LOVE AND fidelity are vital to the stability of society, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.
Speaking in Dublin last night in a lecture to the conservative think tank the Iona Institute on “Marriage and the Common Good”, Archbishop Martin said: “Love and fidelity are at the essence of marriage and are also fundamental values for society.
“The State cannot but be a supporter of that love and that fidelity which couples bring to the human and ethical enrichment of society and which are vital contributions to the stability of society,” he added.
He also said the record of services provided by the State “is rarely a good one. It works well only in specific situations.”
“The State, however, is not society; it is part of society; it is a function within society. Society to be effective requires participation. It requires that the subjectivity of society be made real by the active participation of its citizens as subjects and not as objects of policies and entitlements.”
He said a society “with a dominant individualistic inspiration” would find it very difficult to support marital fidelity, a term that cannot be understood within an individualistic philosophy alone, because by its nature it implies mutuality.
“The danger is that the State and public opinion will distance themselves from fostering such values because these values are not realised by everyone in society,” he said. The proposed children’s referendum was “at times presented in terms of a clash between the role of the family and the rights of the child”, he said.
Yet both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child “stress not just the importance of the family but also the responsibilities of the State to support the family”, he said.
He said, “the inherent tension between the rights of the child and the rights and responsibilities of the family will remain whatever the constitutional provisions. Decisions made in the best interests of the child will not always be easy to determine.
“The successful resolution of these tensions between the respective rights of the child and the family depends on the resolution of another tension: the tension between the rights of the family and the role of the State.”
One could “understand that in today’s Ireland where the role of the church in delivering social and educational services had become so dominant, that the pendulum will now swing in the direction of the State wishing to assume the responsibility for providing a wide variety of services directly,” he said. But the record of the State in that context was “rarely a good one”, he added.
