Church and Family

The theme of the family continues to acquire greater centrality in contemporary reflection to the measure in which factors which threaten it appear on the scene. Without doubt, nobody in his right mind can deny that the family is a basic and fundamental cell of social life. Today it's evident that there is a certain feedback between family and society. In order for there to be a healthy society there have to be healthy families; but the contrary also contains a high dosage of truth: a healthy society is a favorable social frame for healthy families.

As in many other complex matters a reductive or unilateral vision does nothing but twist our approach to it. In relation to the family and its social impact it has become clearly necessary to approach the issue from both perspectives thus recognizing this mutual impact. Keeping this global vision in mind, we will refer on this occasion to the family in itself.

Let's look - without ignoring the context - at the most logical starting point: the issue itself. The family today is threatened by a crisis which affects it from within, in its own self-understanding and realization, as well as from without, by social inertias and ideological currents which don't consider it a necessary element of a healthy social life or which simply see it as an obstacle to manifestations of the 'law of like/dislike' [1] in people's lives.

The Church, expert in humanity, possessing the knowledge of God's Plan for the life of human beings, proclaims the fundamental importance of the family in human and social life. The Church sees in the family a vocation to holiness, that is, a path to which spouses are called in order to realize themselves humanly, both conjugally and as parents, and be assumed into the dynamic of the Lord's divine and sanctifying love.

From the faith, the Church proclaims the sublimity of the Christian path of marital life and the family. From the point of view of the Savior's redemptive work, Church teaching not only values the social aspect of the conjugal love constituted in the family that attains the dimension of a path to holiness in the sacrament, it understands that Christians called to marital life receive a calling from God which invites them to human and Christian perfection. To be precise, the vocation to holiness - a universal calling to all the faithful - also seals the identity of Christian marriage and opens up the dimension of the couple's love to a horizon of fraternal charity and solidarity.

Marriage is no state of egoism-for-two. It's rather a call to overcome egoism and open oneself to the Lord's transforming love, assume this love within the family nucleus, and project it into all of social life. In this perspective the raison d'être of conjugal love is to be found not only in itself and its social dimension but in God's salvific design itself from which it receives its fundament and orientation.

Everything related to the intimate life of spouses encounters the horizon of its understanding and its unfolding in that very fundament. Not long ago Pope John Paul II asked Bishops, and other sons and daughters of the Church capable of making understood the profound meaning of Church teaching on marital fecundity, to deepen in the meaning of marriage itself, in the light of which the nature and reach of the Magisterium's teachings about the transmission of human life and the education of children can be better understood. Doubtless many of the misunderstandings and errors concerning marital life and the family will disappear as this sublime path is deepened in under the light of the Church's authentic interpretations of the Divine Plan.

Our times present an urgent invitation to those called to the vocation of marriage to deepen in the characteristics of the gift they have received and situate conjugal love and marriage in the profound identity and scope that comes to them from the Gospel, the good news of the Lord Jesus for today, for tomorrow, and forever.

1990

Notes

[1] Translator's note: To be subject to the law of like/dislike is to live and act and make decisions according to one's caprices or feelings rather than according to the objective demands of a given situation or an objective moral reference.

Notice: These articles have been translated by members of the Christian Life Movement and have not been revised by the author.

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