F as FAMILY

Anyone with a little sense of reality and a little Christian sensitivity notices this with concern: the foundations of humanity are being shaken! It is no longer just faith that is in crisis, but reason too. It is not only the experience of God that is hindered, but also the perception of reality is distorted. Even education, that ‘second generation’ that introduces us to a full experience of things, and that teaches us to trace the presence of God in things, is increasingly threatened. Recently, the Holy See observed that we have moved from the ‘educational emergency’ to the ‘educational alarm’: if before it might have been difficult to transmit from one generation to the next something valid and certain, rules of conduct and credible objectives for a good life, the new fact is the irruption of the ‘ideology of gender’ in educational practices, because here the threat is anthropological, that is, it touches the root of the vision of man.

The degeneration of gender ideologies

Gender theories and policies, through a now pressing and capillary action, aim to erase all traces of the order that God has imprinted on His creation. They aim to impose a new order through a systematic state re-education, which churns out educational programmes for schools of all levels, where theories that are completely unripe pass as if they were common evidence or established scientific knowledge, gagging those who think differently by means of legislative intimidation and media intimidation.

Under the pretext of fighting against gender discrimination, the convictions of the so-called ‘LGBT communities’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual), which do not recognise the ‘binary’ character of the sexes. These communities promote the view of men and women (GS 48), to any affective aggregation. These convictions are imposed on a large scale.

Even in Italy, the reality of the traditional family, the one that has natural roots and sacred origins, is radically threatened today: not only does the network of public administrations coordinate the educational action of local health authorities, municipalities, state schools with the LGBT associations, but some clauses of the bill against homophobia, already approved by the Chamber of Deputies, would bring a climate of intolerance towards the commonly understood family into schools. The foreseeable result, simply put, is that it would become impossible to educate to the natural family, thus end of educational freedom, end of religious freedom. Just as Benedict XVI predicted, who in a speech in 2011 put it this way: “I cannot pass over in silence another threat to the religious freedom of families in some European countries, where participation in sex or civic education courses is imposed that convey allegedly neutral conceptions of the person and life, but which in reality reflect an anthropology contrary to faith and right reason”.

The truth of the family according to nature and God's heart.

The family is an original system of relationships, whose dimensions are recognisable, and in no way comparable or interchangeable with other types of relationships. There are three axes that determine the specific fabric of family reality: the inter-generational axis, the conjugal axis, and the parental axis. One is not without the other, one refers to the other, one promotes the other, and together they determine the reality of human time and space in the sense of love. And three are the unfailing presuppositions that qualify the family as an affective and effective exchange of love and life between progenitors, parents and children: sexual difference which makes generation possible, love which makes generation desirable, and fecundity which opens loving intimacy to the newness of a new life.

Now, the specific evil of our time is to deny and dissociate these three dimensions and assumptions. The result is affective aggregates without memory, families indifferent to difference, children who are not really children, the abnormal outcome of the idea of freedom understood as ‘autonomy’. In reality, our freedom is filial, existing as the fruit of man-woman love, and owing thanks to the love that precedes it. Pope Francis' expression is beautiful in this sense, when he says that “a people that does not respect its grandparents, has no future”!

It is therefore not true that love is enough to make a family: there is an ‘order of love’, as St. Augustine said, which is absolutely recognisable by every intellectually honest person! And it is irresponsible to legitimise any behaviour or affective aggregation by appealing to the general principle ‘love is love’: rather, the family is that form of love that shapes society: a social body cannot exist without its own cells!

And let it be clear that these are not confessional beliefs, but simply natural truths. Even in the most secularised countries, voices of dissent to the ‘single thought’ of gender ideology are beginning to be heard. Recently, even in Ireland, as shortly before in England, a witness absolutely not suspected of clericalism, Paddy Manning, a homosexual journalist, expressed his dismay at the forcing of gender politics, appealing to an elementary respect for reality: “only a man and a woman can beget a child, in spite of all the fantasies that destructive gender ideology wants us to believe”; we forget that “affirming equality is not denying difference”, and we go so far as “to ignore the right of children to have a mother and a father”. Not every bond can be called marriage and make a family: “marriage has meaning and produces a vital effect not only for the individual, but for society; it is not only between two people who love each other, but between a man and a woman who commit themselves to begetting and bringing up a child”.

Roberto Carelli SDB

(Fonte: Roberto Carelli – Alfabeto Famigliare)