BEING divorced and raising three children on my own I can sympathise with Neville Grace’s concern over any clampdown on annulments (CL 22/2/09) but I can’t agree this means the Church is ignoring marriage breakdowns, nor his sentiment that “one wonders sometimes what planet he (the Pope) lives on”.
In fact it is “the real world” which seems hell-bent on unlearning every lesson of history.
Take four diverse examples:
We now have the most serious economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Yet notwithstanding our apparent vast knowledge of economics, we have made the same mistakes as before, and not one of our “experts” worldwide saw it coming.
There are today between six and 10 times more Aboriginal children in state care than at the height of the Stolen Generations era (The Australian, February 20, 2009).
We’ve rightly spent substantial resources, unavailable to our much poorer ancestors, but have arguably done far worse. Yet we apologise for their transgressions and imagine ourselves better.
Youth homelessness has dramatically increased since a 1989 report. A new 2008 report stated that youth homelessness is the fallout from three decades of social and economic change including no-fault divorce and single parenting but that “few would seriously want to reverse these social changes” (The Australian, April 8, 2008).
Isn’t that the problem? We want the counterfeit freedoms of the Sexual Revolution without the consequences.
Evidence from the tragic Victorian bushfires suggests that state and local authorities ignored many lessons from previous fatal bushfires.
The Church has consistently upheld Christian marriage and morality while “the real world” has rejected these values which are the very cornerstone upon which Western civilization was built. No wonder nothing works.
Pride has cost us wisdom, a message implicit in Pope Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg lecture on faith and reason.
ROSS HOWARD
Daisy Hill, Qld
