WMOF watered down Faith – priest

A Co. Down-based priest and writer has criticised this summer’s World Meeting of Families (WMOF) for watering down the Christian vision of the family to become more acceptable to current secular understandings of family life.

Writing in The Furrow, Fr Andrew McMahon observes that although there were “unquestionably edifying aspects” of WMOF2018, a desire for acceptance was also clearly present.

Fr McMahon noted that while Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was both sensitive and truthful in speaking at the gathering of the variety of family types today, it would also have been truthful and sensitive to recognise that “there remains a vision for family at the heart of Church teaching – a vision which, however imperfectly, continues to be reflected within very many Irish homes”.

Many of the topics covered at WMOF2018 were worthwhile but hardly distinctively Catholic, he continued, observing that the gathering avoided exploring the destructive implications for family life of recent changes in Irish law.

“Such exploration would, presumably, have left the gathering at variance with Mr Varadkar’s Ireland and its cheerleaders,” he wrote. “The ultimate consequences of such timidity, at a moment of real opportunity, will take some time to manifest themselves.”

Already, he noted, there is a growing sense that WMOF2018 is fading without a trace from popular memory.

Presentations

Barrister Patrick Treacy, who runs the Integritas Centre of Christian Spirituality, agreed that while WMOF2018 brought together many people of goodwill who were generous with their time, convened interesting presentations and allowed many to encounter the Pope, it has indeed left no real impression.

“It has no lasting legacy, however, because its central organising dynamic was an inhibiting fear of controversy,” he told The Irish Catholic. “In this way, through a studied silence, it was effectively compliant with the prevailing ideological colonisation of our country which maintains that marriage has nothing to do with the distinction as to sex between a man and a woman and that a child does not uniquely benefit from having a mother and a father.”

The next WMOF should be free from societal pressures to conform, he said.

“Thankfully, Pope Francis has chosen Rome for the next World Meeting of Families in 2021 so that the full teaching of what is articulated by him in Amoris Laetitia will not be inhibited by the fear of secularist liberalism which is now so pervasive in every aspect of contemporary Irish society.”