In early 2015, our Archdiocese like many others was offered a 47-question open-ended survey in order to gather information about what people throughout the world understand about the Church’s teaching, her pastoral practice, current conditions, and the reality of marriage and family life. The survey was probably a poor translation, and the questions were ill-structured, so I ended up writing about 15,500 words in the one week window for completing it. I have chosen to share a few of these, here, as well, for your comments. I will quote the question, and what follows is my answer. I have edited the answers slightly for brevity, politeness, and clarity.
6. How do Christian families bear witness, for succeeding generations, to the development and growth of a life of sentiment? (cf. ns. 9 – 10). In this regard, how might the formation of ordained ministers be improved? What qualified persons are urgently needed in this pastoral activity?
Even after reading the (rather turgid) paragraphs from the Relatio, I am quite unable to think of a straightforward sense in which “a life of sentiment” is the sort of thing whose “development and growth” we need to seek—what kind of “sentiment”? what sort of “life”? in what direction should “development” proceed? And even should we assign meanings to these terms, what would it mean to “bear witness” to such a thing? I am at a loss to process this gobbledygook. I’ll assume that we are meant to understand “provide to succeeding generations a model of emotional maturity.”
Emotional maturity means the ability to actively engage the whole of life without becoming enervated or sinking into despair, on the one hand, or seeking intoxicants and distraction for escape, on the other. Families are the model of this insofar as they concretely share not only their own but also the Church’s life, and especially when they do so in neighborhood.
Some notes, including at the end a note on those called to orders:
When husband and wife live their marriage as mutual support in ministry to the “household of faith,” beginning with their own highest responsibility for one another and their children but proceeding immediately to their Church family, and then to their whole neighborhood, the marriage covenant concretely performs what it symbolizes; its grace bears fruit, without being spent and wasted.
I would like to navigate past two errors toward a truth. The family, as a unit, has specific responsibilities both within itself and toward the Church that separate individuals would not have: responsibilities having to do with the proclamation of Christ’s love for His Body bound up with the sacrament itself, as well as the education of children for the Church. Those who serve families in the Church therefore have to address families as units of responsibility: husbands for their households, husbands and wives for each other, parents for children, and even children as responsible to their parents and for their siblings. Church ministry ought never begin from a position of dividing families into separate units, only subsequently attempting to teach these alienated souls to simulate appropriate roles.
On the other hand, it is precisely this understanding that requires us not to imagine that any family is completely autonomous, either! I have seen some “family integrated church,” home-school, and traditionalist material that comes very close to setting up each “domestic church” as its very own Protestant denomination. Precisely because the graces and promises of Christ for marriages and children are bound up with the sacramental economy that Christ entrusted to His Church, because Matrimony as well as Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist are necessary to Christian families and available only in the Church, the family as a responsible unit is responsible to Christ, and therefore to His Church. Those who serve families in the Church ought always to call families as families to serve Christ through his Church, and so fulfill their callings as Christian husbands, wives, parents, and children.
Such a call, as I’ve said, must address the family in its integrity, as a responsible unit. Families should be called to work proper to families, such as caring for children and passing on trade skills, wisdom, basic education, and spiritual lessons; and they should be resourced in a manner that fits this calling. Families can also have advantages in productivity and efficiency over single people or even teams of singles in certain areas of practical life and Christian service, if they are taught to regard themselves as functional units of society (a reality our culture actively works to obscure and fragment, today). Teaching families to work together for goals proper to their Christian calling, to forego individual opportunities in order to achieve common goals, makes strengthening family bonds one and the same as helping family members achieve their calling in Christ.
Such teaching should also help to prevent a harmful byproduct of much “traditional family values” teaching, the tendency to regard a self-absorbed nuclear family as the Christian ideal. In fact, this ideal is not “traditional” in any society, but reflects the negative impact of industrialization and its search for the smallest “atom” of human society, the economic unit that most efficiently organizes capital and consumption to serve financial and commercial interests. Strong families are not strong in themselves, but as they honor and depend on extended families and are firmly embedded in thriving communities of faith, work, and cultural practice.
Christians serving families should always focus on the family as a fruitful unity, not an atom of consumption; the family must be taught to “do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of faith,” and such teaching will always involve the family in the reciprocal sharing of care, hospitality, and support by which whole communities become impregnated with familial life.
Ordained ministers need to have grown up in neighborhoods comprising faithful families, so that mundane virtues will have been formed before heroic virtues are demanded of them.
We urgently need leaders who are competent to help families build neighborhood in each parish, leaders who will help to organize the local civic, economic, and educational measures required to build civil societies in the middle of a culture generally bent on atomizing them. These will be people with an understanding of the importance of trades and professions, and a good sense of how living in any occupation is a family job.