Last month Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi took up his new post as head of the Archdiocese of Milan, and with it the unofficial baton as the Italian front-runner in a future papal conclave. This event has been given a lot of attention by the Italian media. We would like, however, to concentrate not on Mgr Tettamanzi's position in Milan but on his parting gift to the people of Genoa, his former diocese.

This took the form of a pastoral letter on the family. It's an instructive document in style and substance.

Cardinal Tettamanzi's letter draws its deepest inspiration from two major documents of the current pope: his 1981 encyclical on the family and his 2001 apostolic letter on the future of the Church.

Cardinal Tettamanzi begins by emphasising one of Pope John Paul's favourite points - that the family is not just the basic building block of society but also the fundamental agent of the Church's evangelisation. But he says this missionary priority is meaningless unless the family lives the faith deeply. That's another common tenet of the pope and the cardinal.

They both focus on key elements for progress: the essential role of parents in the religious education of their children; the value of example over preaching; the importance of personal prayer; the duty to attend Sunday Mass; the centrality of the Eucharist; the need to welcome and protect human life; and the absolute commitment to the concept of the traditional family, based on permanent marriage between a man and a woman.

They also agree on social trends that are oppressing the modern family, from a "divorce mentality" to the exploitation of human sexuality. But here Cardinal Tettamanzi shows a more cutting verbal style, honed perhaps by the particular challenges posed by Italian society - a society that is Catholic by tradition, but where faith is superficial and most families "live like pagans", he says.

The cardinal describes the "dominant culture" in strikingly negative terms. He says it rejects the Christian idea of self-giving in marriage because it has so elevated the ideal of individualistic self-gratification. Cardinal Tettamanzi sees Italy's low birth rate, its high cohabitation rate and its increasing tolerance of homosexual unions as signs that the country has accepted the "privatisation of marriage", in which anything goes.

He says it's symptomatic of a cultural decline, aggravated by a school system that often ends up "destroying the moral personality". Even the Church's instructors can fall short. He faults the mass media for promoting banal values and dangerous moral messages. Television in particular is guilty of "acts of aggression" against the family, he says.

The cardinal says the unravelling begins in courtship, when sexual gratification is simply taken for granted and the virtue of chastity ignored. Often, he says, sexual attraction has been worn out by the time marriage takes place, so "it's obvious that attention is going to turn towards other people" after the wedding.

Most Italian weddings celebrated in the church have "nothing sacramental about them except the external form", he says. The couple goes to Communion, in the majority of cases for the last time in their lives. They recite vows that are meaningless because they are not educated in self-sacrifice.

More often than not, the whole ceremony is designed to satisfy parents and provide the opportunity for a social celebration. He suggests that it's time for pastors to refuse to marry couples unless they truly understand and accept the Church's teachings on marriage.

A Christian Outlook believes that Cardinal Tettamanzi's pastoral letter provides us in Malta with a lot of food for though followed by radical pastoral action in this area.

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