Our People

Introduction
Imagine the year is 2024. The revolution is over. The legal and social understandings of marriage, family and sexuality have been stretched to a point beyond imagination only a few decades ago. There is a sexual free-for-all and rates of sexual activity are at an all-time high; courts and governments have held that even children have a right to sex without interference from parents or social workers;  some even advocate sex with domestic pets.  While sex rates are on the up-and-up, marriage rates have hit an all-time low, with fewer and fewer people marrying at all.  This is despite the fact that many jurisdictions now allow men to marry men, women to marry women,  transsexuals to marry spouses of either sex,  live people to marry dead people  or to have children with them.  No marriage need last more than a year, after which its extension is optional.  With serial polygamy widespread for so long, concurrent polygamy is coming.
Its 2024 and what Peter Berger called 'the war against the family' and Patrick Buchanan dubbed 'the suicide of the West' have been consummated.  Despite all the sex, birth rates are in free fall, well below demographic replacement level.  Many of those now getting married decide from the beginning to have no children or at most one or two. Pregnancy rates remain surprisingly high, despite widespread sex-ed, contraception and infertility. It is abortion that keeps down the birthrate and so no real brakes have been put on that practice for decades. Over-the-counter abortifacients have successfully blurred the line between contraception and abortion and helped hide the real abortion rate. Those who do have children often do so as a kind of life-style project, and then only with the aid of considerable technology, first to avoid and later to achieve conception, and then to monitor developments to ensure that the product measures up to requirements.  It is increasingly rare for children, once born, to grow up with both their parents married to each other and living in the same home as them.  All in all, marriage and family as they were known in former times are disappearing.
Will 2024 really be like that? I don't know: what I do know is that 2004 already is. A week ago the Australian Parliament added to the Marriage Act a definition of marriage as "the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life".  It is a sign of just how far we have come that such a clarification of the law was thought necessary and that some of our leaders even opposed it. Some senators described the move as 'regressive', 'indecent', 'terrible', 'disgusting', 'destructive' and 'anti-human'; they described the promoters of the bill as 'heartless', 'bigoted', 'hate-filled', 'backward-looking, outdated, old-fashioned, mean, nasty and totally out-of-touch'.  Senator Greig denounced the bill's promoters as "mostly fundamentalist Christians and other assorted rightwing and antigay groups", who offered "not one single, solitary, sensible or provable argument against same-sex marriage" and sought rather "to reinforce fear and loathing of homosexual people" so as to entrench "heterosexual supremacy" and "sexuality apartheid".
At a risk of being called a fundamentalist advocate of the new apartheid with not one single, solitary argument to my name, I want tonight to argue in favour of the traditional construction of marriage and the family in both law and society. I believe I can do so without advocacy of hate and injustice, which form no part of the Christian Gospel. Indeed I am convinced that Christian concern to strengthen and support marriage and the marriage-based family does not mean we deplore all other friendships. Nor do we ignore the heroism of those people who struggle to support children without the aid of a stable marriage or who fail in various ways to live up to God's plan for the human person, sexuality, marriage and the family. In fact the churches have long been in the forefront of helping just such people. As Senator Jacinta Collins reminded the Senate during its recent debate, the Catholic Church teaches that "men and women with homosexual tendencies must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided."
When Christians deny that same-sex relationships are equivalent to marital ones, or that homosexual acts are equivalent to conjugal ones, or that the manufacture of laboratory children for single parents is equivalent to procreation through genuinely marital acts, we are not discriminating unjustly: we are recognizing relevant differences.  We do not deny the genuine love between some people of the same sex or the importance of friendships other than marital ones or that some unmarried persons make good parents or that some married ones make bad parents. We do not pretend that dysfunctional relationships are peculiar to the unmarried or that all marriages or marriage-based families are honkey-dorey. And we do not imagine that sound legal definitions and social policies will be enough to guarantee healthy relationships in our country. They are only part of the antidote to the current confusion about marriage and the family and only serve to highlight the wider evangelical and educational challenge that is before us.

How did we get here?
Marriage and the family have over the past four decades been the subjects of radical social experimentation, led and fed by four revolutions:
  Stage 1: the sex-on-demand revolution of the 1960s me-generation denied that sex has any intrinsic meaning or limits, let alone a marital significance. With the rapid adoption of a contraceptive-abortion mentality and practice, the West was able to sustain a copulation explosion at the same time as a population implosion. This denied even Christians the traditional boundary notions that 'sex is for marriage' and 'marriage is for family'.
  Stage 2: the divorce-on-demand revolution of the hedonistic '70s cast to the wind the notion of life-long commitments and the attendant self-sacrifice, except as a sentimental ideal for the newlywed and the religious. From the 1970s the divorce rate spiralled, robbing spouses and children of the experience of permanence and even Christians of the 'for life' horizon for marriage and family.
  Stage 3: the children-on-demand revolution of the 1980s built on the contraceptive-abortion explosion of the '60s and '70s. It saw the laboratory manufacture and quality-testing of children as commodities and the use of infertility technologies not merely to space children but now to prevent them altogether for a new generation of 'DINKs'. Paul VI's prophesy of a radical break between love-making and life-making, sex and children, now came to its fulfilment as even Christians were denied a sense of the mystery and givenness of fertility and children.
  Stage 4: the marriage-and-family-is-what-you-make-it revolution, which began even before the 1990s with the recognition of 'de facto' relationships in law. From the 1990s other relationships such as same-sex ones have increasingly been put on an equal footing with marriage, and various domestic arrangements equated with the family in law and society. Any remaining privileges and protections of marriage and the marriage-based family have been systematically removed or else extended to so broad a range of other relationships that marriage gets no 'special treatment' at law or in social policy. Marriage and children are now seen not just as optional extras but, like all options, as rights for any adult who wants them. Individuals can have children with or without marital acts, and enjoy all the signs and privileges of marriage with or without a lifetime heterosexual marital commitment, openness to children etc. The notions of marriage and family are being expanded to the point of triviality. This has robbed even many Christians of a coherent understanding of what marriage and family are.
These several developments are much more radical than they seem to us because, like frogs being gradually boiled alive, we often fail to notice what is happening until it is too late to protest, let alone jump out of the water! All four revolutions continue to unfold themselves and feed each other and, in the process, contribute to widespread misunderstanding of what marriage and family are and to the breakdown of many marriages and families. As confusion mounts the institutions are weakened further.
Recent rewriting of history by activists notwithstanding, every known culture in history, every major religion, and many secular philosophies have understood 'marriage' as "the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life" whereby they undertake to live sexually and otherwise as husband and wife with a view to family.  Despite cultural variations, 'family' has consistently meant a community of two or more generations related by blood, law and affections, based on marriage and sharing a domestic life.  Though not the only relationships recognised and respected, marriage and the family have long been seen as so crucial for the flourishing of spouses, children and the wider community, that they have deserved and been given special public recognition, regulation and support. For the rest of this lecture I want to unpack something of significance of these aspects of marriage and the family and their implications for the future, especially in view of recent trends and controversies.
Some people say that the desire of many people who do not fit the traditional understanding of marriage and family to share in those titles and attendant privileges represents a kind of reverence for traditional marriage and family. Some say that heterosexual marriages are unaffected by what other people do or call marriage. Yet as I will argue tonight, these recent moves, far from giving honour to marriage and the family by mimicking them and extending their benefits to others, or being of indifferent effect upon the already-married, actually add to the widespread confusion about what marriage and family are, dilute further the precious little marriage-specific support there is, and threaten what are already fragile institutions. The future of those institutions-and the many people affected by them-will require greater clarity about what marriage and family are and a greater willingness to give them some preferential treatment.

 

Marriage is "the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life" whereby they undertake to live sexually and otherwise as husband and wife
When Catholics talk about a 'vocations crisis' they mean a shortage of priests and religious. Yet there is a worse vocations crisis at the moment: the crisis in marriage. Fewer and fewer people get married at all and of those who do, fewer stay married. The marital breakdown rate and divorce rate are now so high in the West that it has raised in some theologians' minds the possibility that for the first time in history a significant proportion of people cannot validly married. The reason: because in their heart of hearts they believe that "marriage is for ever, so long as it 'works'." The divorce option is now so deeply ingrained in us that it is hard for any young person today to engage in the sort of total self-giving that marriage requires. The escape-hatch is always there in the subconscious. And in the meantime years of 'living together' and other experiences have habituated would-be spouses in a debilitating non-commitment.
It is not that people are selfish, precisely, though many no doubt are. Rather it is that in our culture nothing is forever, nothing for keeps any more, whether that is relationships, work, housing, causes, beliefs, morals. All is transient, revisable, renegotiable. However damaged so many individuals and our community have been by the divorce-on-demand revolution, we maintain the unrealism of expecting near-perfect relationships, though without compromise to anyone's will and without total commitment on either side. All the while there is a legal and socially acceptable "Get out of gaol free" card when the relationship no longer satisfies. If marriage, family, priesthood and consecrated life are to have a future, we must learn again how to sacrifice some of our beloved autonomy and how to commit, for life, heart and soul, persevering even when the going gets tough, even when the warm feelings are missing. We must learn again what "to love, honour and obey" means and what "till death do us part" means.
On the classical account marriage is not only for life but also for a man and a woman, i.e. two people (not one or three or more), of adult age (that is, rational, sexually mature beings able to commit to and live a marriage), who are free to marry (that is, not otherwise committed), of opposite sex, and both alive and consenting at the time. Those who argue for 'gay marriage', marriage to a corpse (as has been permitted in France ), and other exotics, either do not understand marriage or do not understand other relationships. Not all friendships are marriage and not all people are marriageable. Homogenising marital and non-marital friendships devalues both, trying to force the non-marital into a marital mould and vice versa and creating inappropriate expectations on both sides. But children apart, what is relevance to spouses that they are of opposite sex?
First, on any sound anthropology of the sexes there are real differences between men and women. Much has been said about this throughout the history of law and politics, science and the arts, psychology and sociology. Despite the confusions of the contemporary world, even the freudians, most feminists and pop writing on men being Martians and women Venetians, agree that there are essential differences between men and women, and that these go beyond genitalia. In theology this point has been richly developed by the current pontiff whose deep insights into the theology of the body has spawned a whole industry.  Now if these many traditions are right about the essential differences between the sexes, marriage presents a unique challenge to human beings: to deal with the otherness of a spouse whose sexuality one will never fully understand. Only the male-female relationship allows the discovery and expression of both the similarities and the differences, especially the complementarities, of temperaments and rôles of both sexes in that relationship. Same-sex couples commit instead to someone more like another self, psychosexually speaking. Were this to become widespread it would have important social consequences for the understanding and relationship between the sexes.
Secondly, whereas married couples commonly give up much of their same sex world (e.g. 'going out with the mates') for each other and for their new family, 'gay couples' or other cohabitors often continue as before. Only genuine marriage (and family) seems to have the power to draw forth that kind of self-sacrificial commitment told in the way marriage and family change all the relationships that the couple had individually with others before the marriage.
Thirdly, marriage is a place where the 'eros' of both sexes can be tamed, enriched and directed to the service of their vocation and the common good and where human life and love will most easily be understood as 'gifts' or trusts received rather than 'projects' chosen. There we learn to be spouses and parents and siblings, and to subordinate sexual and other desires to the common good of the marriage and the family.
Fourthly, marriage is a school of intimacy between persons of the opposite sex. In the contemporary world 'intimates' have been reduced to 'partners'-with all the impersonality this business terminology suggests-or to short-term 'compatibles', meaning: "I take you on my terms". The marital exchange, on the other hand described by Pope John Paul II as 'the gift of the self', promotes certain crucial values such as decisiveness, trust, hope, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, fidelity; other relationships are unlikely to cultivate such virtues so effectively and may even encourage contrary vices. The loss of this primal experience of community and of this school for certain virtues is potentially very damaging not just for the individuals concerned, but also for society. It is very difficult to 'build community' with people who have never been schooled in the qualities of character it requires or where their most fundamental relationships have been reduced to contract autonomy, and compatibility.
Fifthly, marriage is the place where the rôles of husband and wife are learnt and enacted. It is of course highly contentious at present as to what these rôles are; it is perhaps more difficult in 2004 than at any time in history to write the job description for a 'husband' or a 'wife'. But to the extent that there are real differences between the sexes there will be real differences in the ways they espouse and turn in the ways they parent. It would be naïve to imagine that the rôles of both husband and wife (and so of father and mother) are entirely interchangeable or can readily be performed by persons of either sex without loss to themselves or others, or without very considerable supplementation.

Marriage is good for the spouses themselves
Philosophers and theologians have identified marriage (and the marriage-based family) as one of the basic goods of human flourishing.  It is the purpose (or end or for-the-sake-of) which explains an enormous range of human choices, activities, commitments, institutions and policies. Marriage is self-evidently and intrinsically choice-worthy: no further explanation is needed as to why people do many of the things that they do than that it is 'for the sake of their marriage', their spouse, their family, or someone else's, or the very institutions themselves. Marriage is something we enjoy 'for its own sake', irreducible to other goods or ends, even if it is also a means to other goods such as friendship and life, work and leisure. That marriage is a good of human beings is something 'given' in our nature rather than merely a preference of individuals or communities. It is an aspect of every person's flourishing-even those who are unmarried-and one of that range of goods which everyone seeks to realize within the confines of their own nature, circumstances and commitments. Most people find their vocation and hopefully their happiness in being married, thereby making it a central life commitment, the goal of many of their day-to-day choices, and the structuring principle of their identity or 'narrative unity'.
To say that marriage (and the marriage-based family) is a basic human good is not to say that participation in it is reasonably to be pursued by everybody, at all times, and in all circumstances, at whatever cost to self and others, by whatever means. If that were so, nuns would be required to jump the convent walls, the monogamous to try polygamy, and everyone to have as many children as physically possible. But some means of participating in marriage and family are unreasonable (such as adulterous seduction or abduction or IVF); and there are other important values which might preclude marriage and family for a particular person. Marriage does not trump all other goods in our choices. So while there is always a good reason to pursue marriage and family, whether for ourselves or for others, there may well concurrently be good reasons not to do so, such as our other proper goals or responsibilities.
Of course there are many ways of participating in the good of marriage: as a consecrated celibate I do so by preparing people for marriage, both remotely and proximately, by celebrating their marriages liturgically, by preaching, teaching and lobbying about marriage and the family, by mediating for the married at the altar of God and in the rest of my prayer-life, and by being invited by them to share in their family lives in various ways. Yet I will never be married myself, except in the spiritual sense of being, as a Christian, part of Christ's bride the Church and, as a priest, in persona Christi a husband to that bride. But I am not literally married, and that could be instructive to those who think the only way to dignify a state in life is to call it marriage.
People today focus a lot of their energy and their personal wealth on houses. Yet they are often at a loss as to how to make their house a home and they often underestimate the real value of a home even as they overestimate the value of a house. Leon Kass (now Chair of the US President's Council on Bioethics) wrote of the home (or domestic household) as that nest and nursery of humanity-private, intimate and vulnerable. Though its roots are the needs of bodily life-nurture, protection, reproduction, and then protection and nurture of the young-it provides for more than the body. A richly woven fabric of nature and convention, it is established by law to nurture our nature. It is sustained by customs that humanize the human animal, engendering love and friendship, speech and education, choice and awareness, and shared beliefs and feelings… 
Thus while houses are what you make them, homes have certain given meanings and responsibilities. Before we can extend the notion of a home and a family to various strangers and make various metaphorical and extended uses of those terms, we need first to experience a home and a family into which we can invite others and treat them 'as family', where they too can be 'at home'.
There is much more that could be said philosophically and theologically about why marriage is good for people and what the implications of this are for personal morality and public policy. There is also a huge weight of sociological evidence on the importance of marriage for home-building and for the fulfilment of the spouses. Put simply it says: married people are generally healthier and happier than their divorced, never-married, cohabiting or same-sex counterparts.  They live longer and healthier; they are less likely to engage in "problem drinking" or other high risk behaviours, and more likely to engage in responsible, healthy behaviours; they are less likely to experience sexual dysfunction or STDs and are more likely to be sexually satisfied; they have lower rates of depression and other psychological and psychiatric disorders, cope better with stressful events and are overall substantially healthier psychologically; they are more socially productive and less alienated from their work; they have lower rates of suicide and fatal accidents; they are more likely to invest emotionally in their relationships and develop partner-specific relational skills; they are on average more physically, emotionally and spiritually satisfied; and they report that marriage gives their life a sense of meaning and purpose.  There is no evidence that pseudo-marriages yield these public and private benefits.
The future of marriage and the family will crucially depend upon a continuing clear understanding of marriage as an exclusive and life-long commitment of a man and a woman to live sexually and otherwise as husband and wife. To extend the notion of marriage by excluding one of these elements is to risk undermining personal and social conceptions of this relationship and weakening existing marriages. Put baldly: if everyone is married, no-one is.

 

Marriage is a commitment with a view to family-a domestic community of two or more generations related by blood, law and affections which is good for the children
Recently Paul Gray has written very wisely on the dangers that the 'gay marriage' idea may further institutionalise childlessness in marriage.  The traditional notion that marriage is a commitment with a view to-or at least openness to-family has been challenged since the sexual revolution and the children-on-demand revolution which I treated earlier in this paper. The effects have been dramatic. Two months ago the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that our birthrate has plummeted to 1.73 babies per woman, the lowest on record.  That's half the rate it was four decades ago and far below replacement level of 2.1. Principally for this reason our median age-currently 36 years-will rise to 50 in the next few decades. This worries governments and economists, and there are lots of proposals about stemming the tide.  Yet there are powerful forces operating for our demographic demise.
To take just one example, also in the news this year: the 'morning after pill' Postinor-2. Oddly, if you want a milder dose of this potent drug (to take as a contraceptive), you still need a prescription: but if you multiply the dose several times, to levels thought risky for some women and deadly for any already-conceived children, you can get it over-the-counter in a pharmacy. The Federal Health Minister caused a furore when he modestly suggested requiring medical advice before giving out such potent drugs. He was concerned that girls as young as 13 may get the drug with little or no information or supervision. Sydney's Sun Herald had reported that pharmacies cannot or do not provide the expected counselling and that, in at least one case, a cosmetician was dispensing it!  Yet the government of Victoria was quick to lead the other states in their refusal to have the morning-after pill resheduled.
Behind the campaign for over-the-counter 'emergency' contraception is the notion that new children are intruders, the enemy, something nasty to be warded off at all costs, even with hazardous drugs. Their appearance-indeed the very thought of them-sounds alarm bells. Instead of being socialised to love our lives, our marriages and our children we are increasingly being taught by our culture to fear our fertility, to withhold it even from our spouses, to drug-bomb it out of existence. Instead of being encouraged to be generous toward the future, we are rewarded for living only for today. Australian society is becoming sterile in the process.
Of course there are still some married people who want children, some who are even open to more than one or two. And there are yuppies who postpone them but would still expect to have one some day. And there are some 'gay couples' who want them, perhaps with a bit of lab help or adoption. And there are singles such as Lisa Meldrum who famously persuaded an Australian court that having a lab child is her right even if she is single and the child would be fatherless. But is it really irrelevant to children whether their parents are related to them or to each other? Is a single parent or two parents of the same sex just as good? For several reasons I think it is desirable that a child's parents, where possible, be a man and a woman, married to each other:
  the male-female relationship that constitutes marriage enables children to come to be, through procreation; any other relationship requires artifice to achieve pregnancy, often at some risk to the child;
  the natural bonds between spouses, between parents, and between parents and their children, are bonds not just of choice, but also bodiliness, emotions, instinct and geneaology; such bonds strengthen each other and normally draw forth from all concerned great generosity and self-sacrifice in the care of each other;
  the presence of a male and a female parent allows children to experience and model masculinity and femininity, husbanding and wifing, fathering and mothering; single and same-sex parenting denies children some of these important experiences and models;
  the permanence which comprises marriage as a long-haul commitment is also crucial for the security of family members, especially for children who are dependent for many years; a non-permanent relationship endangers the economic and personal security and identity of the members;
  the commitment and self-sacrifice which constitute marriage are also a great advantage to the children, not only as the principal beneficiaries of much of the parents' commitment and self-sacrifice, but also as learners of these same virtues;
  the clear family lines which marriage and the marriage-based family provide go to the heart of people's sense of identity, rôles and how to relate to each other; other kinds of 'family' relationship complicate these for all the family members, especially for children;
  the love and care which the marriage-based family should provide is by far the most emotionally stable and economically secure arrangement for child rearing;
  in addition to children, the marriage-based family commonly provides for other dependents, such as the elderly and handicapped, because it builds an environment of care upon the sense of continuity with past generations, of belonging in the present, and of aspirations for the future.
No alternative family arrangement, bureaucracy, business or agency can fully substitute for the marriage-based family as the ideal place for personal formation, education in relating, and schooling in virtue for children. This is probably also true for adults. My claim, then, is that the marriage-based family directly provides various personal benefits for the children and for the spouses as parents and is the context for each attaining many other goods; these can only be achieved outside the marriage-based family, if at all, with very considerable supplementation.
Psychological and sociological experience backs up these philosophical claims.  Studies have found that children who grow up in marriage-based two-parent families: are healthier and have a longer life expectancy; receive greater parental attention; are better socialized; are economically advantaged as children; have a more geographically stable upbringing; are more likely to marry well themselves and have children within marriage; and report significantly higher-quality relationships with their parents as adults. Conversely, children who grow up in 'families' not based on marriage: are more likely to suffer economic, geographic, emotional and educational deprivation of various sorts, with attendant disadvantages to child development, and expectancy of health, life and happiness; are on average less well socialized and more likely to suffer disorientation, depression, anger, values bewilderment, delinquency or an inability to commit; are more likely to engage in substance abuse, violence, suicide and other risky behaviours; report significantly lower-quality relationships both as children and as adults; are much more likely to engage in early sexual activity, be sexually promiscuous and have unwanted pregnancies, abortions and ex-nuptial children; and are much less likely to marry and have children themselves.
A fortnight ago it was reported that this state's Infertility Treatment Authority has allowed 'infertility' treatment for fertile lesbians, a move I am sure Fr Harman would have deplored and regarded as clear contrary to the guiding principles of the legislation.  'Father hunger'-the expressed desire of fatherless children for a father-found most often in adolescents is surely prevalent enough in broken families without designing these situations from the start.  The lack of a father has been demonstrated to increase the risk of various 'deficiencies in well-being', such as: compromised learning by modelling about sexual differences, masculinity, fatherhood and relating; diminished learning in other areas, such as certain sporting, craft, intelligence quotient and academic skills; increased rates of accidents, unemployment, criminal activity and imprisonment; and much greater risk of suffering physical or sexual abuse.
Yet again human experience and sociology backs the philosophical and theological arguments for the proposition that the family is not just a social construct for which a married mother and father are an optional extra but nature's nursery for children. Notions such as 'spouse', 'husband', 'wife', 'parent', 'mother', 'father', 'family', 'household' and 'home' are natural realities which transcend social variations and private preferences, and all these terms relate to children. Yet it is striking how little attention the welfare of children (and of our relationship to them) has received in the four stage cultural revolution I identified at the beginning of this paper. The focus of each stage has been decidedly on the immediate desires of adults.  Were we to recover a sense of "the paramount interests of the child" we would quickly realize how important marriage and the marriage-based family really are and how much our children's future depends on them.

 

Marriage and the family are good for (or essential to) the wider community and so deserving of public recognition and support
In Catholic theology the marriage-based family is the natural unit of society. The Second Vatican Council described it as "the first and vital cell of society".  Pope John Paul II in his Letter of Families talked of the marriage-based family as "the primordial and, in a certain sense, 'sovereign' society" and, following St Thomas Aquinas, he has argued that the very legitimacy of society and the state rest upon their support for life and for families.  Aristotle argued that: "Man is by nature more inclined to live as a couple than to associate politically, since the family is something that precedes and is more necessary than the state."  Other secular thinkers make a similar point. As sociologist Robert Nisbet has remarked:
It should be obvious that family, not the individual, is the real molecule of society, the key link in the social chain of being. It is inconceivable to me that either intellectual growth or social order or the roots of liberty can possibly be maintained among a people unless the kinship tie is strong and has both functional significance and symbolic authority. On no single institution has the modern political state rested with more destructive weight than on the family. From Plato's obliteration of the family in his Republic, through Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, and Marx, hostility to family has been an abiding element in the West's political clerisy.
In the earlier parts of this paper I have outlined many benefits of marriage and the marriage-based family not only for the individuals concerned but for the community as a whole. The public recognition and regulation of human sexuality and the promotion of healthy marriage and family life are essential for the common good as the ordinary vehicles by which societies provide for the generation, nurture, education, moral formation, housing, healthcare and welfare of their younger citizens. They are also fundamental to employment, commerce, culture and politics. Society therefore has a compelling interest in promoting, sustaining, and preferring marriage and the marriage-based family, especially in times when they are under particular pressure or especially fragile.
Good marriages and families don't just happen. They require enormous commitment and need to be supported by an appropriate cultural, economic and political-juridical context. Thus the state has traditionally part-compensated married couples for the sacrifices which they make in order to stay married and raise a family, and has 'privileged' the institution by recognizing it as a civil reality, not easily dissolved, forbidding incest and bigamy, protecting family property by superannuation and inheritance laws, providing various tax breaks or endowments to support marriage and family, and so on. The social significance of 'gay couples' and other cohabitors is very different from that of marriage: such arrangements last for one generation only; they do not provide the same benefits or require same self-sacrifice for the couple themselves, the next generation or the community as a whole.

 

Marriage and the family are good for the salvation of those concerned and so deserving of ecclesial support
So far in this paper I have focussed largely on those elements of marriage as it has been understood by most major religions, philosophies and cultures to date, and why I think our society's future depends upon these elements being respected and protected. In this sense of marriage as a natural institution it has been described by Pope John Paul II as 'the primordial sacrament'.  But for Christians and especially Catholics there are additional reasons to want to protect and support sacramental marriage. For:
The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of their whole life, and which of its own very nature is ordered to the well-being of the spouses and to the procreation and upbringing of children, has, between the baptized, been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament.
But what is distinctive about sacramental marriage? Many of the aspects of natural marriage are healed and heightened and have a new significance under the New Law. The fact that the spouses are of opposite sexes and complement each other as husband and wife and are fruitful in raising up a new generation makes their relationship iconic of Christ's 'spousal' relationship with the Church in a way that no other relationship is.  By the power of that sacrament their bodies, minds and wills are united indissolubly and fruitfully in the service of each other and the wider Church. Marriage thus points them and us back to the original blessedness of that first marriage when Adam and Eve were at ease with God in Paradise.  And it also points them and us forward to that ultimate marriage, when Paradise Lost will be regained, and when all the saved shall be perfectly united to each other and to God in the marriage feast of the Lamb.
The love told in sacramental marriage and family is not just the sentimental love of the great classics of Western romance such as Neighbours: sacramental love is cross-shaped rather than heart-shaped, the persevering love told better in Easter cards rather than Valentine's cards. Marriage understood in this self-sacrificial way will be family-focussed, not in a way which demeans the intimacy and personal fulfilment proper to spouses, but in a way which finds much of that intimacy and fulfilment precisely in that most concrete enfleshment of their love in children. And this is about more than just 'preserving the species': bearing children of God, raising saints within a domestic church, and accepting responsibility for others in this new 'Holy Family' makes married love not only iconic of Christ's union with the Church but also of the open-ended love of the Trinity. The grace of the sacrament strengthens and sanctifies the couple for this ministry of spouse and parent, so that they mediate divine love and energy to each other not only on their wedding day when they are first 'priests' to each other, but also thereafter. Other relationships, vocations and ministries may confer some of these responsibilities and benefits but not all: only marriage and the marriage-based family are this distinctive path to holiness, service and salvation.

 

Conclusion
Imagine the year is 2024. The revolution is over. Having looked over the precipice at the prospect of the complete breakdown of the institutions of marriage and family, demographic suicide, and multiple personal and social sequelæ, marriage and family are in recovery mode-just as happened with the past baby-booms after plagues, wars and economic depressions had decimated families. Even in the dark days of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, despite all the confusion about the meaning of marriage and family, most people thought being a good spouse (of the old-fashioned husband and wife kind) and being a good parent (of the old-fashioned two parents married to each other and caring for their kids kind) was the most important element of human happiness.  Despite the best efforts of cultural elites in the courts, academies and media, the overwhelming majority of people and their political representatives still honoured genuine marriage and the marriage-based family and wanted church and state to support their continued existence.  The classical definition of marriage-entrenched in law back in 2004-has stood firm as "the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life," whereby they undertake to live sexually and otherwise as husband and wife with a view to raising a family.
What was the cause of this turnaround by 2024? Partly it was the strange grace which the four revolutions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries provided in challenging each and every aspect of marriage and the family as traditionally understood. This forced Christians and others to re-examine what marriage and family truly are, why they matter so much, and how they might be protected and strengthened. At that very time of crisis the world had also been blessed with the magisterium of Karol Józef Wojtyla. By 2024 he has been dead-a few years-but he is already honoured as a saint. His legacy has been successfully to equip a new generation to recover the truth of God's plan for the human person, marriage and the family.  The survival of some of the most basic human instincts and natural institutions ultimately depended upon the supernatural instinct for God and the divine institution of the Church.
In Australia it fell to the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family to unpack and promote that extraordinary legacy. By 2024 the Institute has come of age and its thousands of graduates are now active throughout the region at every level in family life, community groups and ecclesial movements, the universities, the professions, the arts, media, commerce, politics and the Church. The result has been a renaissance for marriage and the family, and so for every aspect of church and society. And John Paul the Great, interceding before the throne of God with his friend Fr Francis Harman, is very proud indeed.