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This is a letter to be read in all parishes in Minneapolis/St. Paul today, from the Bishops of Minnesota, in which the bishops take a united stand for marriage!!
(So much for the Rainbow Sash folks thinking that Flynn was their best buddy, see rainbowsashmovement.com/Pope_Stop_Gay_Bashing.html)
(So much for the Rainbow Sash folks thinking that Flynn was their best buddy, see rainbowsashmovement.com/Pope_Stop_Gay_Bashing.html)
Feast of the Holy Family
December 26, 2004
Introduction:
We have just celebrated the wonderful feast of Christmas and the minds and hearts of believers everywhere are focused on the love of God made present among us in the birth of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. With Simeon in today’s Gospel from St. Luke, we give thanks for the fulfillment of God’s ancient promise which our eyes have now seen: “A revealing light to the Gentiles, the glory of your people Israel.”
Renewed in that ‘revealing light’ and motivated by God’s “glory” made manifest among us, the Bishops of Minnesota take the occasion of this Feast of the Holy Family to reflect on the profound importance of marriage and family in our society. We do so with a two-fold hope: first, encouraging the great number of families who witness daily to the permanent reality of the state of marriage and secondly, sharing our concern over growing social influences that aim at the breakdown of the marriage bond and threaten the well-being of family life.
As Catholic leaders, our message is directed primarily though not exclusively to the members of the Catholic Church. The good of marriage and family life redound on the total human community in providing the basic building blocks for a stable social environment in which each person’s growth and happiness are fostered and encouraged. All men and women of good will have a stake in the proper understanding of the role that marriage and the family have for the social, political and economic order.
God is the author of human marriage (cf Gaudium et Spes, 47.2) and God’s own Trinitarian life exempliefies what married life should be like. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father so completely that this mutual self-giving is the personal bond of the Holy Spirit. It is from the Church’s contemplation of God’s own revelation of himself that she defines marriage as a union that is total, exclusive, faithful, fruitful and indissoluble. In the act of creation, God made man for woman and woman for man (cf Genesis 2:18), so that their love would result in their own mutual good and in the gift of new life in their children. For this very reason, God commanded husband and wife to “be fertile and multiply; fill the earth.” (Genesis 1:28) The proper ordering of marriage, therefore, is destined for the procreation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate crown.
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