The Media can Undermine Marriage

by Letters Editor · September 17, 2015

From Fr Finbarr Flanagan OFM, Pretoria

The late American Franciscan Father Benedict Groeschel once said that the media is involved in a huge undermining of Catholic and Evangelical Churches.

This is specially true of media coverage of Ireland which presents an anomaly in the European Union in not being completely compliant with EU relativism. So as Dutch abortion boats stalked off the Irish coast to provide abortions because the Irish people did not permit this, so the media stalked off Ireland to abort its traditional values.

The Pontifical Council for the Family reported that the recent Irish referendum on same-sex marriage was seriously flawed by irregularities and by fear and intimidation, with the 50:50 allocation of television space to groups on both sides blatantly ignored.

Barely one third of the Irish voted for same-sex marriage. So Pope Francis statements that same-sex marriage is anthropological regression and what is being proposed is not marriage were drowned out.

Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney stated that in Australia the media gave great prominence to the Pitcairn Island vote for same-sex marriage, with a population of 48, and virtually ignored the Australian legislature’s overwhelming vote against same-sex marriage (110 MPs to 26).

Pope Francis told the Schoenstatt movement that marriage has never been attacked so much as now and should not be the subject of endless manipulation according to passing ideological fads.

Archbishop Fisher in his article Same-sex marriage: evolution or deconstruction lists the passing fads that ridicule and debase the institution of holy matrimony (the word used in the Catechism of the Catholic Church) and emphasises two aspects of marriage: procreation and heterosexual complementarity.

For example: marriage to dead people in France; a former Catholic priest in Florida marries a woman to a ferris wheel called Bruce; a Houston woman, failing to find a husband by age 40, marries herself assisted by three pastors; people marrying their pet dogs, cats, dolphins or goats; men marrying blow-up dolls, men marrying men, women marrying women!

Does no one notice the emperor has no clothes! Is it only the majority of the Irish people, African leaders and a Jesuit pope who notices? Has the zeitgeist got the others in thrall?