Pope says divorce, cohabitation destroy families

(Sept 25, 2009) Pope Benedict XVI on Friday denounced the growing phenomena of divorce and cohabitation saying they are ruining the lives of many children, who are often deprived of the support of parents. Addressing a group of bishops from northeast Brazil on their 5-yearly visit to Rome, the Pope decried the attack on the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman and the deep sense of uncertainly widespread in the secularized world, especially since western societies legalized divorce. The Pope said that the Church cannot remain indifferent to the phenomena of separation and divorce that ruin families and the consequences that such phenomena have on children. In order to be taught and educated, the Pope said, children need the extremely precise and concrete reference points of definitive and sure parents. It is this very principle that the practice of divorce attacks, spawning the so-called enlarged and mobile families where there are children from other unions. Children in such families, the Pope explained, feel orphaned not because they are without parents but because they have too many of them. Such a situation, he said, only generates internal conflict and conflict, and contributes a distorted concept of the family in the young ones.