That the traditional family has been under attack by a variety of secular interests for many years is, at this late date, too obvious to rate as news. When the assault on the family comes from a religious source, however, it's still enough of a novelty to be a bit of a shock. It's not that religious liberals haven't been working at undermining the family for years — it's just that those people frequently hesitate to put their case in totally blatant terms.
Lately, nevertheless, I came across an egregious example of that — an article in The Tablet, a reliable voice of Catholicism's progressive wing published weekly in London. If the sentiments expressed were peculiar to England, one might shrug them off as merely another symptom of the sorry state of Christianity in Britain. Unfortunately, the same kind of thinking can be found in some Catholic circles on this side of the Atlantic as well, though generally expressed in more restrained terms.
The article is the work of a woman named Philomena Cullen, described as program manager of an English charity, a visiting theology lecturer at a school in London, and editor of a book on Catholic social teaching.
"My argument," Ms. Cullen writes, "is that there has been in Catholic tradition concerning the family from the very beginning, a significant and subversive strand that cautions us against the danger of over-investment in the biological family." Making selective use of scattered sources, she shrugs off, as if it didn't matter, the overwhelming weight of testimony in the Old and New Testaments and the authoritative teaching of the Church supporting the primacy of the "biological family" in God's plan for humankind.
No less weird is her dismissal of vast quantities of social science data showing that children in intact, two-parent families do far better on the whole than the offspring of single parents and cohabiting couples. The "poorer social outcomes" of the latter are due to the fact that these children are "more likely to be poor and socially disadvantaged to begin with," Cullen argues.
To put it bluntly, that strikes me as daffy. Consider.
Social scientists analyzing the breakdown of family structure among African-Americans in the United States have repeatedly traced the roots of the problem as it exists today to the historical experience of slavery and its profoundly destructive impact on marriage and family life. This analysis appears to be entirely correct — and still another reason for condemning that "peculiar institution," American slavery.
But note: you can't logically say that slavery was a huge social evil because it did so much to bring about the breakdown of families among slaves and their descendants, and simultaneously argue that the problems of children in pathological family situations, many of them minorities, arise from disadvantages unrelated to family breakdown. Poverty and social disadvantage on the one hand and family breakdown on the other are noxiously intertwined, producing a vicious circle of mutual, ongoing cause and effect. When people like Philomena Cullen deny that self-evident fact, it is because they have chosen to impose ideological blinders on themselves.
Pope Benedict XVI lately has undertaken a project to foster the revival of natural law thinking. The Holy Father's effort comes not a moment too soon. Much of the nonsense talked about issues like marriage — including nonsense talked in some Catholic circles — reflects a foolish and destructive turning-away from natural law. The defense of the family ultimately requires a clear understanding that its excellence and its necessity derive ultimately from human nature itself.
