Instrumentum Laboris, on the results of the survey on the Synod of the Family, just came out. The news is not good, by any means. Catechisis on the institution of the human family has failed in the last 40 years, not just in America and Europe where it was attacked by the sexual revolution, but everywhere, in a lot of strange ways. Divorce, contraception, abortion, and gay marriage rule in North America and Europe- but male family abandonment is rampant everywhere, and in Africa and Asia it's plagued by polygamy, not homosexuality, being the alternative family structure (you think divorce in the United States is bad, try being one of eight Islamic wives whose husband has decided to go on Jihad and blow himself up in the town square!), not to mention Latin America with problems with marriage extremely young (teens and even pre-teens) and machismo leading to a culture of rape.
In the face of this, it's anthropology that the Bishops are turning to, which while a good intellectual start, doesn't exactly warm the heart and doesn't appeal to today's soundbyte, philosophically free and emotion based culture.
But one area hasn't yielded to the dictatorship of relativism and consent: Popular music still longs for monogamous, heterosexual relationships in a way that the modern and postmodern zeitgiest can't fulfill. So perhaps, that's where we should start: In a love so strong that it even gives one another fertility, to create new life. That is the one arena where traditional marriage still has the ability to be superior- perhaps the only area.
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