The invitation by the Vatican to lay Catholics to offer their views on the family to the coming Synod is welcome. It is an understandably awkward first step, but the document that accompanies the discussion questions shows the need for wide consultation. The document illuminates by its silences as well as by its words the immense challenges the Synod faces.
The document was written primarily for bishops and assumes familiarity with theological terms and arguments. It is followed by 40 questions grouped under eight headings. They invite discursive responses which will be collated and synthesised and sent to the Vatican where presumably they will be further synthesised. The risk in this process is that a homogenised document emerges that loses the sharpness and diversity of the original submissions.
Three features of the document suggest the challenges facing the Synod. The first is the striking contrast between the ideal of the Christian family that it proposed and the reality of child rearing in our society.
The document represents a fairly traditional Catholic theology of the family, setting it within a high theology and expressed in elevated language. This theology, of course, has been developed principally by celibate men, no doubt familiar with family life through their childhood and pastoral ministry, but at a distance from it. They may know that young parents may be up five times a night to tend to a teething baby, but the knowledge is not carved into their hearts and minds.
The gap between the ideal Christian family and the relationships in which children are reared in Australia is large. Many children are reared by single parent families, by serial parents, in unmarried partnerships, in blended families and in same sex relationships. Many Catholics, too, are married outside the Catholic Church.
This contrast is significant because it makes it harder to argue persuasively that the rearing of children within a monogamous and enduring family is the normative state for all human beings rather than an ideal for the few. It makes more plausible the argument that state regulation and formalisation of marriage and family ought to be separated from church regulation and ceremonies. This in turn makes it more difficult to appeal in public conversation to arguments based on natural law.
Second, the account of family life in the document is coloured by nostalgia. It looks back to a period when marriage alone had legal sanction, most marriages were in churches, divorce was difficult if not impossible, to be born out of wedlock was a stigma, and there was no social support for raising children outside of marriage.
Nostalgia tends to overlook the harsher aspects of relationships within many duly married families: the incidence of domestic violence, of loveless relationships, of neglected and abused children, the damaged health and early death of so many women, and the inequality of husband and wife.
It is also easy to forget that critics of such family arrangements were motivated by concern for the human dignity of wives and children who were trapped in abusive relationships. They were led to press for divorce and for tolerance of different forms of child rearing by the failures in practice of the Christian ideal of marriage when embodied in law and custom.
Whether changes in social mores have ultimately benefited or disadvantaged women and children is open to debate. But to ignore the failures of societies in which the Christian understanding of family life was imposed by law, and the ethical passion of many of its critics, is to underestimate the challenge facing Christian reflection on the family today.
The third challenge for the Synod lies in a significant omission in the document. It shows little interest in the correlation of patterns of child rearing and marriage with fashions in economic theory and developments in technology.
In an economic order that is constructed around the participation of individuals in the market and values people by their financial success, it is expected that both adult partners will work to sustain the economy. Those who cannot engage in paid work are stigmatised and their benefits kept very low.
This shapes family life. For example, someone who came to Australia from a rural society where the family was the economic unit may have been one of nine or ten siblings, but in Australia will have only one or two children. And it will be normal for the children to be placed in child care so that both parents can work.
The place of the market in society will always be the subject of debate, but when it becomes the lens through which a culture evaluates the world, religious faith and the relationships in which the raising of children are set will be seen as matters of purely private choice.
That suggests that when Catholics reflect on the future both of church and family, they should first ask whether the ordering of the economy serves human values.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Same-sex parents image from Shutterstock