Friday 1 June 2012

Marriage Matters


Hundreds of thousands of people from over 140 countries are currently attending the World Meeting of Families in Milan to discuss issues affecting marriage and family life. Pope Benedict travels to Milan on Friday to meet with those attending the 5-day event and will remain in the northern Italian city until Sunday.

Among the participants at the meeting is my friend Edmund Adamus, Director for Marriage and Family Life at the Diocese of Westminster in London. Susy Hodges spoke to him just before his departure for Milan. As a married man with a toddler son, Edmund speaks at first hand about some of the practical challenges of raising a family and about the threats facing the institution of the family in today's secularised society.

Asked about the current state of the family, Edmund concedes that it is a "bleak" landscape given "the enormous breakdown in family life" that has occurred in Britain over the past few decades. At the same time, he says surveys have shown there is "a real desire" among young people to achieve "a renaissance of family life."

When it comes to his own family and the lessons he has learnt as a husband and father, Edmund says one of those lessons was realising the need to make "a clear distinction between work time and family time", especially in view of the growing influence of information technology and its "invasion into family life."

Listen to the full interview by Susy Hodges with Edmund Adamus:


MP3 RealAudio 


 

No comments: