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            The family is both fruit and school of love. It begins in the self-donation of the spouses who chose each other as husband and wife. It comes into proper being as their marital union gives birth to their children. It is the natural setting in which the most important lesson of life - to love and grow in love - is learned.

School of love

            Are people today forgetting how to love, how to sacrifice personal time or interests so as to understand and care for others? To learn to love is hard unless one has already experienced being loved. The family is the normal place where love is first experienced and the ability to love acquired. The person who has not received love when he or she is young, is not likely to be able to give love when older. A happy family background is a unique gift; a big reward awaits parents who create this background for their children.

            It is natural as well as a duty that parents love their children. Moreover, precisely because love means wanting what is good for the other - wanting him or her to grow - parents are naturally the first to make loving demands on their children. "Love is true when it creates the good of persons and of communities; it creates that good and gives it to others... Love is demanding... Nowadays people need to rediscover this demanding love, for it is the truly firm foundation of the family" (Pope John Paul II: Letter to Families, no. 14). Parents should not spoil their children; yet this is exactly what they do if they simply give to them (money, gadgets, even affection) without requiring anything of them (responsibility, sincerity, loyalty...).

            Love always means coming out of one's self, giving one's self, caring for others. In the family as a school of love, the parents are the first teachers. By their perseverance in the hard but marvelous task of giving themselves, they gradually become skillful and even expert teachers. Later on they can and should involve the older children as co-teachers of the younger.

            Humility is necessary if one is to be able to love. Pride is love's worst enemy. Asking pardon - making up from the heart - is the best weapon against pride and in favor of love. People who don't ask one another for pardon are placing their love in danger. Husband and wife who know how to apologise to each other as often as necessary, are safeguarding their own conjugal love. If they have quarelled in the presence of their children (wise parents will work their differences out apart), then they should also make up before them; so they restore to the family that atmosphere of humble love which had been ruptured by their quarrel.

            Parents need to correct their children in a just way. When they have corrected unjustly, or when they have given bad example, they should not be too proud to acknowledge this before their children, and to rectify. This way, far from losing face, they gain authority. "By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them" (CCC 2223).

            The more self-giving rules in a family, the more love is learned and communicated. That is the ideal of family life, for which God gives abundant grace. But if the parents do not take their task seriously, the end result may be far from the ideal. Selfishness is present in every family, as in every person. It needs to be combatted. If love is not made stronger than selfishness, if selfishness rules more than love, then the family itself can become a school of selfishness. Children learn from their parents what the parents themselves practice.

School for social living

            Christian anthropology resists certain modern theories which consider the ideal of growth to be the building of a non-dependent personality, and so criticise the family as a narrowing experience, a focus of small interests, a limitation on self-expression, and an obstacle to the development of independence. But what the world needs is not more self-sufficiency or more self-sufficent persons, but more persons open to others and sharing life with them, and more places where people can be accepted and loved in their insufficiency. Such is the Church; such is the family (the "domestic church"). Interest in the "small" interests of others is a way of living interdependence and at the same time of expressing oneself.

            The family is the most powerful force in any society for the humanizing of persons. "The well-being of the individual person and of both human and christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life" (GS 47). In God's plan, the family "is a school for human enrichment" (ib. 52); "the first school of how to be human" (Letter to Families, no. 15): "the place where different generations come together and help one another to grow wiser and harmonize the rights of individuals with other demands of social life; as such it constitutes the basis of society" (GS 52). Caring and united families make for caring and human societies.

            "The family is the original cell of social life... Authority, stability and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhod, one can learn moral values, begin to honor God and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society" (CCC 2207; cf. 2224). The family therefore stands "prior to any recognition by public authority, which has an obligation to recognize it" (ib. 2202).

            Loyal family life over the years is a school for understanding, solidarity and love; for tolerance, ability to appreciate and accept, concern for others, cooperation, generosity. It is at the same time the setting in which mutual need and dependence, within complementary roles, are learned, and each one finds a place of refuge and trust. At one extreme, there is the loyalty of not letting others down ("He's not heavy; he's my brother"). At the other, the knowledge that one will not be rejected however much one deserves it - like the Prodigal Son in the Gospel, or the drunk wastrel in "Crime and Punishment" who, ill-treated everywhere else, keeps coming back to the family he neglects: "I mean, everyone must have at least one place where people take pity on him". The Catechism insists that the home is where "one learns endurance and the joy of work, fraternal love, generous - even repeated - forgiveness" (1657).

            Those who truly experience family life spread a spirit of fraternity, seeing, and helping others to see, that one's "neighbor is not a 'unit' in the human collective; he is a 'someone' who deserves particular attention and respect" (CCC 2212). No christian family can remain closed in on itself. It needs to live solidarity toward other families, and also toward those without a family (cf. 2208).

Specific family roles

            Human dignity between man and woman is identical, sexual and family roles are not. The attempt to abolish the difference between these roles has highly negative effects on personal, social and religious life.

            One of the great challenges of married life is the progression from being spouses to being parents. To become (or to avoid becoming) a parent is easy; to be a parent is difficult. Many parents consciously or unconsciously pass up the challenge this poses.

            Children have natural respect for their parents, unless the parents forfeit it. Looking up to God and trusting him (so difficult for many people today) is enormously facilitated by being able to look up to and believe in one's parents. Young people need a father who can in some way incarnate God's fatherliness: trustworthy authority coming from love. They have no less need of a mother who can incarnate God's motherliness: his understanding and support for our weakness, God as our loving refuge (cf. CCC 239). Parental roles have been badly misunderstood when father and mother compete to wield authority, but do not compete to give support. It is an immense strength to family life when sexual complementarity has been well developed in the parents. Children will be much more likely to bring their problems to parents to whom they have alternative access on different grounds. They are not likely to have much confidence in parents whom they sense to be engaged in a power-struggle.

            The importance of the brother-sister relationship has a social as well as a personal dimension. This is more readily seen if one adverts to the situation when such a relationship is not possible because, as happens today in one-child families, there is a boy or a girl, but no sibling to relate to. Perhaps we have not yet weighed (though we are beginning to experience) the social effects of this ever more common lack of natural domestic introduction to the experience of fraternity. The danger is increasing that the very term "fraternity" will be left with an exclusively ideological content, whose practical application to life escapes the majority of persons since, as children and adolescents, they never knew what it means to have a brother or sister. Where will they find the inspiration or example that teaches them what is involved in treating others fraternally?

Family and prayer

            The family is a school of faith and supernatural life and love. "Parents have the mission of teaching their children to pray and to discover their vocation as children of God" (CCC 2226). It is a mission and a privilege.

            'The family that prays together, stays together'. Even more importantly, each member of such a family stays with God, or will in the end come back to him. It is not mainly a matter of formal or fixed family prayers, but rather of having experienced a family where God was a "member" in his own right. The impact on young children when they begin to grasp that for their parents God is not someone to be afraid of, nor is he just worshipped. He is loved! Nothing lays a firmer base for a child's own spiritual life than that discovery, "My dad, my mom, is a friend of God"! Then family prayers and family worship flow naturally.

            Certain practices are habitual in every normal christian family: saying grace at meals, the Angelus... But prayers should never be compulsory. The family rosary is a marvelous devotion; but wise parents will allow their children to take part (e.g. to lead just one mystery) as they begin to grow up, without ever letting them look on it as an obligation or something expected of them. Sunday Mass is a commandment of the Church. It cannot be imposed by parents on older children.

            Parental preaching counts very little. Parental example counts very much. If children see their parents never missing Mass, getting frequently to Confession, switching off certain TV programs..., the impact of the example given will eventually go home.

School of sexual identity

            A growing mistrust between the sexes is one of the most disturbing phenomena of modern times. Those who find no explanation (and no apparent remedy) for this, may conclude that sex is a negative reality which in the end leads men and women to exploit one another. Christians rejects this conclusion. "That man and woman are made for one another is affirmed by Holy Scripture" (CCC 1605). Christians believe this, but believe too what the Catechism also recalls: the first sin disrupted the harmony and ease of that original communion between man and woman, with the result that "their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations; their mutual attraction, the Creator's own gift, changed into a relationship of domination and lust" (1607).

            The Church has always taught that human nature is not radically vitiated by sin. We all have a fundamental yearning for truth and goodness; but we need God's grace to fulfil those yearnings. This applies very particularly to the area of sexuality. "To heal the wounds of sin, man and woman need the help of the grace of God... Without his help, man and woman cannot achieve the union of their lives for which God created them 'in the beginning'" (CCC 1608). In the measure that married and family love, aided by grace, are made strong, they will enable men and women, boys and girls, to discover the deeper mystery and meaning of sexuality, in such a way that the sexual urge is gradually purified of self-seeking and of tendencies to exploitation or domination, so that its expressions - according to each one's state - strengthen the mutual respect that should always characterise the relations between the sexes.

            A family function seldom stressed is its role in the development of true sexual identity, and in the area of what is today called sex education. True sexual education does not consist simply in imparting biological knowledge. If informing young people about the physiological consequences of sexual activity has no moral reference (if it fails to inculcate the virtue of chastity), it is not sexual education at all, but sexual deformation, which tends to leave young people incapable both of understanding the real human meaning of sexuality and of relating with respect towards the other sex.

            The family is meant to be the first and most natural school of proper sexual education. It is the special role and responsibility of parents to explain to their children in good time (which always means before puberty) the dignity and difficulties of sex. Sexual education operates in a thoroughly natural fashion in a family where there are several brothers and sisters. Brother-sister after all is the one sexual relationship not characterized by any disturbing presence of physical attraction. In a family where proper values are maintained, this offers both boys and girls an opportunity to gradually understand and appreciate the main characteristics of sexual identity (even the inevitable fights between brothers and sisters, if properly channelled, can help here).

            The gradual unfolding of parents-children relations (especially father-daughter, mother-son) should also play a powerful two-way role in the achievement of sexual identity.

Building family personality

            In his Letter to Families, Pope John Paul II said that families today lack life; they "have too little 'human' life. There is a shortage of people with whom to create and share the common good" (no. 10). Families need to have their own vitality. "Love is true when it creates the good of persons and of communities" (ib. 14). Family love has to be inventive so as to create the christian and human goodness of a home with its own distinctive personality. This can come about only with the active and creative participation of each one: parents and children - and grandparents too! No true family excludes the aged (cf. CCC 2218). The result is a "family life" that the children, having helped to create, live by, look forward to and probably involve their friends in. Families with such a personality are not only the best safeguard for young people against negative or destructive elements in the social atmosphere, but become themselves focal points for gradually changing and renewing - humanizing - society.

Evangelizing mission

            The christian family has a specially great mission today. "The family is placed at the centre of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love. To the family is entrusted the task of striving, first and foremost, to unleash the forces of good, the source of which is found in Christ the Redeemer of man. Every family unit needs to make these forces their own so that... 'the family be strong with the strength of God'" (Letter to Families, 23).