Bishops respond to Marriage Care on homosexual 'marriage'

The most complete report on the bishops' reaction to the speech of Terry Prendergast, the Chairman of Marriage Care, rubbishing Catholic teaching on marriage, appeared in The Tablet. It reveals that Archbishop Nichols is actually the President of Marriage Care, and that Prendergast is an adviser to the Marriage and Family Life Committee (chaired by Bishop Hine) of the Bishops' Conference. In short, he and his organisation are intimately connected with the ecclesiastical bureaucracy, making it particularly difficult for the bishops to distance themselves from even his more outrageous views.

The Tablet (25/7/09) “The Church’s vision is that the crucially important quality of stability in family life needs gender complementarity and role modelling too,” said the bishops. They recognised that circumstances may mean that some of these dimensions were unavailable, creating the need for additional support, but added that “it is inconsistent with Catholic teaching to plan or promote a notion of family from which they are deliberately excluded”.

Mr Prendergast is an adviser on the Bishops’ Marriage and Family Life Committee, chaired by Bishop John Hine, who acknowledged this week that there were difficulties over Mr Prendergast’s observations. The concerns of both Archbishop Nichols and Bishop Hine were raised with the board of directors of Marriage Care at a meeting on Tuesday.

Mr Prendergast said that he felt he had been able to explain his position to the bishops. “My impression was that they were making every effort to understand the position of Marriage Care,” he said.