by Anthony Esolen –
The family is that natural society where individual liberty and the common good are most nearly reconciled. To deprive it of its rights is to rob people of a great part of what it is to be human.
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The beauty and the divine order of the family is the very soul of his social teaching, because it is there, within the walls of the home, that society begins. Thus we hear him declare, against the statists of his time, that by the command of God “we have the family; the society of a man’s house — a society limited indeed in numbers, but no less a true society, anterior to every kind of State or nation, invested with rights and duties of its own, totally independent of the civil community.” This is the doctrine of subsidiarity at its core.
The Pope does not justify the family on utilitarian grounds. He does not affirm (what is true in any case) that there are many things the family can do that the State cannot do as well, or cannot do at all. Instead he founds the rights of the family in nature, and the God of nature. It is a society both human and divine. It is within those bonds of love or duty that children and parents both put faces upon law that would otherwise remain abstract, distant, sometimes threatening, sometimes impotent, but always extrinsic, and therefore not quite real. It is there, and only there, that law and love may be found growing together.
And it is there that we first, when we are children, and most effectually, when we are grown, exercise our practical reason in attaining the common good. It combines the best of monarchy and aristocracy and democracy and even at times a merry anarchy, and, if it does not transgress against its own natural purposes, the family “has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty.” There we dicker in council, make strategic alliances, adjust the punishment to fit the crime, correct the sinner, commend the patriot, sing with the comrade, struggle on the field and laugh thereafter, make obedience into gifts and gifts into praise, remember those who have gone before us and follow in their wisdom, and fall to our knees in worship of the common Father of all. We occupy space in a city or county, those geographical fictions, but there in the family we dwell. Nations and parties pass away, but not the souls of those whose faces we never forget.
The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household, is a great and pernicious error.
At this point it seems to me coarse to turn to the political; but fittingly coarse. As jarring as it feels now to refer to so petty a thing as the leviathan, so unnatural it is for the leviathan to attempt to destroy or enfeeble or absorb the family. So says the Pope: “The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household, is a great and pernicious error.” True, a destitute family without friends must be assisted by public aid, and parents who pervert the true ends of the family, by gross neglect or abuse, should be brought to justice, “for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly to safeguard and strengthen them.” Yet we tread here upon hallowed ground. “The rulers of the State,” says Leo, “must go no further: here nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself.” Just as each one of us is an unrepeatable instance of the goodness of the Father, so too each child “takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born.”
The family, then, is that natural society where individual liberty and the common good are most nearly reconciled. To deprive it of its rights is to rob people of a great part of what it is to be human. It is repressive. The judgment of Pope Leo could hardly be more sternly expressed: “The Socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and break into pieces the stability of all family life.”
To deprive the family of its rights is to rob people of a great part of what it is to be human.
With what indignation, and even nausea, must we then regard the never-ceasing intrusions of the State! In Alberta, the “conservative” government has forbidden even homeschooling parents to teach their children that homosexual acts are unnatural. It does not occur to the lawmakers that their own edict is itself unnatural. In no school district in my area do parents have the least authority in determining what their children will learn; they are thwarted by buffers of bureaucrats, those within the schools and their friends on school committees, not to mention by the deliberately inculcated arrogance of teachers, who take it as their sacred mission to separate children as best they can from those beliefs of the parents that they do not share. Planned Parenthood, that money pit for the production of porno-twaddle and the destruction of life, peddles salacious “educational tools” to children, and never says, “You had better talk these things over with your father and mother,” or, “You should honor the laws of your faith,” or, “You might wish to take counsel from a wise clergyman.” No, that would be the advice of people who actually understood the harmony between law and love, and the just claims of the society into which we are born.
Mass entertainment, that drivel that trickles from the jowls of leviathan while it snores, has the same end in mind: to render us less human, by separating us from family and faith. After all, just as a strong family is a bulwark against the predations of the State, so too, as the entertainers have finally learned, is it a bulwark against the predations of the media. At least it can be a bulwark; its members can turn aside from the glaring screen and, rubbing their eyes, glance at one another. Its members can ask, after a long muddle, why they should attend to idols so stupid and ugly and impotent, and not to the God who made heaven and earth.
There has never been a calamity that someone or other has not profited from. So I will be asking, in this series, cui bono? Who profits from the dehumanization? More on this to come.
HT: CERC (read full article)
