Pope Benedict warned Sunday that the traditional family in Europe was "disintegrating" under the weight of secularization and called for laws to help cope with the costs of having and educating children.
On the second day of his trip to Croatia, a bastion of Roman Catholicism in the Balkans, the pope said in open-air mass for hundreds of thousands of people and hammered home one of the major themes of his papacy:
"Unfortunately, we are forced to acknowledge the spread of a secularization which leads to the exclusion of God from life and the increasing disintegration of the family, especially in Europe," he said in his sermon on the edge of the capital.
He continued, "Freedom without commitment to the truth is made into an absolute, and individual well-being through the consumption of material goods and transient experiences is cultivated as an ideal, obscuring the quality of interpersonal relations and deeper human values; love is reduced to sentimental emotion and to the gratification of instinctive impulses, without a commitment to build lasting bonds of reciprocal belonging and without openness to life. We are called to oppose such a mentality!
