Doha, Qatar, Nov 29, 2004 / 22:00 pm
At the International Conference on the Family this morning in Doha, Qatar, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, addressed the growth of an ideology hostile to the family which obscures the natural complementarity of men and women in conjugal love and upbringing of children, and underscored the fundamental importance of this complementarity for family life, children and society.
"One truth that is present in a profound way in all cultures and religions is that of the family based on marriage, the only worthy and appropriate place for conjugal love," with the couple's "complete, reciprocal self-giving.”
He said that “a child, God's most precious gift, is the fruit of this mutual self-giving, and the spouses are associated with God, the source of human life, with their complete masculinity and femininity."
"Today an ideology hostile to the family is spreading in some parliaments not only in Europe, but in America too,” he noted. “In fact, in the past decade, the complementarity between a man and a woman and the overcoming of any opposition between the sexes have strangely been negated.”