Church’s marriage teaching poorly accepted: Archbishop

The Archbishop of Dublin has said it should not come as a surprise that a survey of parishioners there found the Church’s teaching on marriage and the family is poorly understood, and was poorly accepted and disconnected from real life experiences of families.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said the survey was carried out in the Dublin archdiocese in preparation for the forthcoming Synod of Bishops.

“The results are not very different to those which emerged in the same consultation process in various other European cities, on such subjects as family planning, pre-marital cohabitation, the problems of the divorced and re-married, the attitude to same sex relationships,” he told a gathering of priests and parish councils in one Dublin deanery. “What should surprise us is the fact that we have not been developing a strong pastoral response to these questions over the years. We should not have had to wait for a questionnaire from Pope Francis to address these questions.