The Christian Family

Such was the state of decay in the Roman Empire that had followed the abandonment of the traditional patriarchal society based upon the family when the Catholic Church appeared on the scene

The Catholic Church reconstituted Western Civilization and reconstituted the family on a new basis.

The Catholic ideal of the family owes much to the patriarchal tradition which found it’s complete expression in the Old Testament.

It now became a new creation, a patriarchal system sanctified and modified by a sacrament.

The prior patriarchal family was essentially aristocratic, the privilege of a ruling or patrician class while the Catholic family was common to every class, even to slaves.

In the Catholic family the husband belongs as exclusively to the wife as the wife to the husband and this made marriage a more personal and individual relationship than it had been under the pre-Catholic patriarchal system.

The ideal of marital love now became an unselfish one where each spouse devoted him/her self to the welfare of the other rather than to oneself.

The family became an autonomous and self-contained unit which did not depend upon any outside power.

It was regarded as the primary and independent unit of society, possessing it’s own inalienable rights secondary to it’s duties.

This type of monogamous, sacramental and indissoluble marriage has been the necessary foundation of European society and Western civilization for two thousand years.

Women have always had a wider share in social life and a greater influence on European civilization than was ever the case in prior civilizations -Hellenic, Roman or Oriental.

In Catholic civilization, the patriarchal ideal was balanced by the ideal of virginity and the family did not control the whole existence of it’s members.

The spiritual side of life belonged to a spiritual society in which spiritual authority belonged to a consecrated celibate class - the clergy - who by their acceptance of chastity showed how the sexual instincts could be sinlessly controlled and disciplined.

This transcending of sexuality enabled husband and wife to live together in fidelity and trust.