The Basic Values and Ideas of the Church's Legislation and Teaching on Marriage for Europe and the World

Abstract

The Church, aware of the fact that marriage and the family are one of the most valuable goods of mankind, and at the same time noticing the threats and hazards to them coming from the state legislation and various institutions, places marriage and the family in the centre of its attention. By its legislation and persistent teaching, the Church wants to show their origin, nature, character, purpose, qualities, importance and value as well as to offer help to marriage and the family in the fulfillment of their tasks and vocation. Through its instruction and teaching the Church wants to take an explicit stance towards various unfavorable or inimical forces and systems aimed against marriage and the family, reminding with power and strength about the values, principles and ideas of marriage and the family. At the same time the Church perceives marriage and the family as a subject of its own rights, which the state, consisting of a multiplicity of families, has to correctly interpret, acknowledge and protect. Hence the Church encourages the state to protect and help the marriages and families, encouraging it also to create such a social-economic-cultural system and such legal and system protection, in which the rights of marriage and family will be fully respected. Thanks to the energetic activity of the Holy See in the field of researches on the problems of contemporary family, the ground is being prepared for a complete and comprehensive picture of the rights of marriage and the family; the beginning and a sample of this was given in the exhortation Familiaris consortio of John Paul II, which on the foundation of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and the Code of Canon Law, clearly demarcates the direction of the Church's stipulations for the code of family rights. The Church holds deeply at heart the defense and protection of the fundamental and essential rights of marriage and the family. It can be said that the Gospel of marriage and the family, which is propagated by the Church and offered by it to the world and Europe, gives marriage and the family an unchangeable position and dynamism, showing the necessity for assistance and service on the part of the state, society and the Church itself. The objective of that teaching is welfare and proper development of marriages as such and at the same time it provides a full view of the rights of marriage and the family including their spiritual and personal dimension. Marriage and the family are consequently presented as subjects of rights both in the Church and the state, by virtue of their own and inalienable natural right to existence, proper functioning and realization of vocation, tasks and development. The problem is how induce Europe and the world to voluntarily accept and implement the teaching, vision, rights and values, which are propagated by the Church with reference to marriage and the family.