CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 April 1938, Page 9

CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

ROMAN CATHOLIC STAND THREAT OF MODERN PAGAN IDEAS. ADDRESS AT HAMILTON. Declaring war between the Church and the world on marriage issues. Father Owen Dudley, superior of the Catholic Missionary Society, London, addressed a congregation of 2000 in Hamilton on marriage and the home. He vigorously condemned birth control as the invention of a pagan world and defended the sanctity of the Christian marriage, which, he said, was an indissoluble bond, sealed “until death us do part.” The family, Father Dudley said, was the centre of the home, and the home the centre of the world. The home at the moment was in constant danger in the midst of modern pagan ideas. In fact, we lived in an age which saw the beginning of another great war —the Catholic Church versus the world, a war for and against the home.

Influences were at work undermining Christianity and all it stood for. A certain section of the press was perverting the public mind on the most intimate subjects associated with the home, a large, portion of the cinema displayed things which were a menace to Christian morality, divorces were streaming through the law Courts, and the world was levelling its guns upon that very morality without which Christian marriage and the Christian home would be utterly swept away. “WAR IS ON.” It was war now. The whole of the Christian civilisation had been built up upon the sanctity of the Christian marriage bond and the teaching of the Catholic Church concerning it. When that was removed the whole of this civilisation would crumble, and the sancity of the home, safeguarded by the Church for 2000 years, would be no more. The Roman Catholic Church declared that the Christian marriage bond was unbreakable. Nothing but death could sever it. A decree of nullity did exist in the Roman Catholic Church but that did not destroy the marriage bond, it simply declared that where there was no marriage act there was no marriage bond. The Church had been accused of having in this decree of nullity a back-door way to divorce, but such accusations were silly, libellous nonsense. Homes could not remain happy if the practice of birth control existed within them. Some public statements made on this subject apparently completely ignored birth control as a moral question. The advocates of it refused to admit that it was, though it was essentially bound up with marriage.

Marriage was given for the procreation of children to people the world. The use of artificial means of preventing conception was a perversion of the natural end which God provided. It was a great breakage of God’s law. It was, in fact, a defiance of God. PHYSICAL DANGERS. The laws of the Catholic Church were not arbitrary, but in accord with the laws of Nature. He was pleased to see that certain medical men had issued a report giving extremely reliable grounds to prove that the process of birth control could be very injurious to health. It was a fact that Nature always punished perversions.

It was scandalous that another large section of the medical men refused to admit the danger. They knew it existed. It was a contradiction, also, that birth control should be practised when this country was in need of population. If birth control continued there could be no future' for New Zealand, nor for the British Empire.

Marriage had been blamed for many evils, but the Church proudly and gladly accepted the blame for the Christian marriage bond. The Church had nothing but contempt for those who libelled it. The blame for sins such as adultery lay with the traitors to the marriage bond, not to the bond itself. There was at the moment a type of family life that was . anything but Christian. It was the type seen on the screen —the modern, sophisticated home life, if it could be called home life at all. HOME AS HOTEL. In that home the father and mother were looked upon chiefly as the means of providing a roof over the children’s needs. The mother was looked upon as the right sort if she danced, hunted, gambled, and frivolled, and kept up an appearance of youth. In the home bright young things lounged about with cigarettes and sporting papers, and girls sat before mirrors admiring their plucked and streamlined eyebrows. The chief reading these people did was reading the newspapers, and then it had to be a really good murder. Too often the home was simply a hotel to return to after a dance or theatre. That was the modern, sophisticated pagan home, the home of the so-called smart set. There was no respect for the parents and no moral supervision of the children.

In contrast to this was the Christian home, in which first and foremost came religion, as the pivot and centre. Religion there was openly expressed and the home was consecrated to the Father. The glory of the home was taken further, into places of work and play. In that home there was careful moral supervision of the child, and harmony between husband and wife.