained so until fairly recently.

Gratitude, regularly expressed should be one of the hallmarks of our Catholic community, an antidote to the self-centredness, the ideal of those silly persons who claim to have won their success all by themselves, which is regularly foisted upon us. It is good to have these many married couples here this morning at Mass to witness to the place God has in their lives as they give thanks and pray for the future.

As a proud Australian I still believe Australia is one of the best places in the world to live at least for the great majority of our population. The general living standards have improved and an increasing percentage are now able to travel widely. But there is strong evidence that our social capital, our spiritual inheritance, is being diminished in many ways. At the centre of this damage is the changed and diminished role of marriage and the family.

A few years ago a couple of authors explained that our culture of modernization, efficiency and short term satisfaction has reduced “the idea and reality of marriage to little more than an affectionate sexual relationship of tentative commitment and uncertain duration”. This is plain, blunt speaking, but it is coming closer and closer to the truth: “tentative commitment and uncertain duration”.

Perhaps 75% of young people who marry are living together beforehand and many others live together and never tie the knot or break-up and move on to other relationships. In many of these de facto arrangements the level of commitment is quite different among the partners, with one or more of them being tentative and uncertain.

The absolute number of divorces in Australia has stabilised or even diminished but the likelihood of divorces is climbing steadily, up to 46% for marriages contracted in 1999, according to are estimate. Our fertility rate too has slightly increased, although it remains below the replacement rate needed to maintain our population.

Mainline Catholics believe that the Christian view of life e.g. of marriage and family, reflects the natural law, placed in nature by our Creator God.  When the natural law is respected human beings flourish. There are easy examples where we recognize the truth of this claim. If lying is commonplace and approved, communication is imperilled. If the strong can use violence to impose their will on the weak, we have the law of the jungle, not civilization.  In other words in the world of human affairs we have a similar situation to the balance and respect required in our dealings with our physical environment. If we get things wrong and abuse physical creation, massive pollution and environmental degradation follow. Moral pollution has the same effect on our spiritual environment, or our social capital.

In response to these challenges, Catholics and indeed all serious Christians should be aware of the advantages traditional marriage and family life bring to society and be prepared to explain these advantages to outsiders and to the young, as well as living them out in practice.

Marriage has certainly been organized by God for the next generation, because a permanent union of the biological mother and father remains the best protection for children. St. Augustine, who fathered a child, Adeodatus, in a de facto relationship before his conversion, claimed God invented marriage to ensure fathers would be interested in their children!

Marriage makes an irreplaceable contribution to social harmony, nation building and binding the different generations together. We now know from many studies, as well as intuition, that high rates of divorce as well as high conflict marriages, especially where there is violence, hurt children. Evidence no longer allows the claim that divorce is regularly better for the children.

A good society works to reduce the suffering of children, because children are great gifts from God who bring equally important responsibilities, especially for their parents. We must never ignore this fact.

No family is perfect. There is never a pearl in the oyster without some grit and no matter how much grit we find, we all have to persevere.

May God bless all our families and may we realise much more fully how many advantages good families bring to their members and society generally.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.