There will be two World Meetings of Families (WMOF) in Dublin this August. The official one and an alternative parallel conference planned to take place in nearby Ballsbridge.
The alternative conference, entitled the Conference of Catholic Families, is sponsored by the Lumen Fidei Institute. It will focus on defending the Church’s teaching on sexuality.
It will focus on Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, which addressed the topics of marriage, procreation and contraception almost 40 years before Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae was published in 1968.
Catholic speakers at the Conference of Catholic Families include Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Fr. Thomas Weinandy who is a member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, Dr. Robert Royal who is the founder and president of the Faith and Reason Institute, and Dr. Gerard van den Aardweg, a Dutch psychologist and psychoanalyst.
Other speakers include pro-life philosopher Professor Stéphane Mercier and John Smeaton, director of Britain’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.
Cardinal Raymond Burke, Archbishop-emeritus of St. Louis and a member of the Apostolic Signatura, will address the conference via live video feed.
Although the alternate conference is planned for the same time as the World Meeting of Families, the organisers say their goal is to help rather than compete.
The 2018 World Meeting of Families in Dublin, the official Vatican conference, will be themed on Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
The speakers will include Francis, and Jesuit priest James Martin who has called on the Church to embrace homosexual persons even if they don’t conform to the teachings of the Catholic Church regarding sexuality.
Martin’s presentation is entitled “Exploring how parishes can support those families with members who identify as LGBTI+.”
Anthony Murphy, director of the Lumen Fidei Institute, says rather than inviting Fr James Martin, the WMOF organisers should have invited an apostolate like Courage International.
He says Courage International has been around “far longer than this publicity-seeking priest.”
Courage is an approved apostolate which counsels men and women with same-sex attractions, helping them to live chaste lives in fellowship, truth and love.
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