The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World

John Paul II's important encyclical, The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World (Boston: St. Paul Books & Media, 1993) deserves the attention of Protestant as well as Catholic Christians, whether or not one agrees with certain traditionally Catholic teachings on such issues as birth control and divorce. In the Pope's judgment, "Willed by God in the very act of creation, marriage and the family are interiorly ordained to fulfillment in Christ and have need of His graces in order to be healed from the wounds of sin and restored to their 'beginning,' that is, to full understanding and the full realization of God's plan" (p. 13). The family, in fact is "the first and vital cell of society" (p. 67). Still more: "The future of humanity passes by way of the family" (p. 129). Surveying the contemporary scene, John Paul sees a mix of "bright spots and shadows for the family today." Clearly there are a multitude of shadows--such things as divorce, loss of proper authority or authoritarian wielding of power, abortion. "At the root of these negative phenomena," he says, in an important passage, "there frequently lies a corruption of the idea and the experience of freedom, conceived not as a capacity for realizing the truth of God's plan for marriage and the family, but as an autonomous power of self-affirmation, often against others, for one's own selfish well-being" (p. 17). We urgently need to recover the wisdom and sense of responsibility which have always sustained traditional families. What we most need is to recover God's plan for marriage and family. In revealing Himself to us as a loving God, He seeks to draw us into a lasting, loving, covenant relationship. Reflecting that is the "covenant of conjugal love which is publicly affirmed as unique and exclusive, in order to live in complete fidelity to the plan of God, the Creator. A person's freedom, far from being restricted by this fidelity, is secured against every form of subjectivism or relativism and is made a sharer of creative Wisdom" (p. 23). Christians who marry should work with God to be what He designed them to be: a family. Doing so constitutes the heart of our calling, our vocation as believers. "To bear witness to the inestimable value of the indissolubility and fidelity of marriage is one of the most precious and most urgent tasks of Christian couples in our time" (p. 35). Both men and women are equally called, equally dignified as created in God's image. Their roles in marriage, however, have durable distinctions. In particular, the pope says that "society must be structured in such a way that wives and mothers are not in practice compelled to work outside the home," that a family should be able to live on a man's income (p. 40). The husband must accept the responsibility of providing for his family--providing not only material goods but emotional and spiritual strength and guidance. Families, of course, include children. In procr