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Part IV: Zeitgeist…

As we are all products of families, no societal catalyst more warrants the term zeitgeist, (spirit of the times), then the climate found in the family; for the spirit of a particular epoch is governed by the prevailing wind that sweeps through the home. Familiaris Consortio, poignantly captures the essence of the problem:

"The historical situation in which the family lives therefore appears as an interplay of light and darkness. This shows that history is not simply a fixed progression towards what is better, but rather an event of freedom, and even a struggle between freedoms that are in mutual conflict, that is, according to the well-known expression of St. Augustine, a conflict between two loves: the love of God to the point of disregarding self, and the love of self to the point of disregarding God. It follows that only an education for love rooted in faith can lead to the capacity of interpreting "the signs of the times," which are the historical expression of this twofold love." (par. 6)

Martin de Porres Medallion

	Desiderius Erasmus Medallion

Far from saying that children from dysfunctional familes are slaves to a life of perdition, many of the greatest heroes of the Church, have through their faith, won greatness: Desiderius Erasmus and St. Martin de Porres, are but two examples of children of broken homes. The Catholic Church offers a message of hope to those whose families have offered them none. Human beings are not rail cars on whose tracks one cannot deviate from a pre-determined path. Such a vision would be similar to Luther's analogy of the human person not being able to throw off the jockey, devil or angel that has been placed on their backs by predestined forces.

Yet all of us require introspection to analyse spiritual pathways and consciences — and to take ownership of any error in life. A father is a man before he is a parent, likewise a son is an individual before he is a child. That one can have a father who is a murderer, yet the child become a Saint, or that one can have a Saint for a parent, yet a child who is a reprobate, sums up the human condition — the need for each of us to choose either life or death. Yet personal choices are made the easier, if we are exposed to sets of moral codes that have stood the test of time for generations, that surpass the moral whims of a particular era. It is the duty of the parent to provide such an exposure to their children, so that the children will have something to hold on to, when, and the occasion will arise due to human fallibility, the example of the parent fails the child. It is the responsibility of the child to listen and learn from such instruction.

Wounded Healers choosing life…

A parent, has a lifetime's responsibility for their child, but does not own the child; a child must indeed love his parent, but is not born a slave to them, and should not consider each and every act of their parent as worthy of emulating. Both parent and child are pilgrims on a journey from birth, through earthly life, to heaven. Each will stand before Christ as an individual, requiring to take ownership of decisions made in life; as Familiaris Consortio so clearly teaches, regarding the vocation of parenting: "the Lord is entrusting to them the growth of a child of God, a brother or sister of Christ, a temple of the Holy Spirit". (John Paul II, 1981, par. 39)

That the parent and child are interdependent within the family, but are independent as spiritual pilgrims, before God, is evidenced in the life of some of the Church's greatest Saints. We need not look into too great a depth to see in the history of the Church many instances where a child has been disobedient to his or her parents because of a spiritual disparity that has grown between the two parties. St. Francis of Assisi we are told was born again in the streets of his hometown in a public display of the revocation of family values; St. Thomas Aquinas 'escaped' to a Dominican Priory, disobeying the wishes of his family, not once but many times; Metropolitan Andrii Sheptyts'kyi, caused anguish for his parents by his decision to transfer from the Roman to the Byzantine Rite of the Catholic Church; Christ Himself also teaches us in the Gospel of St. Matthew a very important lesson as regards our moral obligations:

"While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied to the man who told him, 'Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?' And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brethren! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother'." (Matthew 12: 47 — 50, RSV )

Thomas More poster by Stephen B Whatley 2000

That this is so can be seen in Holy Scripture as early as the event of Abraham and Issac in the land of Moriah, when commanded by God, the heartbroken father, Abraham, was willing to sacrifice that which he loved most on earth for God. Abraham was justified by faith, for he was willing to place Truth above the strong bonds of family. The English martyr, Sir Thomas More, is another example, where the existence of a higher Truth was placed before family life. Another parent, the Ukrainian Catholic married priest, Fr. Roman Lysko, in dying for his Faith, also chose God before family.

These examples are not acts of selfishness, as some may claim, but they are acts of love, affirming that there is no life, without God. These acts, it should be stressed, are rare acts, in which an individual's conscience is pushed to that knife edge of life and death. Outside of God and His Truth, a parent, we are taught by the Church, should give their life for their family. (cf. Ephesians 5: 25)

Christ nor Holy Scripture is of course teaching that we should not love our parents or our children, but that in the family both the parent and the child, owe a primary allegiance to God, and as part of this allegiance both are required as best as they can — to live lives of goodness and truth, according to the Church. The term 'unconditional love', so often bandied by New Age therapists, should therefore not be seen as some 'fuzzy' euphemism for the fashioning of a relationship that sees a symbiosis set in place, where moral relativism is the end-result. Despite the affection that members of a family may have for one another, there are pre-existing Truths that far outweigh any human emotion. In life there is a good, there is an evil, there is a course of living that leads to life, and there is a course of living that leads invariably to death. In today's spirit of the times, with the absence of God and the Church within the home, God has been supplanted by a nebulous belief in 'the family', and the values of this family, cannot in any way be defined, and thus codified and shared on a broader level, due to both the fluid nature of modern families as well as the varying permeations of family structures that exist.

Whereas in the past we learnt about God, by way of the example of love and commitment that existed within the family — spouse for spouse, parent for child, today, the use of this 'language' is vastly on the decline. God is no longer an emotional, living, loving being — but in many cases an intellectual concept to be accepted or denied. It is little wonder in such a climate, that the pews of the Church are emptying, when so few in society have been educated within the family with enough spiritual and emotional literacy to be receptive to, and able to comprehend a Truth, whose very Self is intertwined in a love that used to be above all things — Absolute.

Without an Absolute Truth, there are no bench-marks, to train the ear of the soul, as to what is harmony and what is inconsonant; without such a bench-mark we all flounder believing Truth to be that which makes us feel happy, or that which gives us pleasure; we become permissive, because all that we allow ourselves, as parents, cannot in justice be denied our children. If anyone taps us on the shoulder, and tells us that what we are listening to is not harmony but cacophony, we dismiss this person, outright, for on whose authority can they come between how I choose to live my life, and how I choose to raise my children? For now there exists no authority other than the sum total of my life's experience and knowledge. Thus we are not only blissful in our self-perpetuated 'ignorance', we are proud of our folly, for no-one else could have dug a hole so deep for me to sit in — but me; and if there is a Hell, then I'll be happy, because my family and I will be gathered there together!

Herein lies the most critical issue for both the Church and society. Rather then debating matters of exegesis, which we have done for two thousand years, or the ordination of married men in the Roman Rite (which is in itself increasingly irrelevant due to the emptying of Churches), the Church needs to offer its support and attention to that which has always been Her foundation — the family, whether this family are regular Sunday attendees or not. Christ did not primarily minister to the 'saved'; and there is indeed no challenge for a priest or prelate to wax lyrical before an audience who would come to the same Church, even if the priest or prelate were absent.

	Luis de Leon, engraving by Pacheco del Rio

Manual Durán in his Introduction to the writings of the sixteenth century Spanish mystic, Luis de León, encapsulates this well: "Luis de León clearly understood that theology was not merely a series of theoretical propositions about God. On the contrary, it dealt as well with everyday life, with the fabric of our experience and our actions, since the essence of God required, to be properly understood, a definition of the relationship between God and the creations, between God and the cosmos, God and history, God and mankind." (Luis de León, 1984, p. 15) Thus more than any other area of study and action — theology should be about God and the Family, for within the context of the family, we find the creation of new life, new life made in the Image of God. The primary question for Theology should be how the Church can assist parents in the sacred task of shaping each new life to its greatest self-realization in Christ, and as Alphonsus de Liguori, Lacordaire and Ozanam knew well, such a mission takes place within the granite walls of a Church, but also in the streets, among those people whose hearts and minds have been closed, for whatever reason, to the notion of a God, and Christ His Son.

With regard governments in democratic nations, the highest priority, after the maintenance of national defence, is the preservation of the Family, both as a philosophical ideal and as a material reality. Inherent in John Stuart Mill's, The Principles of Political Economy, is the notion that a person or a family within their home has the right to act in any way they feel proper, up to that point when their actions begin to have a negative effect on the freedom, integrity, or quality of life of another person or family. With the degeneration of the family unit, crime, poverty, illiteracy, poor health, psychological and emotional trauma, do all impinge on how families and peoples live in a society as citizens. Global warming and climate change may be the geographic signs of the times, but far more pervasive and confronting is the way in which we live and act, individual-to-individual, family-to-family. Healthy family living, where all parties are loved, nurtured and affirmed, should indeed lead to a higher, freer form of citizen and therefore a more 'advanced' nation; a family in which ideals have been shattered and trust broken, and violence taught, will inevitably lead to a cynical form of citizenship, that will inevitably change, in time, the face of a whole nation, for the worst. Perhaps we as a society may not be able to see this for being too close to the forest to see the trees, yet it is but common sense to understand that whatever a nation allows to be sown, that also that nation should be prepared to harvest. (cf. Galatians 6: 7)

If the Church does not act, and act swiftly, to bring back whole families within Her embrace, She will soon find Herself as a Church solely of the adult convert and the intellectual. In time, and swept along by the forces of moral relativism, western society will evolve via the democratic process, and the lack of a grassroots Church influence within the heart and minds of the masses, as a society governed on the basis of the lowest possible moral common denominator. The chief principle of this new morality will be the unwritten 'law' that the individual has the right to adhere to no set of prescribed values, outside of course, from that one 'value' that declares that an Absolute Truth does not exist for want of a First Cause — an Absolute Being. When such a law is instituted by way of cultural norm, then there will be no need for a Church, for there will be little if no understanding of God. Then people will begin to whisper; 'What happened to the Church?', 'Why did things change?', 'How did God die?' Perhaps then someone will come to realize, during that shopping spree for the 'pagan' festival still known as Christmas, that just maybe there might have been something inherently Divine in the 'primitive' notion of a family, for Jesus of Nazareth to have been born into one.

ARTICLE NAVIGATION: 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:
Amato, P.R., and Booth, A., (2001), The Legacy of Marital Discord, in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81, No. 4, pp. 627 — 638.
Flannery, A. (Ed.), (1996). Gaudium et Spes, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents. Newtown, NSW: E.J. Dwyer, Ltd.
John Paul II, (1981), Familaris Consortio: On the Christian Family in the Modern World, St. Pauls Publications, Homebush. New South Wales.
John Paul II, (1988), Christifideles Laici: On the Vocation and the Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World, St. Pauls Publications, Homebush. New South Wales.
Lacordaire, J-B.H., (1924), Political and Social Philosophy, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., Ltd., London.
Luis de León, (1984), The Names of Christ, The Classics of Western Spirituality, Paulist Press, United States.
Marquardt, E., (2006), Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, Three Rivers Press, United States.
Myers, B.C., (2007), Religiosity and Gender Attitudes, in American Journal of Psycological Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, September 2007, pp.
Popenoe, D., (2001), The Top Ten Myths of Divorce: Discussion of the Most Common Misinformation About Divorce, With References to Social Science Literature, April 2001, National Marriage Project, Rutgers University, United States.
Popenoe, D., (2007), The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2007. The Future of Marriage in America, National Marriage Project, Rutgers University, United States.
The Barna Group, September 2004, Born Again Christians Just As Likely to Divorce As Are Non-Christians, www.barna.org
Wallerstein, J., (2001), The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark Study, Hyperion, United States.
Whitehead, B.D., and Popenoe, D., (2001), The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2001. Who Wants to Marry a Soul Mate?: New Survey Findings on Young Adults' Attitudes about Love and Marriage, National Marriage Project, Rutgers University, United States.
Whitehead, B.D., and Popenoe, D., (2004), Ten Important Research Findings on Marriage and Choosing a Marriage Partner — Helpful Facts for Young Adults, National Marriage Project, Rutgers University, United States.

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©2007 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

[Index of Commentaries by Dr Andrew Kania]