By Gerald Korson
Voice correspondent

When an East Bay newsweekly published a lengthy article last month referring to him as “The Father of Proposition 8,” Bishop Salvatore Cordileone was flattered.

Bishop Salvatore Cordileone

However, he said he could not take credit for what the article described as his “indispensable role” in the success of the controversial ballot initiative by which California voters last November approved a state constitutional amendment that effectively banned same-sex marriage.

Although as auxiliary bishop of San Diego he was “pivotal” in building initial support for Proposition 8, “There are other people after that point who had much more influential positions than I had,” Bishop Cordileone told The Catholic Voice.

The bishop’s contribution to the amendment’s passage is just one expression of his passionate commitment to the defense of marriage and family.

Challenges such as those posed by the gay-rights movement “give us a great opportunity to teach about marriage — why marriage is good, why marriage is holy, why it benefits everyone,” said Bishop Cordileone. But “our effectiveness will be limited unless our people model the goodness and holiness of marriage.”

That need for education was the motivation for a training conference last month sponsored by the pro-family organization Catholics for the Common Good (CCG) and hosted by Holy Spirit Parish in Fremont. One-hundred and forty people attended the daylong event, which offered formation to become a lay “marriage advocate” and strategies on how to take action in the defense of marriage and family, according to Bill May, CCG’s chairman.

“We all have a vocation to witness to the truth and to help form society in the way that is most conducive to the dignity of the person,” May told The Voice. “Strong marriages and families are foundational to society.”

Bishop Cordileone echoed that principle.

“Our human experience shows from the beginning of civilization that society is built on the cell of the family, and family is built on marriage,” the bishop said. “Marriage really is the foundation of everything else — and if that crumbles, then society is not going to be able to hold together for very long.”

He said he hoped the newly formed corps of marriage advocates in the diocese will take the Church’s teaching on marriage into the parish, the workplace and the political arena “so that more and more people can become educated on what marriage really is.”

While the gay-marriage movement is perhaps the most visible contemporary challenge to the institution of marriage, it is neither the first nor the only one.

May told The Voice that the push for same-sex marriage “is only a symptom of something much deeper — that marriage has already been redefined in the minds of many people.”

Bishop Cordileone noted that the institution of marriage in the United States had been increasingly undermined for several decades even before homosexual unions became an issue.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the establishment of “no-fault” divorce laws compromised the understanding of marriage as a permanent lifelong union. Around the same time, some couples began to experiment with “open marriages,” which tolerated adultery and thus redefined the concept of marital fidelity. During the same period, a contraceptive mentality developed that led many married couples either to strictly limit childbearing or to remain willfully childless, thus disassociating marriage from family life.

Indissolubility, fidelity and the raising of children are “the three defining elements of marriage — which we know from our Catholic tradition, but which also reflect what every society has understood marriage to be,” said the bishop. “So going back 40 years, we see at least the withering away of what is essential to marriage.”

As these essential elements of traditional marriage and family are weakened or rejected, even schoolchildren are affected. A case in point involves the Alameda Unified School District, which approved a supplemental “gender curriculum” last May that would teach about “alternative” homosexual, bisexual and transgender families. Last month, a parents’ group filed suit against AUSD for not allowing parents to opt out their children from these instruction sessions.

The moral formation of children is of special concern to Bishop Cordileone.

“What is worrisome is that the more family life decays and the more schools teach about alternative family lifestyles, the more children and young people are not going to be able to understand what marriage is and what marriage is for,” he said. “So we really have to recapture the minds and hearts of our young people.”

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