Category: Marriage, Family & Life

Church teaching, reflected in Scripture and Tradition, affirms that it is a man and a woman, united in marriage, who, together with their children, form a family. This community is the basic cell of society and the foundational and determinative point of reference according to which all other forms of family relationship can be assessed (CCC 2202). It is certainly true that the qualities of love and care which are intrinsic to the family may not always be adequately realised, sometimes with devastating consequences. Equally, aspects of the values particular to family life can be found outside of the familial unit composed of husband, a wife and their child or children. There are, however, unique and indispensible characteristics of the accepted understanding of family which make it the rightful and preferred context in which to raise children, namely the diverse and yet reciprocally enriching nature and contribution of both male and female parents, exercised within the security and the
permanence of marriage.
The Church teaches that God created man and woman and thereby established the fundamental constitution of the human family (cf. Gen 2:24; CCC 2203). While the traditional notion of family is not immune from breakdown and difficulty, this is no reason for it to be abandoned or replaced as the primary building block of society. On the contrary, more effort should be made to support families, whether the children within them are genetically the offspring of their father and mother or have been placed in their care through adoption.
Because of this constant teaching and the Church’s adherence to it, I find it unthinkable, indeed heart-breaking, that Catholic Caring Services, so linked to the Catholic Church since its inception, would abandon its position and capitulate to recent same-sex adoption legislation. Again, it is abundantly clear to me that you are adamant in your pursuit of an Open Policy, at variance with the Church’s teaching.
As your Bishop, I cannot give permission to an agency of the Catholic Church to act in opposition to her teaching and her long and rich experience of the placement of children with adoptive parents.

Patrick O’Donohue, Bishop of Lancaster
Letter to ‘Catholic Caring Services’

The Berlin Gemaeldegalerie appears if anything to be one of the most user-friendly artistic sites in Europe. So why â?? unlike other museums in cutting-edge Berlin â?? isnâ??t it crawling with culture vultures?

Itâ??s hard to avoid the obvious here: given the centuries in question, the galleryâ??s collection is inevitably, ineradicably, inescapably Christian. Such is true not only of the majority of paintings, whose subjects are overtly Biblical or otherwise religious, but of many â??non-religiousâ?? pieces too. Even the Dutch masterpieces by Steen, Brueghel, and others portraying â??ordinary life,â?? for example, are often hortatory comments on the gaps between Christian morality and Christian practice.

Might the overall Christian character of these artworks somehow account for the seeming lack of public interest?… growing religious illiteracy might help to explain something of the Gemaeldegalerieâ??s relative emptiness. But I wonder if another, perhaps less obvious factor – the simultaneous disappearance of something known as the human family in the lives of many Europeans â?? may turn out to explain a lot, too. Thatâ??s one disappearing act at which the Germans, even more than any of their neighbors, have excelled. Almost a third of the German women born in 1960 have had no children. Only half as many children were born last year in Germany as in 1964 â?? and thatâ??s even throwing in the Turks. And this empty cradle may be just the human backdrop against which the empty Gemaeldegalerie makes best if perverse sense.

After all: how do you explain the sublimity of Raphaelâ??s Madonna with the Infant Jesus to someone whoâ??s never held a baby? Or whatâ??s so perfect about Botticelliâ??s adolescents in The Virgin and Child with Singing Angels to people who havenâ??t seen real teenagers up close for decades? How to convey what is throat-tightening about Grienâ??s Mourning of Christ to a fit, childless man or woman of any age who has never seen death?

In cutting-edge Germany as elsewhere in Western Europe, increasing numbers of people can no longer be assumed to have hands-on experience of any of these things. This familial illiteracy may yet turn out to be more connected to religious illiteracy than weâ??ve so far understood.

Mary Eberstadt Empty Cradle, Empty Gallery
Here is more by Mary Eberstadt

Finally I am getting to see the point of the Virgin Mary – Maria, das Kind verehrend – she rightly adores this child from whom our future comes.

The British, never fond of children, have lost all knowledge or intuition about how to raise them; as a consequence, they now fear them, perhaps the most terrible augury possible for a society. The signs of this fear are unmistakable on the faces of the elderly in public places. ..

The British may have always inclined toward harshness or neglect (or both) in dealing with children; but never before have they combined such attitudes with an undiscriminating material indulgence. My patients would sometimes ask me how it was that their children had turned out so bad when they had done everything for them. When I asked them what they meant by â??everything,â?? it invariably meant the latest televisions in their bedrooms or the latest fashionable footwearâ??to which modern British youth attaches far more importance than Imelda Marcos ever did.

Needless to say, the British stateâ??s response to the situation that it has in part created is simultaneously authoritarian and counterproductive. The government pretends, for example, that the problem of child welfare is one of raw poverty… But after many years of various redistributive measures and billions spent to reduce it, child poverty is, if anything, more widespread.

A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences, makes childhood in Britain a torment both for many of those who live it and those who observe it.

Theodore Dalrymple Childhood’s End

The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study from the independent think-tank Civitas.

In Licensed to Hug Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues that children need to have contact with a range of adult members of the community for their education and socialisation, but ‘this form of collaboration, which has traditionally underpinned intergenerational relationships, is now threatened by a regime that insists that adult/child encounters must be mediated through a security check’ The scope of child protection has become immense. Since its formation in 2002 the Criminal Records Bureau has issued 15 million disclosures, but the whole operation has now been ratcheted up several notches by the passage of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006. This has led to the creation of the Independent Safeguarding Authority which, when it is rolled out in October 2009, will require CRB checks of 11.3 million people – over one quarter of the adult population of England.

Whereas adults would once routinely have rebuked children who were misbehaving, or helped children in distress, they now think twice about the consequences of interacting with other people’s children. A culture of fear pervades what should be ordinary relationships.

Civitas Licensed to Hug: How child protection policies are poisoning the relationship between the generations and damaging the voluntary sector

The central role of intra-family gifts
This leads us to the other essential feature of family economics, but one which Becker’s “neoclassical” theory omits. Like Adam Smith, Becker presumes that all economic transactions, including those within marriage, are essentially self-interested efforts to maximize one’s own utility or satisfaction. Now, family members do acquire their incomes mostly by exchanges with those outside the family. But the “division of labor” within the family, as Aristotle and Augustine pointed out, occurs mostly by personal and joint gifts, not exchanges. We all need to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and transported, whether or not we earn income. Our income therefore typically exceeds our consumption during parenthood and the “empty nest” (i.e. after children have left home), while consumption exceeds income during childhood and old age. This involves extensive gifts, not only from parents to dependent children but also between husbands and wives and from adult children to aged parents. … Without government social benefits, the retirement gap could be bridged only by love: a gift from someone (most often one’s adult children) whose own consumption and utility are thereby reduced.

Why do people have children?
Becker answers that children provide parents satisfaction as producer or (in modern economies) consumer durables. But this theory is not very accurate. In what I call “neo-scholastic” economic theory, parents have children for one of two reasons: because they love the children for their own sakes, and/or love themselves and expect some benefit from the children. … Becker’s theory cannot accommodate this fact, since worship, like marriage and fertility, involves another kind of sacrifice of valuable resources by the giver.

John D Mueller Demographic Winter

A contributing factor to post-abortion trauma is silence from the Church. The common reluctance to preach on the matter because there are some women in the Church who have had abortions and it will hurt them is misguided and harmful. There is a crying need to acknowledge the grief of abortion – silence pushes this grief underground and prevents forgiveness and reconciliation.

Since, sadly, the rate of abortion among Catholic women is about the same as the rate in the general population, there is no question that there will be many women in our parishes who have had abortions. They need the grace of the sacrament of penance, the understanding of the Church and the clear and unambiguous commitment of their priests to preaching compassionately against this evil – and indeed the reaffirmation of the virtue of chastity for their own children.

Tim Finigan

A mother and daughter, both of whom had had abortions, and became pro-life. They went to the parish priest with a pro-life poster asking him to display it in their church. He politely took the poster and folded it, saying to them: “You know, I can’t put this up. Don’t you know there might be women in my congregation who have had abortions?” Our silence denies these women the right/opportunity to grieve for their child. Silence means that their child’s existence is denied.

There are prayer vigils regularly outside the abortion mill at Bedford Square.

John Boyle

Last weekend, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a wonderfully concise and eloquent statement on embryonic stem cell research. When printed out, it comes to barely more than six double-spaced typewritten pages, but within that relatively small compass may be found all of the elements essential to a well-formed Catholic conscience on this important question. Even more remarkably, the statement marshals its argument in a manner that can be grasped by a person of ordinary intelligence.

Given the complexity of the subject and the continual stream of disinformation propagated by the mainstream media on the question, this is no small accomplishment. The bishops deserve a hearty round of applause for piercing to the heart of the matter in such a thoughtful and accessible fashion. The pity is that it hasn’t been done before, but now that the statement is out, every effort should be made to ensure wide dissemination throughout the nation’s parishes. A rough estimation suggests that its fifteen paragraphs would fit nicely onto a single two-sided page for insertion into weekly bulletins. But there’s no reason why the effort to educate the laity should end there. Homilists should be encouraged to expound upon its themes from the pulpit.

Michael Uhlmann The bishops get it right

Karl Barth Church Dogmatics III.4 3.

1. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command it is surely evident that the decision for the way of marriage is for some, as the choice of the unmarried state is for others, the matter of the supremely particular divine vocation. (p.183)

2. When marriage is seen in the light of divine command and it is plain to men and women united in marriage that here too and especially that they are called to be obedient to God then the fulfilment of this life-partnership becomes for them a task (p. 187)

3. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is apparent that it is full life- partnership. It is this fact which differentiates marriage from other relations between human beings and between man and woman. (189)

4. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is clear that it is an exclusive life-partnership. With or without a family it builds and shapes a home where many may go in and out… The man who thinks it is possible or permissible to love many women simultaneously or alternately has not yet begun to love. (195)

5. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, it is clear that it is a lasting life-partnership. It is the full and exclusive union of a man and a woman for the whole of the time which is still before them and which is given to them in common. To enter upon marriage is the of renounce the possibility of leaving it. (p.203)

6. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command, this is decisive for the question of its genesis. It is now made manifest that to be concluded and lived out in freedom, marriage requires from both participants free and mutual love. And we further maintain that it is not their love for each other but God’s calling and gift which is the true basis of marriage. (213)

This essay represents what might be called a radical friendly amendment to the revisionists by exploring a hitherto unexamined logical leap in the famous story line. To be fancy about it for a moment, what secularization theory assumes is that religious belief comes ontologically first for people and that it goes on to determine or shape other things they do — including such elemental personal decisions as whether they marry and have children or not. Implied here is a striking, albeit widely assumed, view of how one social phenenomenon powers another: that religious believers are more likely to produce families because religious belief somehow comes first.

And therein lies a real defect with the conventional story line about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe. For what has not been explained, but rather assumed throughout that chain of argument, is why the causal relationship between belief and practice should always run that way instead of the other, at least some of the time. It is as if recent intellectual history had lined up all the right puzzle pieces — modernity, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking and absent families — only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but leaves something critical out.
This essay is a preliminary attempt to supply that missing piece. It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over secularization.

In brief, it is not only possible but highly plausible that many Western European Christians did not just stop having children and families because they became secular. At least some of the time, the record suggests, they also became secular because they stopped having children and families. If this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it.

Mary Eberstadt How the West really lost God

And this is the sevenhundred post on this blog. Fecund in more than one sense then.

Not only do we have an entirely novel definition of marriage that excludes procreation from its purview. That would be dramatic enough, since it shifts the focus of our most basic social institute from inter-generational concerns to those of present personal gratification, and in doing so eliminates many of the responsibilities that belong to marriage. But we also have the novel idea that the state has the power to re-invent marriage by adopting and enforcing this definition. By claiming such a power the Canadian state has drawn marriage and the family into a captive orbit. It has reversed the gravitational field between the family and the state, putting itself at odds with the founding principles of Canada and with the notion of free men and free women. It has effectively made every man, woman and child a chattel of the state, by turning their most fundamental human connections into mere legal constructs at the state’s disposal. It has transformed those connections from divine gifts into gifts of the state.

Douglas Farrow Nation of Bastards: Essays on the End of Marriage. Yup, this is the Douglas Farrow of Ascension and Ecclesia.

Read lots more Farrow at the wonderful Institute for for the Study of Marriage, Law and Culture