ZAGREB – Pope Benedict warned yesterday that the traditional family in Europe was “disintegrating” under the weight of secularisation and called for laws to help couples 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 an 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 secularisation which leads to the exclusion of God from life and the increasing disintegration of the family, especially in Europe, he said. – (Reuters)