The Family as Domestic Church

There is no doubt that the most important document issued by the Holy See in recent history on the family is the apostolic exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, which is truly a summa of the teaching of the Catholic Church on the life, the structure and the role of Christian marriage and family in the world today. Everyone should have a copy of this timely document.

The key to the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage and the family and its role in society lies, I believe, in the family’s identity as a Church in miniature – a domestic Church. This ancient title – Ecclesia domestica – was brought forth again in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, particularly in Lumen Gentium #11 and Gaudium et Spes #48 and also occupies a key position in the Catechism of the Catholic Church Part II, numbers 1655-1658. All other discussions of its priestly, prophetic and kingly roles – including its role as the foundation of the society – stem from this key and fundamental theological concept.

We live in an age in which we must restate and reaffirm the obvious because we have lost our sense of the obvious. There has been an abandonment of common sense. As our good friend, who was with us this summer, Francis Cardinal Arinze, is always fond of saying, “The one thing we know about common sense is that it is not very common today!”

St. John Paul II stated bluntly that “civilization depends upon the family.” In a very real sense, the future of humanity is at stake in this battle. Alarming signs revealing a severe moral crisis are being set forth, which deny the traditional definition of marriage. These signs point to how far we have fallen. As Catholics, it is especially important to remember the continuity of papal teaching in this matter.

One of the most interesting quotations in Familiaris Consortio is one in which the Pope gives a puzzling exhortation: “Family, become what you are!”¹

How can something become what it already is? I believe that what the Holy Father is saying to us is, first of all, the grace of the sacrament is present, and secondly, the grace of the Magisterium’s teaching on sacramental marriage is there, but both are lying dormant and unused. Sadly, there has been in many instances a failure to realize these truths and this affects their actualization in family life. In the first world today, there has been an almost total failure in communicating these saving truths. And this has been a failure not so much of the family, but a failure on the part of the institutional Church to communicate effectively and faithfully papal and conciliar teaching.

Sadly, often our failure as a Church to communicate these truths is directly linked to the widespread failure of families and helps explain their inability to “become what they are.”

As the Second Vatican Council taught and as our late Holy Father St. John Paul II said: “Modern culture must be lead to a more profoundly restored covenant with divine wisdom.”²

This refers to the wisdom of God – His plan, His design, which is reflected even in the natural created order. How many Catholics in this country alone have any sense at all of the family as a domestic Church? How many have even heard this term?

As the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, promulgated by Pope Benedict XVI, states in #350: “The Christian family is called the ‘domestic Church’ because the family manifests and lives out the communal and familiar nature of the Church as the family of God. Each family member, in accord with their own role, exercises the baptismal priesthood and contributes towards making the family a community of grace and of prayer, a school of human and Christian virtue, the place where faith is first proclaimed to children.”³

Sadly, very often our pre-Cana conferences spend more time telling our young people how important it is that they balance their checkbook and seek to achieve psychological health than they do about the sacramental nature of marriage. This fact contributes to the secularization of Christian marriage, which we have seen in our modern era. If we as a Church today do not speak clearly and emphasize the centrality of this great sacrament – who will?

The notion of the Catholic family as the domestic Church can be traced back to the teaching of Christ, who as the Second Vatican Council teaches, in re-creating the human person, fully reveals the human identity: “Christ the Redeemer not only recreates human persons and reveals to them their fullest identity…He also recreates marriage and family and in so doing, reveals their fullest identity.”⁴

The importance of the family as a domestic church is revealed by Christ.

Let us go back to Our Lord and talk a little bit about Him. The first thing that we should notice is that: “In the fullness of time, God sent His son born of a woman.”⁵ When the Creator enters into His creation, He does so through a family. That in itself should tell us so much, because there are so many ways in which Our Lord could have come, but He came in and through the family. Christianity is a religion of intimate domesticity. Thirty of Our Lord’s thirty-three years on this planet were spent with His mother and father in the domestic sanctuary in the home in Nazareth. Faith was at the center of this family’s life. If you read the Gospel attentively, especially Saint Luke, you find a number of interesting things. Saint Luke particularly tells us that every single year they went up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. This reveals the intense devotion which animated the Holy Family for God was the center of their life. This is the way it should be. We need to have passion for God. Our children need to see in our lives that passion and love for God.

We have spent so much time in recent years concentrating on the role of women that we are now sadly neglecting the male role. As St. John Paul II said most powerfully in Familiaris Consortio: “Above all, where social and cultural conditions so easily encourage a father to be less concerned with his family…efforts must be made to restore socially the conviction that the place and task of the father in and for the family is of unique and irreplaceable importance.”⁶

The two sexes are made for and ordered to each other. They complement each other and cannot be fully understood apart from each other.

This is why I believe that feminism in its militant form is essentially demonic for it tears apart what God meant to be joined together. Many in our confused world tend today to deny the importance of the Father’s role, but the statistics bear out the truth. Today in the United States, for example, five out of ten children go to bed in a home without their fathers.

Forgetting God’s plan, we see now that:

• 50% of marriages end in divorce.
• 60% of rapists,
• 72% of adolescent murders,
• Over 70% of prison inmates

Did not have a father in their home.

Daughters with single-parent homes are:

• 164% more likely to have a baby out of wedlock than when both parents are present
• They are 111% more likely to have children as teenagers and disturbingly,
• 92% are more likely to end their own marriages in divorce.⁷

I am fully convinced that one of the principle reasons why there has been such confusion in our contemporary era as to the role of woman is precisely because it has been isolated from and we have neglected to clearly present the proper male role, which as Saint Paul, Pius XI and Saint John Paul II have observed is essential as the head of the family, as the woman is the heart.

We do live in an age in which it is important for us to again begin restating the obvious. It is very clear that parental presence of mother and father in the home is essential for the child’s emotional health, self-esteem, educational attainment, and to foster virtuous behavior.

Touching upon the role of women, St. John Paul the Great observed: “There are tasks in which women are irreplaceable. Women must strengthen precisely what is properly characteristically and indispensably theirs like motherhood. Woman’s vocation to motherhood is a burning issue today. We must diligently work so that the dignity of this vocation is not eliminated from culture. To concentrate on woman’s main role as wife and mother is to place her in the heart of the family – her irreplaceable role must be appreciated and recognized as such and should go together with the very essence of her womanhood.” (cf. Mulieris dignitatem, n. 18) “A mother’s dedication to her home and to her children is the loftiest role she can carry out. Without the mother, there is no home, no family, no country, even no Church!”⁸

Since conjugal love reveals the mystery of the love between Christ and the Church, the husband is the “imago Christi” – the image of Christ, just as the wife is the “imago ecclesia” – the image of the Church. This is a great responsibility – the weight of glory. The husband in his love for his wife and children must reveal the face of Christ as the mother in the heart of the home must reveal the loving maternity of Holy Mother Church.

The early Christian writer, Tertullian, reflects this beauty in his writing on Christian marriage. Listen to what he says: “How can I ever express the happiness of the marriage that is joined together by the Church? Strengthened by an offering, sealed by a blessing, announced by angels, ratified by the Father. How wonderful the bond between two believers with a single hope, a single desire, a single observance, a single service. They are both brethren and both fellow servants. There is no separation between them in spirit or flesh. In fact, they are two in one flesh and where the flesh is one, one is the spirit.”⁹

Marriage therefore symbolizes the union between Christ and the Church. It is because this symbol and reality was understood that divorce was unthinkable for Catholics a generation ago and was regarded as a scandal.

How important it is, as Pope Benedict taught us in Valencia, that couples frequently receive the sacraments of Eucharist and Penance in order to sustain married love since these are the principle channels of grace.¹⁰ In his Angelus address of Sunday, July 2nd, Pope Benedict said, concerning marital love: “If it is to be authentic, there must be a commitment of the parents to deepen their knowledge of their own faith, reviving its flame through prayer and the assiduous reception of the sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist.”¹¹

T.S. Eliot, the famous Anglican poet, wrote an essay entitled “Thoughts after Lambeth” (the Lambeth Conference in 1930 was the first instance in Christian history where a Christian denomination authorized contraception – it is important to remember that prior to 1930, contraception was condemned by all Christian denominations as gravely sinful). Eliot writes: “The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail, but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time; so that the faith may be preserved alive in the dark ages before us, to renew and rebuild civilization and save the world from suicide.”¹²

That was written back in 1931!

We must have the courage to present fully the saving truth of Christ concerning marriage and the family as an “ecclesia domestica.” The crisis of faith so deeply afflicting our Church is preventing us from offering this truth which saves and frees us. We must believe again in the power of God’s word and truth to transform and change people. All too often we are like the disciples who shake their heads saying, “This saying is hard – who can bear it?”

With the result that we walk with Him no more, listening rather to worldly voices of sociological statistics, Gallup polls and the great contemporary herd of independent thinkers in the media. In some areas, to be “pastoral” today means to water things down so much so that no one is offended or challenged with the result that there is no longer a God for a man to be lifted up to.

We need to speak once again of courage, of fidelity, of fortitude and the beauty of chastity if we are to help restore marriage and family to their proper god given dignity.

^1. Pope St. John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, November 1981, paragraph 17.
^2. Pope St. John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, November 1981, paragraph 8.
^3. Pope Benedict XVI, Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2005, #350
^4. Vatican Council II, Gaudium et spes.
^5. Galatians 4:4.
^6. Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio, November 1981, paragraph 25.
^7. Patrick Fagan, statistics on fatherless homes from www.heritage.org.
^8. Pope St. John Paul II, Papal talk at National Bishop’s Conference of Brazil, February 1995
^9. Tertullian, Ad Uxorum, Patrologia Latina.
^10. Benedict XVI, Homily on his Apostolic Journey to Valencia Spain, World Meeting of Families, July 9, 2006.
^11. Benedict XVI, Angelus Address, St. Peter’s Square, July 2, 2006.
^12. T.S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth, 1931.