August-September 2022
Continuing our serialisation of papers delivered at the Summer School
of
Catholic Studies, held at Cambridge in July-August 1935.
Church and State: 6
THE RIGHTS OF THE FAMILY
Man's imperious need for society is satisfied by membership of many groups of different kinds. The object of his membership is to secure for himself and to minister to others that mutual aid without which he cannot achieve his ends, do his appointed work in the world. The one supreme society to which he may belong, the Catholic Church, is of divine institution and is intended to facilitate his progress to his supernatural end. That is his last end, and any other he may have in view should lead to that. Thus his well-being in the world, which in various ways and degrees is catered for by other societies, must be subservient to his eternal happiness. The object of every legitimate grouping must fall in with this norm. Of the many natural societies for natural objects to which he may or must belong there are two of outstanding dignity and importance. The first is the family; the second is the State.
Natural and Fundamental
A society is defined as a permanent or durable union for a common end. The fundamental unit of society is the family, which is a community constituted by nature itself for the successful carrying out of the common activities of everyday life. (Communitas per ipsam naturam constituta in omnem diem.)
This most elementary grouping is the holiest of all merely natural groupings, and it is the one which most immediately and inevitably flows from nature itself. Except in the abnormal case of illegitimacy, an individual comes into existence as a member of a family. In the way of nature he is fostered, nurtured and educated as a member of the family, until he arrives at a period of maturity when he is fitted to establish a family himself, and in so doing to carry on the family name and tradition. The family is united in ties of affection; which enable the members, in spite of difficulties, to do their several parts for the good of the whole. The family spirit secures the propagation of the race, the safeguarding of children, their education in virtue, morals, manners and science. By its solidarity with the past, it is the natural custodian of the tradition of civilisation. Sudden expansions of culture are the work of individuals; but the preservation of accumulated treasures depends upon the conservative spirit of the family.
Contractual and Sacramental
This original elementary grouping, suggested by complementary nature of the sexes and establish by their mating, owes its integrity to the permanence of the union of man and woman. Promiscuous intercourse would never establish the family group. There is need of the definiteness of a contract; and that contract we call marriage.
At all times and among all peoples the contract of marriage has been regarded as something sacred, but in the Christian Church it has been raised to dignity of a sacrament. As such it is concerned man’s supernatural activities. Hence it is that the Church claims a jurisdiction over all the conditions of marriage, i.e., she claims to be the exponent of the law of nature in this matter and to legislate positively for such details as she considers necessary for the safeguarding of the essence of the contract. To that extent she asserts her right to act independently of the State.
Familial Interdependence
Man’s social needs are not completely satisfied by the family group. Interdependence of families appears in the most primitive conditions, and the growth of civilisation results from the increased permeability of the family group to the influence of other families; and reciprocally as civilisation develops the need of mutual aid grows with it. The progress of civilisation means an increase of specialisation. The family simples give way before the doctor; the family spinning and sewing before the spinner, weaver and tailor; the family rushlight before the electrician. So you find the need of doctor, teacher, plumber, and, now, chauffeur. That in certain particulars this progress and interdependence have gone too far is obvious: that there are wives and mothers who have never learned to sew or cook has a bad effect on the health and economics of the nation.
However that may be, a certain measure of interdependence among families, associated perhaps by blood or inclination, has always been a characteristic of the race. Such a group of families, united for a common end of protection or development, with naturally emergent authority, is the inchoative State.
Reciprocity of Family and State
The State is a society of individuals, self-sufficient in its own domain, whose object is the co-ordination of mutual aid and the organisation of that aid for the common good. From this description it is at once obvious that the State is for man, and man is not for the State: a fundamental principle which is in danger of being forgotten today, and which is deliberately challenged in certain countries. The danger of State worship is allied with the loss of the family ideal and the denial of family rights. While it is the duty and the raison d’être of the State to come to the aid of individual families when that is necessary for their essential well-being, it is reciprocally the effect of a healthy family tradition to maintain the discipline, virtue and strength of the State.
The first right of the family, and a right which implies every other, is the recognition of its dignity and importance as the fundamental unit of society. Its institution is the direct and immediate product of nature. Individuals are born into it and are dependent upon it. The State has grown out of it for the purpose of conserving it. It is so intimately one with human nature that its essence is governed by natural law. Therefore anything which immediately militates against it is contrary to the law of nature.
Divine Guide and Teacher
We have seen that the family implies marriage, and that among Christians marriage falls under the jurisdiction of the Church. That does not mean that the Church is free to make what laws she pleases concerning marriage. Her most important function is to teach what is the law of nature concerning this contract, a law which she cannot abrogate. In a perfect condition of society the State would be guided by the Church in this matter. To refuse that guidance is to be deaf to the admonitions of a divinely appointed teacher, and to run counter to the laws of nature, for which sooner or later there is bound to be a nemesis.
Now the Church teaches that the very existence of the family is threatened by Divorce, Birth Control, Sterilisation and Conjugal Infidelity.
Divorce
Nobody but the completely naturalistic exponent of the doctrine of free-love will deny that widespread divorce is an evil. Even those who demand increased facilities and multiplied occasions of legal divorce do so on the plea of hard cases, that is, as a particular remedy for a particular evil. And these must be shocked at the increase in the number of divorces which has occurred in England since the passing of the Marriage Act of 1857. In Convocation this year, the Dean of Winchester quoted from a recently issued report these eloquent figures: In 1871 the proportion of divorces to marriages was one in 11,045. By 1910 it had become one in 377. In 1920 the proportion had jumped to one in 123, which meant that the proportion had trebled in three years. Last year [1934] it was one in 79. [The Church Times, June 7, 1935.]
I do not want to be guilty of the fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, but it is undeniable that the Divorce Laws have exercised a considerable influence in this if shattering of the unity of the family. One very obvious reason is this: troubles and disharmonies which would be conquered and lived down in a State where divorce was impossible are regarded as insuperable when there is the easy way-out of divorce. Moreover in such conditions marriage is entered upon more lightly and carelessly than it used to be, so that it is only too likely that subsequent difficulties will arise. The precipitate marriages made in the stress of the Great War, and the thoughtless marriages contracted in the frivolous period which succeeded it, have given ample proof of this tendency.
Incorporating the teaching of Leo XIII in the Encyclical Arcanum divinae sapientiae the present Holy Father thus concludes his section on Divorce in the Casti Connubii:
Since the destruction of family life "and the loss of national wealth is brought about more by the corruption of morals than by anything else, it is easily seen that divorce, which is born of the perverted morals of a people, and leads, as experiment shows, to vicious habits in public and private life, is particularly opposed to the well-being of the family and of the State. The serious nature of these evils will be the more clearly recognised when we remember that, once divorce has been allowed, there will be no sufficient means of keeping it in check within any definite bounds. Great is the force of example, greater still that of lust; and with such incitements it cannot but happen that divorce and its consequent setting loose of the passions should spread daily and attack the souls of many like a contagious disease or a river bursting its banks and flooding the land." Thus, as we read in the same letter, "unless things change, the human family and State have every reason to fear lest they should suffer absolute ruin." All this was written fifty years ago, yet it is confirmed by the daily increasing corruption of morals and the unheard-of degradation of the family in those lands where Communism reigns unchecked.” [Christian Marriage, C.T.S. Pamphlet, pp. 46 f.]
Every movement towards the spread of divorce is a movement directed against the integrity of the family. Nor may it be argued that Catholics are free to regard themselves as segregated from this influence, for not only are they submitted to temptation by the existence of the divorce laws, but also they are a part of the community, which is injured as a whole.
Contraception
Birth-control, which a few years ago was enthusiastically advocated as a eugenic measure full of promise for the production of a healthy, happy race, is now recognised to have been dysgenic in its effects. The stocks which it was thought most desirable to conserve are precisely those which have dwindled most alarmingly, while the supposedly inferior stocks have increased in their natural proportions. Europe is faced today with an actual decline in the birth-rate which threatens the very existence of its greatest races and the future of civilisation.(1)
Again, I do not attribute this decline to the sole influence of artificial birth-control, but I do say that it is the business of the State to restrain that disastrous propaganda and to shield the family from its influence, and most certainly to do nothing which will bring birth-control into the lives of those who have hitherto avoided it. This is at least part of the reason why Catholics have constantly protested against the opening of birth-control clinics.
Sterilisation
Sterilisation is the latest threat against the family. It has recently been adopted in Germany and there has been considerable propaganda in favour of a Bill to legalise it in this country. “During the first year of operation of the Law for the avoidance of inherited Disease in Posterity (Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 1934) 56,224 persons (in Germany) ... were ordered to be sterilised.” [Catholic Medical Guardian, July, 1935.] Sterilisation is an attempt to control the exercise of the reproductive faculty among the mentally or physically deficient, or those from whom defective offspring is anticipated.
“Against every right and good (the promoters of such measures) wish the civil authority to arrogate to itself a power over a faculty which it never had and can never legitimately possess. Those who act in this way are at fault in losing sight of the fact that the family is more sacred than the State, and that men are begotten not for the earth and for time, but for Heaven and eternity. Although these individuals (the defectives) are to be dissuaded from entering into matrimony, certainly it is wrong to brand them with the stigma of crime because they contract marriage, on the ground that, despite the fact that they are in every respect capable of matrimony, they will give birth only to defective children, even though they use all care and diligence.” [Christian Marriage, C.T.S., pp. 32 f.]
In the correspondence columns of The Times, during June, appeared the plea of certain Anglican dignitaries that the Bill should never be passed without allowing for the religious convictions of the patient; and there was a sympathetic reply from Lord Horder. What these would-be reformers fail to grasp is not only the inadequacy of their proposed remedy, the difficulty of its application and the danger of its abuse, but the fact that it is an attack upon us all because it strikes at the right of every individual who has sufficient use of reason to be at large, no matter who he be, to found a family if he can find a mate.
Infidelity
That conjugal infidelity is an injury to the family obvious, but it is so completely a personal matter as to seem far removed from the scope of a discussion of family rights. Yet we can reasonably claim that it is the duty of the State in the interests of the family to be vigilant of external morality and stem in the suppression of the occasions of vice. There is no civilised State which is not alive to the necessity of such action, but unfortunately there are many where license is allowed too much rein.
A high regard for chastity is essential to any healthy family fife and therefore the State should proscribe (of course with the prudence which considers all the complexities of such public action) offences against decency whether in the conduct of individuals, in the Press, or in public entertainments, and should check the propagation of the subversive doctrines of free-love and sex naturalism.
But these considerations lead one to speak of what are more directly the rights of the family.
In the two matters of Divorce and Birth-control judges and magistrates have at times seen fit to use their influence to force them on unwilling Catholic subjects. Catholics pleading for a judicial separation to which they had every right have been pressed to take the complete divorce which the law was prepared to permit; and poor people who, on appearing before the Courts have disclosed the fact that they had a large family, have been reproved for this as if it were a wanton attack on the resources of the State.
One need say no more about the first infringement of liberty, but the second is more dangerous.
It must be understood that the proposed remedy of artificial birth-control is always and in all circumstances a sin against nature. Therefore, it is never to be recommended, nor should it be tolerated. That is the clear teaching of the Church through her theologians through the ages, ratified in the most solemn manner by Pius XI in Casti Connubii. But it must not be supposed that the Church, while she insists upon the greatest possible liberty for the due exercise of the reproductive instinct within the bonds of matrimony, blesses and approves its unrestrained exercise beyond the limits of prudence.
Fr Flynn’s paper to be continued.
FOOTNOTES:
(1) It has been calculated that four-fifths of the population of Belgium are so infertile that were it not for the fecundity of the other fifth the population would decrease by more than 59 per cent in a generation, and that 8,110,000 inhabitants in 1910 would be succeeded by only 5,760,000 in A.D. 2000 (Cf. Leclercq, Leçons de Droit Naturel, Vol. iii, La Famille, p. 298).
"It appears that in 1927 our crude reproduction rate was 0.98 and our net reproduction rate was 0.75. Put in other words, 30 years hence we will have 750 mothers for every 1000 mothers of today; 60 years hence there will be only 560 odd mothers. In 200 years, other things being equal, the population would be reduced to 6,000,000. There seems to be no escape, therefore, from the conclusion that, given the same birth-rate and the same mortality, the population of England and Wales will in a few years cease to grow and will almost immediately begin to fall. A further reduction of the already low death rate will, as I have already pointed out, retard the process, but cannot prevent it.” -G. T. Mullally, M.S., F.R.C.S., in a paper on The Declining Birth-rate in the Catholic Medical Guardian, July, 1935.