V – Christian Marriage and de facto unions

Christian marriage and social pluralism

(30) More intensely in recent times, the Church has repeatedly stressed the trust that is due to the human person, his freedom, dignity and values, and the hope that comes from God’s saving action in the world which helps overcome all weakness.  At the same time, it has made its grave concern known regarding different attempts against the human person and his dignity and pointed out some ideological presuppositions typical of the so-called “post-modern” culture which make it difficult to understand and live the values required by the truth about the human person. “It is no longer a matter of limited and occasional dissent, but of an overall and systematic calling into question of traditional moral doctrine, on the basis of certain anthropological and ethical presuppositions.  At the root of these presuppositions is the more or less obvious influence of currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth”.[70][70]

When freedom is disconnected form truth, “any reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism. At that point, everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining, even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life”.[71][71] This is also a warning that is surely applicable to the reality of marriage and the family, the sole source and fully human channel for the realization of that first right.  There is “a corruption of the idea and the experience of freedom, conceived not as a capacity for realizing the truth of God’s plan for marriage and the family, but as an autonomous power of self-affirmation, often against others, for one’s own selfish well-being”.[72][72]