Let's forget niceness, let's be Catholic!

I am glad that our Archbishops at least are speaking out loud and clear about the redefinition of marriage, I find it depressing that all they can suggest is dropping a letter to your MP.
There are alternatives.
One of the big problems we have in England is Bishops who are just too nice, when what we need are radically orthodox ones. Niceness means being all things to all men, being willing to burn incense before a pagan god, gathering into the big Catholic tent people whose lifestyle choices and whose theology in any other age would exclude them.
Radical orthodoxy would suggest that we proclaim teaching loud and clear wherever we can. That has not happened since the Warlock/Hume remodelling of the Church into something particularly English, more comfortable with the CofE than Rome. They had a particularly local interpretation of VII.

Let's risk making ourselves unpopular! Let's forget niceness, let's be Catholic!

These are some rough notes for a Catholic Pro-family Manifesto

Rather than being embarrassed by it we should dare to talk about what the Church understands by being "human", which involves human sexuality. It is radical, we should accept that it is counter-cultural, it overthrows the politics of left and right by simply saying the family is the most important element in society not wealth creation or even self determination and self-fulfilment.


We could start by trying to get people to discuss marriage, how about large banners on every Catholic building saying something like "Marriage = Man + Woman: discuss"?
We could spend money on a poster campaign.
We should have done it ages ago but what about every diocese in the country producing study material on Humanae Vitae and Evangelium Vitae?
Is it too late to organise symposia in amongst orthodox Christian academics on Marriage?
In the capital at the very least we should be organising public meetings to talk about marriage, and demonstrations to show what we mean by marriage.


In the institutions we still control, our schools most especially, we should be promoting the family. The state, for the last century or two, has been promoting the view that we are here primarily to serve the economy, and that we have value and status in our production of wealth but as Catholic we should be educating people to understand we have value in our relationships with one another, ultimately in our family relationships. Just as the state promotes Sports or Performing Arts Academies we Catholics should be making every school or  college an Academy for the Family. With epidemic marital breakdown we need to teach people how to be married, especially boys, for too long Catholics have done so very little to really educate our young for either eternal or marital life.

We should recognise most women have abortions because of economic reasons, that controlling the size of families through contraception for most people is an economic decision.
We need to promote an authentic feminism (and masculinism) that is based on relationships, we need to promote the real rights of women to be parents, simply to be able to have children without the constant anxiety to find childcare and to be able to afford it.
We need to promote affordable family housing.
We need promote Sunday, the Lord's Day, a day of re-creation, as a day for building family.

Every Catholic social justice organisation should be deeply involved in promoting an economic model that sees the family, rather than the creation of personal wealth, as priority.