By Hilary White
August 10, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A set of resolutions adopted by the 127th Supreme Convention of the Knights of Columbus condemns the pornography industry and reaffirm the Knights' commitment to defending natural marriage. The Knights also voted to establish a fund for projects aimed to help restore “a common respect for the sanctity of human life” in the culture as a whole.
In their resolution opposing pornography, the Knights said, “modern society” is “saturated” with sexually explicit and violent content in films and TV, video games and “especially” the internet, citing the 4 million websites, approximately 35 per cent of the 'net's content, dedicated to porn.
The resolution stated that the pornography industry, worth US$12 billion a year, is linked to organised crime and is a major contributor to societal disintegration, including infidelity, broken marriages, harm to children and “a general breakdown of moral standards”. The Knights called upon law enforcement to “vigorously investigate and prosecute criminal conduct” surrounding the pornography industry, especially in child pornography.
In another resolution the Knights opposed trendy theories on marriage, saying, “marriage is not a chance sociological or historical construction” but one that is a “natural institution” that predates religious and legal institutions.
Marriage, they said, is “based on the natural biological complementarity of man and woman,” for support of spouses, the raising and protecting of children and “is woven into the social and religious fabric of every major culture and society”.
They pledged themselves to join with the bishops in the struggle to “achieve legal and constitutional protection” for marriage at all levels, as “the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”.
A third resolution agreed to establish the Knights of Columbus Culture of Life Fund, acknowledging that the steady erosion of the legal protections for human life are part of a broad anti-life cultural picture, the combating of which “will be much more demanding than enacting individual pieces of legislation”. The fund, to come from an annual assessment of $2 per member, will be dedicated, to the “much larger goal of moving public opinion toward respecting the dignity of the human person and the fundamental right to life”.
Established in 1882, the 1.78 million member Knights of Columbus is the world's largest Catholic fraternal and philanthropic organisation covering the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, the Philippines, Guam, Saipan, Japan, Cuba, and Poland. In 2007, Knights donated US $144,911,781 directly to charity, with a total of 1.1 billion in charitable contributions over the last 10 years.
Read the full text of the Knights' Resolutions: On life, On marriage, on Decency
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