Edmund Adamus, Director of Marriage and Family Life for the Westminster archdiocese, has alerted me to an excellent initiative to be held at St Patrick’s, Soho Square, London over the weekend of 28 February-2 March on the theme, “Beauty, Freedom and the Family”. This title made me chuckle: you have to be a Catholic to choose to link the word “family” – with all the stresses, duties, responsibilities and worries that family life can bring – with the words “beauty” and “freedom”.
It reminded me (once again) that the language of supernatural faith is simply different from normal English usage. The late Lord Clarke talked about “beauty” a great deal, along with the creative energy and “freedom” that great art presupposes, in his fine 1960s TV series, “Civilization.” But as Christians know, the beauty and freedom that are part of their faith are of an entirely different order.
The weekend talks at the conference will include Dana Rosemary Scallon, co-founder of Ireland United for Life, who will talk on matrimony and family at the heart of the mission of the Church; Sister Renee Mirkes, who will talk on contraception and how it has led, inevitably, to the idea of same-sex marriage; an exploration of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical of 1968 on married love that is the least understood and the least mentioned of all the Church’s teaching documents of recent decades; and John-Henry Westen, co-founder of LifeSiteNews, who will talk about the role of husbands and fathers.
The weekend includes Mass, private prayer, Eucharistic adoration and of course meals. There will also be question and answer sessions, discussions and, as the brochure states, opportunities for networking; in a Catholic context this is not about leaving a visiting card or making influential contacts to further one’s career; it is about discovering like-minded people with whom to explore future new ways of evangelising one’s fellows on why words like “beauty” and “freedom” are actually intrinsic to marriage and family life. At £50 for the weekend or £30 for one day the cost is surely very reasonable for what could be a life-changing experience.
The conference, which is hosted by Fr Alexander Sherbrooke, parish priest of St Patrick’s, is, as so many of St Patrick’s initiatives in recent years, deeply involved in what has been called the “new evangelisation”: in other words, how do we bring the transformative message of the Gospels to bear on ordinary married life in 21st century Britain?
As I type this I note that a UN survey has just announced that “Fertility has declined worldwide to unprecedented levels since the 1970s”. To Malthusians and population doom-mongers this is obviously good news: more space for trees to grow and for the atmosphere to be a bit less “polluted” by those pesky humans. But for any sensible person who realises that a dramatic fall in population spells poverty rather than wealth, it is bad news. An article by Italian economist Ettore Gotti Tedeschi in the Herald last week, titled “Want a healthy economy? Then have more children”, says it all. “Only someone who does not want economic growth would not want population growth”, he writes, pointing out that “Poor countries with growing populations, like China, India and Brazil, have become wealthy, while nations where the populations have stagnated have become poorer.”
Some people might be inclined to think that the forthcoming Soho Square conference is about weird people called Catholics talking to other weird Catholics about their own weird obsessions. Actually it isn’t; it is about the health, wealth, happiness and future of this country.
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