Catholics should not marry Muslims. Cardinal Camillo Ruini

Image

ITALIAN bishops gave warning yesterday against Catholics marrying Muslims, citing cultural differences and fears that children born to mixed marriages would shun Christianity.

Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the president of the Italian Bishops Conference, said: "In addition to the problems that any couple encounters when forming a family, Catholics and Muslims have to reckon with the difficulties that inevitably arise from deep cultural differences." Cardinal Ruini, one of the right-hand men of Pope Benedict XVI, said that it was often the woman who married a Muslim man and it was she who converted to Islam. In a statement, the bishops said that if an Italian woman married a Muslim immigrant and then settled in his country of origin, her rights were "not guaranteed in the way they are in Italy or in other Western nations". In addition the children of mixed marriages tended to be brought up as Muslims and not as Catholics. Such marriages should, therefore, be discouraged. Church officials said that there were 200,000 mixed marriages in Italy, with 20,000 this year alone, an increase of 10 per cent on the previous year. The statement enraged liberal groups, which accused the Roman Catholic Church of interfering in Italian affairs. Emma Bonino, a leader of the Transnational Radical Party, accused the Vatican of seeking to affect the general election, due in April, as politicians from the Right and Left courted the Vatican to gain Catholic votes. She said that the Vatican had taken strong stances on issues such as abortion, same-sex unions, and euthanasia in violation of the 1929 Lateran Treaty between the Vatican and the Italian State. Mara Tognetti Borgogna, a sociologist at Bicocca University, Milan, said of mixed marriages: "Each case is different. It depends on the circumstances.The most critical moment usually comes when the children reach adolescence and come into conflict with one parent or both over their life choices." Signora Borgogna said that they could work, "but you need a high level of mutual tolerance between two languages, two religions, two ways of looking at the world. On the other hand, the mixed marriages we have now are a kind of social laboratory, because that is the way our society is going".

You May Also Like

Image

Pope at Audience: Prayer, self-knowledge enable us to grow in freedom

Vatican City: (By Benedict Mayaki, SJ) Pope Francis continued his cycle of reflections on the theme of discernment during his catechesis at the Wed

Image

Ukraine deserves peace, Pope Francis says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — On the day Pope Francis established as a day of prayer for peace in Ukraine, the pope appealed for an end to all war and

Image

Pope Francis attacked cancel culture. It sounds better than ‘ideological colonization.’

VATICAN CITY: (RNS) In his annual address to diplomats accredited to the Holy See this month, Pope Francis “hit out at ‘cancel culture,



"Trial of Pakistani Christian Nation" By Nazir S Bhatti

On demand of our readers, I have decided to release E-Book version of "Trial of Pakistani Christian Nation" on website of PCP which can also be viewed on website of Pakistan Christian Congress www.pakistanchristiancongress.org . You can read chapter wise by clicking tab on left handside of PDF format of E-Book.

nazirbhattipcc@aol.com , pakistanchristianpost@yahoo.com