Pope Warns Against New Ideas on Family

Society faces “disastrous consequences” if it abandons the traditional family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, Pope John Paul II said this week.

Speaking Wednesday to about 7,000 pilgrims attending his weekly general audience, the Roman Catholic pontiff urged “not only believers but all men of goodwill” to reflect on the value of matrimony and the family in preparation for Holy Year 2000.

“Some sectors of society question the very understanding of the family as a stable community founded on marriage between a man and a woman,” John Paul said. “New definitions of marriage and the family are being put forward which foster narrow individualism and ethical relativism.”

Blaming “the crisis of the family” on “the crisis of society,” he cited loneliness, violence and drugs as “pathological phenomena” that attack the traditional family unit.

He warned, “Where the family gives way, society lacks its connective tissue with disastrous consequences that attack people, particularly the weakest, from children to adolescents to the handicapped, the sick and the elderly.”

The pope also reiterated the church’s opposition to all forms of artificial birth control. He called the birth of a child “the maximum expression of the communion of man and woman.”