Declaration of Fidelity to Church Teaching on Marriage Reaches 5,000 Signatures

Priests, theology professors, men and women religious, catechists, seminary rectors and Catholic teachers from around the world are among those continuing to sign.

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, archbishop emeritus of Bologna, is one of many who have signed the Declaration.
Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, archbishop emeritus of Bologna, is one of many who have signed the Declaration. (photo: caffarra.it)

Five thousand people including cardinals, bishops, priests, religious and laypeople have so far signed a declaration aimed at clearing up ambiguities over the Church's teaching on marriage and the family following two recent synods on the family. 

The signatures of the Declaration of Fidelity
 to the Church’s Unchangeable Teaching on Marriage and to Her Uninterrupted Discipline are “coming in from all over the world”, the initiative organizers, the Filial Appeal Association, said in a statement today.

Cardinals Carlo Caffarra, Raymond Burke and Janis Pujats were among its 80 initial signatories when it was launched last month, to which have now been added “many priests, teachers of theology, men and women religious, catechists, seminary rectors and Catholic teachers.”

The statement pointed out that the petitioners, after the ambiguities of the two synods on the family and the publication of Amoris Laetitia, a papal summary document on those meetings, “find themselves on the front lines, with the difficult task of having to give clear answers on decisive points of Catholic morality regarding the sacraments, family and marriage.”

The Declaration begins by recalling that “we live in an age when numerous forces seek to destroy or deform marriage and the family” and that “secular ideologies”, the result of a “process of cultural and moral decadence”, are taking advantage of and aggravating the family’s crisis.

“This process leads Catholics to adapt to our neo-pagan society,” the Filial Appeal Association said. “Their ‘conforming to the world’ (Rom. 12: 2) is often fostered by a lack of faith—and therefore of supernatural spirit to accept the mystery of the Cross of Christ—and an absence of prayer and penance.”

After reiterating 27 fundamental moral truths that must be held not only still valid but unchangeable, the petitioners conclude: “While our neo-pagan world wages a general attack against the divine institution of marriage, and the plagues of divorce and sexual depravity spread everywhere, even within the life of the Church,” the signatories consider it their “duty and privilege to declare, with one voice, our fidelity to the Church’s unchangeable teachings on marriage and to Her uninterrupted discipline, as received from the Apostles.”  

“Only the clarity of truth will set people free (John 8: 32),” the statement reads, enabling them to “find the true joy of love, by living a life in accordance with the wise and saving will of God, in other words, avoiding sin, as maternally requested by Our Lady in Fatima, in 1917.”

Among the new signatories are Dr. Thomas Ward, member of the Pontifical Academy for Life; Prof. Christopher Malloy, professor of theology at the University of Dallas; the theologian and philosopher Peter Kwasniewski; the rector of the St. Joseph College Seminary, Father Matthew Kauth, STD; Prof. William Fahey, president of the Thomas More College; Prof. Brad Miner, of the DC-based Faith and Reason Institute; Italian writer and psychologist, Roberto Marchesini, former Irish MP and EWTN radio commentator Kathy Sinnott; and Fr. Xavier Ryckeboer, professor of theology in Buenos Aires.