Jul 7, 2009 / 04:03 am
A new support community for divorced or separated Catholics who remain faithful to marriage has launched in the United States, taking inspiration from a similar Italian effort to help people fulfill their vows and live their "I do."
The Saint Mary of Cana project, sponsored in the U.S. by the non-profit Mary’s Advocates, seeks to work with dioceses in the United States in order to, in project director Bai Macfarlane’s words, "reject the divorce culture’s indoctrination that our marriage is dead or that we have new lives as single people."
Maria Pia Campanella initiated the project’s Italian forerunner under the family pastoral arm of the Archdiocese of Palermo. Campanella explained in an e-mail interview with Macfarlane that the pastoral work supports the separated or divorced person in being faithful to the obligations of the Sacrament of Matrimony.
"He who is faithful to the sacrament is faithful to God," she wrote. "Matrimony is the state of life that a man and a woman have chosen freely as a way of holiness. Both of the spouses are able by the Grace of the sacrament to be ‘conjugal ministers' for the sanctification of their spouse and their children, in view of the whole Church."