catholicweekly.com.au 17 24, May, 2020 E ditorial & letters Dorin’s World Send your letters to:
[email protected] By the post: The Editor, Level 13, 133 Liverpool St, Sydney NSW 2000 AUSTRALIA Church as meeting place reveals common naivety I am, in a sense, grateful to a local parishioner to whom (after being confronted by loud talking in church) I said ‘this is God’s house.’ The reply was ‘this is not God’s house, it’s our house’. That remark spoke volumes. It belies any consideration that the church has taken only a mild change in direction in recent decades. The elevation of man above God is no small change. I accept that ‘as we pray we believe’ (lex orandi lex credendi) and now sup- port the Extraordinary form of the Mass and am grateful to bishops who encour- age it. Neville Norwood Mendooran NSW Zimbabwe’s climate of fear must change I t is pathetic and disturbing that the level of abductions and disgusting ill-treatments and torture of oppo- sition members and activists continues rampantly in Zimbabwe. Recently, Movement for Democratic Change activists Cecilia Chembiri, Joa- na Mamombe MP and Netsai Marova were abducted and tortured by ZANU PF thugs just because they were demon- strating against hunger in Zimbabwe. This is the same abduction and torture which happened to trade unionist Doc- tor Peter. The world should seriously condemn, voice their concerns to President Mnan- gagwa about these abductions in Zimba- bwe before we start to see another wave of mass migration of Zimbabweans flee- ing to host countries such as South Afri- ca, USA, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada because of the climate of fear in Zimbabwe and mass abductions. Tapiwa Muskwe Stockwell, London, United Kingdom PC redefinition is eroding, undermining marriage T he past week, National Families Week, held from 15 - 21 May, cel- ebrated the vital role that families play in Australian society. This is all commendable except that the ‘natural family’, as defined by natu- ral law, is often overlooked. Any talk of ‘family’ needs to focus on marriage being the fundamental connection between a mother, a father, and their children. Marriage ensures that children grow up with their own biological mum and dad. FamilyVoice has, since its inception, defended the traditional natural family, and further, we believe that traditional natural marriage is essential for the fam- ily in society to flourish. Marriage is a re- lationship rooted in human nature and governed by Natural Law. The survival of the family is essen- tial for the welfare of the young and the cohesion of society. Without marriage, nothing works. It is the key to stability, peace, wealth, and progress and we tam- per with it at our great peril. The welfare state’s shattering of marriage-based fam- ilies in the inner cities and the chaos that follows is perhaps the most glaring evi- dence of marriage’s importance. Marriage-based family life is the or- ganising principle behind all civilised cultures. No other relationship trans- forms young men and women into more productive, less selfish, and more mature people as husbands and wives, and fa- thers and mothers. No other relationship affords children the best economic, emo- tional, and psychological environment. At the core of marriage are the mani- fold and complementary differences be- tween the sexes – between masculinity and femininity. One of the most unfortunate modern myths is that relationships work if each spouse meets the other halfway. But they work best when husbands and wives each give 100 per cent, not totalling up a relative exchange while looking out for Number 1. We all need to remember the simple message that marriage is a vital public and social institution, and the continued redefining of it has far-reaching conse- quences. Greg Bondar Sydney NSW Leadership should be supported, acknowledged A rchbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB of Perth is to be congratulat- ed on the extremely timely, meas- ured, rational and limpid pastoral letter he has issued during the week defend- ing the Seal of Confession against efforts by the State government of WA (led by Labor politician Simone McGurk) to - essentially - suborn the Catholic faith to state policy. It is heartening to see a bishop take such a forthright stand on behalf of the faith of the Church and on behalf of we who are its members. I suggest Catholics everywhere write to congratulate him for leadership of a kind which is clearly pre- pared to go against the tide. Toby Garcia Lopez Baulkham Hills NSW Undermining family a national madness T his is Australia, where key issues often go unad- dressed while the passing fancies of the political class and media, obsessed with opinon polls, so- cial media and entertainment hog the limelight. Several years ago, school principals around Austra- lia noted the trend of younger children spending up to 11 hours a day at school as their parents use before and af- ter-school care for child minding. The observation should have sounded an alarm: something was seriously going wrong with the welfare of the family – the foundational unit of society - in Australia. Yet as the years have rolled by, the nation’s political par- ties have continued to punish each other relentlessly on comparatively unimportant issues, while vital matters such as the family go unaddressed. The pseuds of the media, of course, notice nothing. Yet the destruction of families through divorce, the effects on children and the increasing- ly tectonic social, personal and financial pressures placed upon the family unit by the nation’s economy and its politi- cal establishment have a decisive effect on the future of the nation. This is the shallowness of our culture. At any given time the wellbeing and welfare of the Aus- tralian family unit – the foundation of society – is the most important policy issue facing the nation. Yet it is a measure of the relative illiteracy of Australian politics and media that it rarely, if ever, is treated with the importance it deserves. This, sadly, is not a surprise. If almost no-one who matters understands how and why the family is the real unit which determines the wellbeing of the nation then it cannot be ad- dressed. With few blips, the juggernaut of demand for childcare continues to advance. Provision of childcare surfaces at elections, when it is talked about as though it is a moral vir- tue and a basic human right – not a sign that something has seriously gone wrong. The childcare industry is now worth an estimated $9 billion a year, which really means Austra- lians are paying staggering sums of money to strangers to look after the children they can’t afford to care for. Almost no-one, except school principals, appeared to have noticed that there may be something badly wrong with this picture. Where does one start? That families are being forced to increasingly place four and five-year-old children in care and to pay for it up to 11 hours a day is a scandal al- most beyond parody. But it is as clear a sign of an inhumane economy and a vapid political class as we might get. What is essentially happening in a process that is now de- cades-long is that there is no longer such a thing as a fam- ily wage. If there is no longer such a thing as a family wage which can be sufficiently earned by one individual, usually the male, it means that both parents must work in order to afford to own a family home. Yet to own a family home is in- creasingly beyond the reach of more and more Australians. Parents are being dragged further and further away from their children in their earliest years at precisely the time when the sum of all human experience, common sense and all the available data from the social sciences tell us that the most important factor in the lives of infants are their parents, beginning with a mother. The situation is mad- ness and the irony is rich. Australia prides itself on being a resource-rich country but the truth is that it discriminates not only against families but especially against women who wish to be mothers. We are really deeply impoverished. Motherhood is now increasingly unaffordable, increas- ingly limited for the vast majority of the nation’s families and a significant part of the problem is a culture which is convinced that the role of being a home-maker and a moth- er is a second-class occupation while the participation of women in the workforce is glamourised. Meanwhile, wom- en are relentlessly told that they have to be men in order to be successful. Yet in reality, woman is the new economic pack horse of the nation. Partly because of the political correctness which enve- lopes this urgent but unaddressed issue, the nation’s po- litical leaders and parties are unwilling to act, terrified – bizarrely - they would be branded as attempting to dis- criminate against women. It is a deeply disturbing aspect of Australian society and culture that it prides itself on having liberated women yet the increasing profusion of childcare centres as substitutes for motherhood is clear evidence that our society is increasingly failing not only women but chil- dren as well. In a general sense, the answer is simple: if we want to build a healthy and happy nation the answer can only begin by decisively - even radically - committing our- selves politically, socially, financially and economically to building healthy and happy families. And it is possible. 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