In this deeply researched and thought about four-part commentary, Dr Andrew Kania takes you through the difficult territory involved in the increasingly common phenomenon of the breakdown in marital and family relationships. The research he uncovers poses difficult challenges for conservative and liberals alike — and for those charged with the responsibility for providing spiritual and moral guidance in contemporary society. Virtually all families are affected today by the pain unleashed by the breakdown in marriages and other relationships. If we do not experience it first hand we are often called to provide comfort to our children, other family members or friends who find themselves caught up when love goes awry.

Part I: An essay on parental love, the blindness of love, the search for moral truth and much else besides…

In Meredith Wilson's 1957 theatre production, The Music Man, the central character 'Professor Harold Hill', is a charlatan, a man who has developed a lucrative money-making scheme, convincing parents that the best way by which to instil virtue into their children and turn them away from a possible life of vice, is by keeping them occupied in learning a musical instrument. Yet what the parents who have bought into this scheme do not realize, is that Hill, has even less musical training than the children to whom he is purporting to create a brass band. Hill's sole intention is to sell as many expensive musical instruments as possible, before the scam is discovered for the folly that it is.

While the parents are raising finances to fund his project, Hill stalls for time by convincing the students that the most modern of methods by which to learn how to play a musical instrument, is simply letting the enjoyment flow from within; no specific instruction is necessary — just take a deep breath and play — formal guidelines or teaching is not required.

Hill's true identity is soon discovered. Similar to a medieval account of trial by ordeal, Hill is then led in chains to the city hall, where dutifully awaiting his arrival, equipped with expensive brass instruments, is his fledgling brass band.

Ordered by the parents to make the band play, and with beads of sweat flowing down his forehead, Hill, conductor's baton in his hand, and with eyes closed, asks the band to begin. Hundreds of parents listen and watch, waiting for the sound to commence. Soon the reality of the situation is exposed; the combined cacophony of the band instruments is nothing short of dreadful. Yet to Hill's amazement, the reaction of the parents is far from negative. Beaming with pride that their children are creating a noise that they have never been able to create themselves, the parents are more than satisfied with Hill's 'labours'.

The ears of the parents have evidently been stopped from hearing the awful, inconsonant Truth because of the blinding love they carry for their children. Thus instead of arresting the charlatan for what he really is — the musical cheerfully ends, all characters in the bliss of happy ignorance — that is all characters with the exception of the great deceiver himself, 'Harold Hill'.

The blind-spot in love…

Wilson's parody on the oftentimes myopic nature of parental love points to a syndrome inherent in the nature of interpersonal relationships within families — the danger of a relativisation of reality and Truth.

Whether a family needs no third-party to offer it advice and guidance, is a notion most certainly open to debate, for the love that exists between a parent and child, is, far from disinterested. No one wishes to admit that what is occurring in their particular family is any worse for the development of the human spirit than what is occurring in their neighbour's home. Few parents ever want to admit that their child is a reprobate; we even see at times the parents of serial killers interviewed on television extolling the hidden virtues of their children; and school bullies seem invariably to have solid parental support behind them, despite the number of times they have been suspended or expelled.

Similarly no child who has a deep love for their parent ever wants to admit that their parent is anything less then a hero; we see this each time a school yard fight ensues defending the slighted honour of a mother and father — a parent, who in fact may be many things in this life, with the exception of being honourable. The power of sibling love despite its rivalry, also has a strong tendency toward painting a million vices with a veneer of virtue. Thus seems to be the human condition, within the mechanics of the family dynamic at least; whatever we love, we shower not only in goodness, and Truth, but we also excuse with spoken and unspoken half-truths, by way of our selective vision and selective memory. Are we indeed willing to tell those who are closest to us that they are in fact wrong, on some points of life and living. At what cost are we prepared to sell Truth for peace in the family home? Is unconditional love a euphemism today for moral anarchism, or does the deepest love, come with certain conditions? Such are the questions posed of anyone who partakes of the world's most difficult vocation — parenting.

The family as primary source of virtue within society — the Foundation of Civics and Faith…

In Political and Social Philosophy (Eng. Trans. 1924), Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, extolled, as many before him, the family as the primary source of virtue within society, that engine room for the inculcation of religious awareness within the hearts and minds of the next generation. As part of the text, the editor of this collection of Lacordaire's essays, Rev. D. O'Mahony, referred to the life of François-René Chateaubriand, the founder of French Romantic literature who in his memoirs reflected on the impact that his family had had in his conversion toward God and the Catholic Church:

"On her deathbed my mother charged one of my sisters to recall me to a sense of that religion in which I had been educated, and my sister made known to me her wish. When the letter reached me beyond the water, my sister also had departed this life. Those two voices coming up from the grave, and that death which had now become the interpreter of death, struck me with peculiar force. I became a Christian. I did not yield to any great supernatural light: my conviction came from the heart. I wept, and I believed." (Lacordaire, 1924, p. 19 fn.)

Far more powerful than any sermon he had heard, or any theological classic he may have read, the words spoken to Chateaubriand from beyond the grave, conveyed by his loved ones to him — were so strong as to cause a radical change of heart toward God and the Church. It was the immortal power of the virtue within the spirit of a physically dead mother and sister that kindled within the soul of Chateaubriand a life of faith. In Chateaubriand we see almost a paraphrase of the life of Augustine weeping over the passing of his mother Monica.

Political and Social Philosophy, also includes, Lacordaire's Conference 39, wherein Lacordaire, speaks of the strong bond between a father and his son:

"Fatherhood is as much above love as love is itself above friendship. It would be a complete and spotless love if the return made by the child to the father were the return of the friend to the friend, of the husband to the wife; but such is not the case. When we were children, we were loved more than we loved, and now that we have grown old, we must be content to love children more than it is possible for them to love us in return. We must not complain. Your children follow in your wake, the wake of friendship, the wake of love, ardent paths which do not allow them to requite that hoary passion which we call fatherhood. Man finds in his children the same powerlessness to recompense his love as he himself experienced when a child, and has thus the honour to end in a disinterested love like that of God". (Lacordaire, 1924, p. 23 fn.)

Once again we hear an author speaking of the sacred nexus between child and parent. So inherent to the human condition seems to be this bond, that Christ teaches us in St. Luke's Gospel that even the most reprehensible of people recognize the power of the obligations and connection that exists between a parent and their child; as Christ states: "'What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!'" (Luke 11: 11 — 13, RSV)

John Paul II would speak at length about the importance of the family in the transmission of the Faith, in Christifideles Laici (1988):

"The Christian family, as the 'domestic Church', also makes up a natural and fundamental school for formation in the faith: father and mother receive from the Sacrament of Matrimony the grace and the ministry of the Christian education of their children, before whom they bear witness and to whom they transmit both human and religious values. While learning their first words, children learn also the praise of God, whom they feel is near them as a loving and providential Father; while learning the first acts of love, children also learn to open themselves to others, and through the gift of self receive the sense of living as a human being. The daily life itself of a truly Christian family makes up the first 'experience of Church', intended to find confirmation and development in an active and responsible process of the children's introduction into the wider ecclesial community and civil society. The more that Christian spouses and parents grow in the awareness that their 'domestic church'participates in the life and mission of the universal Church, so much the more will their sons and daughters be able to be formed in a 'sense of the Church' and will perceive all the beauty of dedicating their energies to the service of the Kingdom of God." (par. 62)

These exaltations of the importance of the family being said, herein thus lies, the most pivotal point for both the Church and for Society; for if it is by way of the strength of this bond between parent and child, that virtues and Faith are instilled and passed on to the next generation, so tragically, the same avenue can be used for the spreading of vice and the denial of Faith, if the family structure is dysfunctional, or begins to fall apart.

Part II: Weakening the Foundations of Society and Church:

In a 2007 Rutgers University Research Paper entitled: The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2007, the researchers identified a number of specific areas of concern for the family unit. Among these was:

1. there exists "a broad cultural shift away from religion and social traditionalism and toward faith in personal independence and tolerance for diverse life styles — otherwise known as 'secular individualism'. This cultural shift is a central feature of modern societies and therefore unlikely to be reversed." Yet researchers also concluded that:
2. at some point in the future, there must occur, in order for society to continue to function, a shift, however small, to "the view that personal happiness depends on high-trust and lasting relationships and that such relationships require constraints on short-term adult interests in order to foster long-term commitments to children, and thus to the future."

In short, without a shift to a situation where 'stable' families are the pre-dominant environments for children to be nurtured in, we will as a society be breeding future generations of individuals without roots, without a sense of identity, without an awareness of the notion of selflessness, without an appreciation of the importance of unfailing commitment. So disparate are the cultures of the married non-divorced families from those who are divorced, or are children of co-habitating couples, that the author of the Rutger's study, David Popenoe, claims that within the United States there are in fact two nations currently being built: "Today, more children are born out-of-wedlock (now almost four out of ten), and more are living in stepfamilies, with cohabiting but unmarried adults, or with a single parent. This means that more children each year are not living in families that include their own married, biological parents, which by all available empirical evidence is the gold standard for insuring optimal outcomes in a child's development."

That there are a great number of broken families in our society, should not see us as a society setting new benchmarks for cultural norms — by so doing we will in fact be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, continually drawing a line in the sand behind the last we have drawn, and daring the tide to cross it once more — which if it is given the freedom to do so, it inevitably will.

What we need as a society to do, is to acknowledge the modern tragedy of the breakdown of the family unit, understand the benefits of a unified family, and strive toward strengthening future generations, creating a climate of stability and emotional maturity — through specific targeting of the youth in Schools — in family re-education programmes. What we do not need is condemnation of people whose families have ruptured, nor alternately a politically correct wave of apologetics that suggest that such families are no different from those which are still unified.

Similarly there is of course an enormous need within society to help piece together the fractured lives of so many individuals. As John Paul II explained in Familiaris Consortio (1981):

"Each of these elements presents the Church with arduous pastoral problems, by reason of the serious consequences deriving from them, both religious and moral (the loss of the religious sense of marriage seen in the light of the Covenant of God with His people; deprivation of the grace of the sacrament; grave scandal), and also social consequences (the destruction of the concept of the family; the weakening of the sense of fidelity, also towards society; possible psychological damage to the children; the strengthening of selfishness). The pastors and the ecclesial community should take care to become acquainted with such situations and their actual causes, case by case. They should make tactful and respectful contact with the couples concerned, and enlighten them patiently, correct them charitably and show them the witness of Christian family life, in such a way as to smooth the path for them to regularize their situation. But above all there must be a campaign of prevention, by fostering the sense of fidelity in the whole moral and religious training of the young, instructing them concerning the conditions and structures that favor such fidelity, without which there is no true freedom; they must be helped to reach spiritual maturity and enabled to understand the rich human and supernatural reality of marriage as a sacrament." (par. 81)

A further study on the breakdown of the family unit, Elizabeth Marquardt's, Between Two Worlds (2006), also revealed a number of quite devastating conclusions:

1. children of divorce come to feel like divided selves, living a certain code of values with one parent, and then a different set of values with the other parent;
2. 'secrets' are endemic in divorced families — one parent not knowing what is being said when the child is with the other parent, and the child not knowing how their parent is living when they are away from them;
3. children of divorce prematurely age, in that they must deal with confronting emotional issues, which by the very nature of a divorce cannot be sheltered from them. In many cases the child becomes the confidante for a grieving spouse, sitting with a crying parent, listening to a highly charged emotional issues;
4. children of divorce must try and attempt to rationalize the opposing moral views of their parents within their minds, for the conversation no longer takes place in front of them, nor is there any resolution;
5. children who have experienced divorce in the family, are also typified by a loss of trust in authority and relationships, that combined, undermine a belief in God. Children from such families are far less likely to have religious adherence. There are however a small number of children whose faith in God is however strengthened after the divorce experience.

Vatican II on the vital nature of the family for the social and religious development of the child…

It is interesting at this point to compare the findings of Elizabeth Marquardt's research with an excerpt from Gaudium et Spes (1965) on the vital nature of the family for the social and religious development of the child:

"The family is a kind of school of deeper humanity. But if it is to achieve the full flowering of its life and mission, it needs the kindly communion of minds and the joint deliberation of spouses, as well as the painstaking cooperation of parents in the education of their children. The active presence of the father is highly beneficial to their formation. The children, especially the younger among them, need the care of their mother at home. This domestic role of hers must be safely preserved, though the legitimate social progress of women should not be underrated on that account … Thus the family, in which the various generations come together and help one another grow wiser and harmonize personal rights with the other requirements of social life, is the foundation of society. All those, therefore, who exercise influence over communities and social groups should work efficiently for the welfare of marriage and the family. Public authority should regard it as a sacred duty to recognize, protect and promote their authentic nature, to shield public morality and to favor the prosperity of home life. The right of parents to beget and educate their children in the bosom of the family must be safeguarded. Children too who unhappily lack the blessing of a family should be protected by prudent legislation and various undertakings and assisted by the help they need." (par. 52)

In terms of more contemporary research, another researcher, Billie Clare Myers in her study, Religiosity and Gender Attitudes, confirms the importance of religion within the life of the family: "Religion has positively influenced families in many ways. Religious families have handled conflicts within the family in healthier ways than nonreligious families. Moreover, Abbott and Berry (1990), noted religious families were more likely to seek guidance and assistance from God and exhibit family satisfaction than nonreligious families. Religious families also have had closer familial ties and higher quality mother-child (Pearce & Axinn, 1998) and father-child relationships (King, 2003; Roggman, Benson, & Boyce, 1999). In addition, religious fathers were more familiar with the development of their infants (Roggman et al., 1999). Besides finding more involvement in religious fathers than nonreligious fathers King (2003) found religious fathers considered marriage and having children to be more important than nonreligious fathers and were more egalitarian in their views about household chores and childcare than nonreligious fathers." (Myers, American Journal of Psychological Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, September, 2007)

Yet in addition to these findings, in a previous study, The Top Ten Myths of Divorce (April 2001), Rutger's University researchers also concluded that: "Marriages of the children of divorce actually have a much higher rate of divorce than the marriages of children from intact families. A major reason for this, according to a recent study, is that children learn about marital commitment or permanence by observing their parents. In the children of divorce, the sense of commitment to a lifelong marriage has been undermined".

This research was further substantiated in a paper, entitled, The Legacy of Marital Discord for The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology written by Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, both at Pennsylvania State University. The authors concluded:

"The two most viable hypotheses are that marital quality is transmitted across generations either through direct observation of parental behavior or through disruptions in parent-child relationships." (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001, Vol. 81, No. 4, p. 637)

The much acclaimed work of Professor Judith Wallerstein (2001), The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, also concurs with these findings, in that even as long as twenty-five years after the divorce occurred, the children of divorce are still shattered by the separation of their parents — to the point that their emotional torment is self-destructing potentially good marital relationships.

Religion is not an immunization against divorce…

However, according to the Barna Research Group, the very fact that one belongs to a particular religious groups, in itself does not miraculously immunize the marriage from the risk of divorce. In their study of 2006, research findings revealed that the marriages of atheists and agnostics tended in comparison to Christian marriages, (without marriage preparation), to be longer lasting. Within Christian communities, the Brana study highlighted that those marital unions that had the shortest life-span were those from the Pentecostal and Baptist communities.

Marriages in which the partners belonged to the mainstream Christian communities: Lutherans, (specifically mentioned from Protestantism) and the Catholic Church, according to this study, had a considerably higher rate of success. As the founder of the Research Group, George Barna commented: "While it may be alarming to discover that born again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time. Even more disturbing, perhaps, is that when those individuals experience a divorce many of them feel their community of faith provides rejection rather than support and healing. But the research also raises questions regarding the effectiveness of how churches minister to families. The ultimate responsibility for a marriage belongs to the husband and wife, but the high incidence of divorce within the Christian community challenges the idea that churches provide truly practical and life-changing support for marriages." (The Barna Group, September 2004, Born Again Christians Just As Likely to Divorce As Are Non-Christians) In essence, the findings stressed the importance of marriage preparation — for religious belief can be as much a divisive force as it can be a unifying one within a marriage.

So what implications do these studies have for a Church and western society beginning a new millennium? How does the family dynamic alter the direction of a society, and the perceived relevance of the Church?

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: PARTS III/IV PRINT VERSION
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PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV
Readers may also be interested in the series by Peregrinus
which examined the Scriptural understandings of Divorce and the
different perspectives taken by different Christian churches.

Bibliography:
See the Bibliography at the bottom of Part IV.

Photo Credits:
Clicking on the images will take you to the original source and or further information.

©2007 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

[Index of Commentaries by Dr Andrew Kania]