The family is the most elementary and natural of human associations. It is the foundation of religious society and civil societies; it is the primary unit which, by multiplying, forms both the Church and States.
Divinely organized from the origin of the world, domestic society has traversed the centuries with the constitution it received from the supreme Lawgiver. This primordial constitution was fortified by the authority of the precepts of the Decalogue, and the Gospel came to restore it to its primitive integrity, imprinting upon it a character even more august and sacred.
Always and everywhere, it is respect for these great laws of nature and grace that has made nations strong and prosperous, and even those not enlightened by the light of faith, like ancient Rome, owed the brilliance and constancy of their fortune to domestic virtues. Among all the facts of history, there is perhaps none more instructive or less contestable. The longevity promised on Sinai for the observance of the divine commandment concerns peoples no less than individuals.
With the intact morals of the domestic hearth, a country can traverse the greatest crises without meeting its ruin: despite its setbacks, it retains within itself, fertile and pure, the source where its vitality is renewed. But when disorder introduces itself into the family itself, disturbing its divine economy, then the evil wreaks havoc all the more as it is deeper. It is the very heart of the nation that receives such wounds, and the effect is mortal, as happens with a tree that slowly withers, despite all appearances to the contrary, when the very root is attacked.
Religion, too, suffers cruelly from these attacks, for it is to the family, as to a common stock, that the Church and the State go to ask, in turn, the one for true faithful, the other for good citizens. That is why we have nothing more at heart than to keep away from this divine institution anything that could weaken its prestige or diminish its strength. Now, who would dare to maintain that, amid the errors and vices of contemporary society, the family, at least, has undergone none of these pernicious influences?
Is it not, on the contrary, to serious alterations in the domestic order that we must attribute one of the causes preventing the social order from being strengthened and restored? Has paternal authority lost none of its strength or its rights among us? Have the traditions of obedience and respect been maintained in their integrity? Are the laws and duties of marriage accepted everywhere with the spirit of sacrifice required by a state sanctified by the grace of the sacrament? Grave questions, our Very Dear Brothers, which impose themselves on the vigilant solicitude of your first Pastors.
For they resound ceaselessly in our ears, these strong recommendations of Saint Paul to Titus and Timothy, and, in their person, to all Bishops, on the necessity of reminding Christian families of the principles that must govern them and the virtues they are called to put into practice. And what moment more propitious for such teaching than this holy time of penance when the Church invites all her children to penetrate themselves with their obligations, in the silence of prayer and recollection?
It was a maxim more pompous than true to have proclaimed in the last century that all men are born free and equal in rights. It would have been more accurate to say that all men are born dependent and unequal. The first of these dependencies and inequalities has its foundation in the divine constitution of the family.
When the child comes into the world, he enters a hierarchy of powers and functions; he finds beside his cradle, in the very authors of his days, not equals, but superiors who have the right to command him. It is an authority that seizes him from the first moment of his existence and will never leave him henceforth. Never, at any age of his life, will he become the equal of his father or mother; never will his rights be equivalent to theirs. Between them and him, there will always be a bond of dependence and subordination, formed by nature itself, which is indissoluble.
This bond may loosen with the years, as intelligence and will have less need of guide and restraint; a moment will arrive when the child, become a grown man, must in turn enter into possession of his liberty. But even then, when filial submission will have lost its primitive rigor, due to the voluntary choice of a personal condition, there will always remain that mixture of respect and love, deference and honor, which is like a second obedience, softened and prolonged. Orders will give way to warnings and counsels, all the more worthy of being listened to as they have the experience of life on their side. And finally, there will be, in the family gathered around its head, a solemn hour when, in the face of death, the command of former times will reappear in the most august form, that of a last will, holy and sacred for all, and which will be the supreme exercise of paternal authority.
Our Very Dear Brothers! There is nothing comparable on earth, in the natural order. The idea of power is so confounded with it that, in human language, the words Authority and Paternity express the same thought and derive from the same source. To this name of Father responds in all men the highest sentiment of respect, for it is the very name, the touching and mysterious name of power; it is the greatest name that can crown the brow of man here below, and this crown is God Himself who places it on the head of him who bears it, according to this word of the Apostle:
"It is from the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ that all paternity takes its name in heaven and on earth..."
Thus, the Christian language could do no better than to borrow from the family the name that designates spiritual power, and it is with the title of Father that we salute the highest representative of divine authority in the kingdom of souls. By which we see how worthy of veneration is this power of the domestic hearth, which thus lends its name and serves as an image to all others, which participates at once in royalty, by the government whose reins it holds; in the priesthood, by the charge of souls it fulfills; and in divinity itself, which associates it with His work and makes it share in the most sovereign of His attributes.
Here, at least, nature has shown itself stronger than pride and passions. Paternal authority may have been weakened, but not destroyed: it is the only scepter that revolutions have not succeeded in breaking, the only majesty on earth before which even those who refuse to recognize any other still bow. Certainly, like all human authority, the authority of the head of the family can exceed its limits and abuse its rights.
In pagan centuries, barbarous legislations had been seen to exaggerate it to the point of attributing to it the right of life and death. On this point as on so many others, it was reserved for Christianity to bring all things back to the measure of the true and the just. Neither weakness nor harshness: it is in these two words that the Gospel summarizes the legitimate exercise of domestic power. While the Apostle reminds children "that it is a duty of justice for them to obey their parents in what is according to the Lord," he says to fathers: "And you, do not provoke your children to anger, but take care to raise them well by instructing and correcting them according to the Lord."
Under the influence of these doctrines, and even more under the impression of the virtues they have given birth to, paternal power has become in the Christian family what it has remained for eighteen centuries: a power entirely of justice and love, tempering the severities of command by kindness of heart, defended against arbitrariness by the sense of duty no less than by public morals, all the more respected as civil laws applied themselves more to maintaining it full and entire, setting limits for itself in the most disinterested of all devotions, with no other concern than to transmit intact the heritage received: a traditional power, communicated from father to son through all the vicissitudes of history, always ancient in its eternal youth, to the point that to designate this intimate royalty of the domestic hearth, as Christianity had remade it, it was necessary to seek in the patriarchal age a name proper to express so much obedience, on the one hand, and, on the other, so much grandeur and authority.
Do we yield to vain alarms, Our Very Dear Brothers, in expressing the fear that this tutelary authority, too, has lost among us some of the prestige with which divine and human laws had surrounded it? How many times have we not gathered from your own mouths this painful admission, that the spirit of independence has loosened even the bonds of the most natural and necessary of all subordinations? Without speaking of those open revolts whose scandal too often comes to sadden us, do not the resistances to paternal will, becoming more and more frequent, testify to a respect that is weakening day by day?
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Does a prompt and joyful obedience make command easy for you? Is it rare to see children treating, so to speak, as equals with their parents, dictating conditions to them with the haughty assurance of inexperienced youth, arrogating as a right what is only a benefit, or claiming as a debt what is only a gift, taking advantage of the advantages of fortune only to dispense with adding anything to it by their own merit, and, instead of creating a new title to the paternal inheritance by work and virtue, waiting, in guilty idleness, for the moment to enjoy without effort a patrimony long desired and often dissipated in advance?
Deplorable results of this ever-increasing alteration of the true principles on which rests the divine hierarchy of the family...
Source: The Works of Bishop Freppel Volume IV – Abbé Douillard – 1893