The Family for the Third Millennium
We cannot speak of the family in the third millennium since that would be prophetic as only God knows the future. But we should speak of the family for the third millennium because family life in the closing decade of the second millennium must be stronger, more solid, more secure than ever before since the dawn of Christianity. Why is that? Because family in the Western world is faced with challenges which threaten its very survival.
Every pope in the twentieth century has written and spoken extensively on the crisis facing family life in our day. The reasons are obvious. In one so-called developed country after another, families are not only on trial; a few are facing extinction. In the U.S. the divorce rate is now three hundred percent of what it was early in this century. The birth rate in the United States is now twelve children born each year for every thousand Americans. By even calculation, the family in our country—as we approach the third millennium—is disappearing. The impact of this breakdown is beyond human reckoning. What no one dares deny is that the family in once Christian nations is becoming a past memory.
Enemies of the family have coined the term, "demographic explosion" to describe what they call "overpopulation." But, is there truly a problem with our population? Not really. No doubt the poorer countries have a higher rate of population growth, but this is difficult to sustain in the context of low economic and social development. It is the more economically developed countries that talk about overpopulation. These are also the ones who are either responsible for the poverty of other countries or are unwilling to cooperate in helping these nations cope with their high birth rate in a Christian manner.
Instead, what are the solutions proposed for dealing with the pseudo-problem of overpopulation? The solutions, we are told, are contraception, sterilization and abortion. As the Holy Father explains, rather than "face and solve these serious problems with respect of the dignity of individuals and families and for every person's inviolable right to life, they prefer to promote and impose, by whatever means, a massive program of birth control. Even the economic help which they would be ready to give is unjustly conditioned on the acceptance of an anti-birth policy." This has become the inhuman policy of the United Nations in one international Congress after another.
How, then, are we to describe our century? It is a century in which the culture of death is being promoted by the political and financial powers of this world. It is not only the lives of individuals that are being attacked; it is the lives of families that are being murdered by forces of evil released in the twentieth century.
Catholic Hope for the Family
Underlying the massive breakdown of family life in our day is the intrusion of values in human society that are totally alien to Christianity. If we are to understand what is happening to the modern family, therefore, we have to go back to the beginnings of Christianity where the family truly began.
The Roman empire into which Christ entered was a culture that did not believe in the family. The Latin word familia meant household. The head of the household was a man who had wives and concubines. He decided whether a newborn child should stay alive. Every bed in which a child was born had to have a pail of water next to it in order to drown the newborn infant. depending on the father's decision. Contraception and abortion were universally legalized in the Roman Empire. Divorce and remarriage were commonplace. Polygamy was assumed, even among believing Jews.
But, in three centuries, Christianity made such an impact on this pagan culture that Emperor Constantine had no choice but to give Christians the legal freedom to practice their religion—which was totally in contrast to the common practices of the day. In fact, if there is one term that characterized Christians in the age of martyrs, it was "the family." Two sentences from a second century document (Letter to Diognetus) tell us the story:
"Like others, Christians also marry and have children, but they do not expose these children. They do not kill the children. Christians share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they live on a level which is above all human law. "
The family, as we now understand it, came into existence with Christianity. Twenty centuries of history teach us that family life is only as stable and as sound as the Christian faith of culture. As this faith goes, so goes the family. And, now the question, why does the Catholic Church offer the only solution to the challenges to the family in our day? Because only the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of God's revealed truth about the family.
In the two thousand years since Calvary, there have been many departures from Catholic unity. There have been countless churches, called Christian, which have separated themselves from the one true Church of Jesus Christ. Without exception, they broke with the Church of Rome because they refused to accept the Catholic teaching on the family. In a culture like our own, Catholics are surrounded, or shall I say, engulfed, by people who do not share our Catholic heritage. Concretely they do not share the unchangeable doctrine revealed by the Son of God.
In 1535, two British Catholics were martyred for the faith: St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More. John Fisher was the only bishop in England who stood firm with the Pope in denying that Henry VIII had a right to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. St. Thomas More was chancellor of England. He, too, remained faithful to Christ's teaching on the indissolubility of consummated, sacramental marriage. Both Fisher and More paid for their loyalty with their blood.
Our Responsibility to Family
All the above was a prelude to what I really want to share with you. No words of mine can describe the breakdown of the family in so-called developed countries like the United States. Our country has witnessed a massive secularization of its culture. God and the rights of God; virtue as conformity to the divine will; sin as the choice of what I want contrary to what God wants; eternal life in the beatific vision as the destiny of our existence—all of these have become either pious fancies or the dream world of religious weirdos. Siegmund Freud defines psychosis as the mental state of people who believe their behavior on earth determines their happiness after bodily death. Thus, according to Freud, most of us are psychotics. If the contemporaries of Christ called Him a fanatic, we should not expect the world to have a better estimate of ourselves.
Now, we must focus our responsibility to meet the global breakdown of the family as understood by Christianity. At this point, we could speak for hours about the implications of our duty to preserve family life for the third millennium. At root, however, our duty is to proclaim the teachings of Christ on the family as taught by the Church which He founded.
Among these teachings of Christ, none is more important for the preservation and promotion of sound family life than the Catholic doctrine on Church and State. I know of no single statement of a Bishop of Rome that is clearer on this subject than one sentence of Pope Pius XI—who also gave us his important encyclical on the evils of Atheistic Communism. In Casti Connubii (Dec. 31, 1930), he declares: "The family is more sacred than the State. Human beings are begotten not for the earth and for time, but for heaven and eternity."
In light of this pronouncement of the Vicar of Christ, our most serious responsibility for the third millennium is to defend the rights of the Church in her teaching on the family. Our corresponding responsibility is to resist the usurped claims of the State which is literally possessed by the evil spirit in some countries to destroy the family. Our faith teaches us that each human person was individually created, his human soul, at the moment of conception in his mother's womb. There is no such thing as a "fetus." There is no such thing as mere "tissue." There is a human being from the moment that the ovum is fertilized and immediately God creates an immortal soul out of nothing; He infuses that soul into what thus becomes a human body animated by a human spirit.
Our faith further teaches us that to destroy this just conceived human being is murder. Our faith teaches us that God instituted marriage to provide for the increase of the human race by the loving cooperation of husband and wife in procreating the human race. Our faith teaches us that marriage is a life-long commitment of one man and one woman in a covenant of love. Husband and wife are to love each other even as Christ loves the Church and wants us to love Him in return. Our faith teaches us that mother and father are to provide not only for the bodily well-being of their children, they are to teach them and train them and prepare them for an everlasting life in the heavenly kingdom which Christ died on the Cross to obtain for us all.
All of this is part of the heritage of our Catholic faith. However, it is not enough to merely believe what the Church teaches about marriage and the family. We must also understand this teaching. I never tire repeating how important it is to understand what we believe: here the revealed truth taught by Jesus Christ about the family. At the core of this truth is a mystery of selfless love. What are we saying? We are saying that the family as a union of father and mother and children is the union of a love, which is the only reconciliation of authority and liberty.
Except for God becoming man in the person of Christ, this family love would be impossible. This is proved in every culture which departs from the foundations of Christianity. Without Christ there cannot be selfless love. Without selfless love there cannot be a stable, fruitful family life. This is the verdict of twenty centuries of Christian history.
Defending the Family
Now we shift our attention to the widespread threats which the family faces in our day. No one has written more forcefully about these threats than our present Holy Father, Pope John Paul II. He tells us that these threats are not merely verbal or highly organized. They are being legally justified and even forcibly legalized.
In one nation after another, the State is given the right to determine the conditions of marriage. For example, in more than one country of South America, Catholic marriages are invalid in the eyes of the government. The State is given the right to determine how many children may be conceived and brought to birth. The State is given the right to determine who is to live and who should die. One result is that those in the medical profession are given legal jurisdiction to decide on the morality of the people's choice to murder an unborn child or kill an unwanted adult.
Dare we ask whether the civil law can require of its citizens to live according to the moral standards determined by the State? The Vicar of Christ tells us, absolutely not. The State has no right to determine moral standards that are contrary to divine law. In order to justify the most devastating anti-family legislation, its promoters are appealing to democracy. The Church tells us that a democratic culture is prone to base its legal system on what the majority in a given society considers moral and actually practices. It further believes that the will of the majority should determine the moral norms of society. What is the result? The result is what we call ethical relativism. This means that the laws are determined by the people of a country. It acknowledges no objective principles of right or wrong, but claims that morality depends on the choices of the majority of people in a democratic state.
What happens to the human conscience? The civil law takes the place of our conscience. In 1973, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion, the reaction of the people was that of a nation hypnotized by an alien mind. Let us not hesitate to say that this alien mind was the mind of the devil. I believe I know the writings of the Popes very well. Twenty-five years of teaching theology to my Jesuits, twenty-six years working for the Holy See have taught me a great deal. I know of no Pope in the last five centuries who has written more openly—I would say more brazenly—about the State encroaching on the laws of God, than Pope John Paul II. He asks whether the civil law can take the place of a human conscience. And he answers, absolutely not! What happens when the State refuses to recognize the human rights of a family? When this happens, it is not only failing in its duty but its laws lose their binding force.
Year 2000 and Beyond
I was only fourteen years old when I began reading Karl Marx. Certainly much too soon, but one thing I have learned: Karl Marx—the father of atheistic Communism—was a sworn enemy of the family, which he claimed was the invention of a patriarchal philosophy. These principles have penetrated the culture of our nation far beyond anything that we can imagine.
There is no human power that can cope with the evil powers of the modern world as taught by Marx and his successors. When Christ told us that the prince of this world is the evil spirit, He was not indulging in platitudes. He was speaking the unqualified truth and foretelling what His followers should expect until the end of time.
Only a deep faith in the Divine Exorcist and trustful confidence in His power can make the humanly impossible divinely possible with the help of His grace. Selfishness, as the saints tell us, is cunning. It pushes and insinuates itself into everything or making us believe it is not there at 'all. This is the root cause of the breakdown of family life in so many materially prosperous countries in our day. Only the God who became a Child and lived on earth as a member of a Family could have inspired the selfless love that brought the Christian family into being. This same Jesus, we are confident, will reform the Christian family where it has weakened and even bring it back, where it has been destroyed.
Father Hardon, author of the Modern Catholic Dictionary, The Catholic Catechism and other books, holds a doctorate in theology from the Gregorian University in Rome. He has taught at the School of Theology at Loyola and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Catholic Doctrine at St. John's University in New York. Following is an adaptation of an address he delivered at the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation Conference in Chicago on April 17, 1999. Copyright Inter Mirifica 1999.
©Mindszenty Report, the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, P.O. Box 11321, St. Louis, MO 63105, 314-727-6279.
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