Gaudium et Spes, when the family became a true "domestic church"
Rome (AsiaNews) - Luz Maria and Jose Alvarez, Mexican, were lost amid the Council Fathers in St. Peter's Basilica. This couple, belonging to the Movement of Christian families, had the task of representing the desires, expectations, and hopes of millions of Catholic families in the council hall. In those years of great turmoil, there was a strong awareness that family was the first place of dialogue between the Church and the world: not only did its structure bear the marks of the many changes taking place in society, but it was absorbing the sense of loss and confusion that the industrial society, the redefining of the role of women, migration and the new ways of life imposed by the consumer society had created.
The presence of Mr. and Mrs. Alvarez, therefore, was a sign of the Church's attention to the times and demonstrated the central role of the family in the everyday life of the Church. At the beginning of the '60s, the family institution was, in much of the world, still the supporting cell of the social fabric, in spite of the discomfort that was emerging in intellectual circles in the West, the cracks that were being felt in the most granitic strongholds of tradition and the first signs of what in 1968 would prove to be a genuine revolution of morals. It was a must, for those building the new face of the Church, to address the issue of the sanctity of marriage and of the family, highlighting personal love and developing the image of the family as a "community of life and love" which had already been glimpsed in Pius XI's Casti Connubii.
The discussion was included in the wider debate between the Church and modernity, so that the "issue of the family" within the Council's most discussed and innovative Constitution, Gaudium et Spes, occupied an important place. It was clear to the Council fathers that the nexus of relations that allowed the individual to discover and express his vocation was essential to Christian life.
In the family, the children naturally learned communion through the relationship with their parents, an indispensable dimension of the Christian community, and also learned the basic and essential notions of the faith. The Council's first concern was to hold together the theme of the personal love between husband and wife, the relationship between man and woman as beings of equal dignity, and the social value of the family, its importance to the civilized world.
The new theological sensibility, Christian personalism, and the recovery of a certain biblical tradition allowed to shift the focus from the family as a tool for the procreation and education of the new generations to a true "domestic church", the key experience for reviving society. However, it was not easy to discuss and define the family institution: in addressing the issue, different visions arose, and there emerged that majority/minority dialectic that imbued the whole complicated process of Gaudium et Spes. The emphasis on the love between man and woman, proposed by the personalist philosophies, ended up frightening those Bishops and Council fathers already concerned about the loss of the social importance of the family. What concerned them was a possible leak in spouses' intimacy. Emblematic in this regard was the discussion of sexuality, presented by those theologians most attentive to the cultural changes, not just as something aimed at procreation, but as an act of mutual love between spouses. A formulation made possible thanks to the recovery of the medieval tradition: the Thomistic view of human love considered the sexual act meritorious in itself, and not a simple and unique way of generating children; this provided a solid theological basis for tackling the problem of the baby boom and the invitation to control births.
We know that the issue of responsible procreation, with its many ethical and moral implications, was so divisive that it lead Paul VI to withdraw it from the conciliar hall and entrust it to an extra-conciliar commission, to then address it in the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Still today it constitutes one of the unresolved issues, though the challenges of the modern world in this field have multiplied.
The codification of the family achieved in Gaudium et Spes did not hold up for long. The "liquid family", the reversal of demographics in many parts of the world, the absolutizing of personal freedom and the new behavioral systems have blown sky high the equilibrium reached between fertility and personal love. For some time now in the Church, new spaces for reflection have been opened, with the decisive contribution of John Paul II and his teaching. The Pope, the author of "Love and Responsibility", as Archbishop of Krakow had investigated the mystery of conjugal love, speaking of the sexual act in the sacrament of marriage as one of the highest expressions of love and addressing unflinchingly issues such as celibacy, homosexuality, sexual desire. During his pontificate, he elaborated around the unitary concept of person an "ecology of man", an attention to the language of the body, which will help to delineate the boundaries and the potential of a "sexuality" understood as a gift, not a tool. An "ecology of man" revived also by Benedict XVI since his first encyclical Deus Caritas Est and reiterated in many of his magisterial speeches.
These are necessary additions to the conciliar text, which reflects the concerns of its time and does not take account of the 50 years of systematic destruction of the family carried out by a nihilistic and libertarian culture. The new frontiers of bioethics, the legalization of abortion in increasingly large regions of the world, family planning dictated by selfish self-referential lifestyles, the absolutism of the body and laws that attack the institution of marriage founded on the love between a man and a woman, make an all-out defense of the family extremely urgent.
Even the recent Synod of Bishops on Evangelization discussed at length the critical factors affecting the fundamental cell of society, neglected by social policies and often besieged by habitus that penalize. Perhaps it is in regard to this, more than to other issues, that the optimism underlying every word of Gaudium et Spes seems so striking. The Council Fathers could not have imagined the acceleration experienced by global society, nor the drift of ethical relativism and its consequences on the natural bulwark of the family. It is certain that the show of sympathy and Christian realism by which the Church explained the presence of Christians in society needs to be updated, but it is still the starting point: on the family hangs the communication of faith and the destiny of humanity.
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