Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

ditions. The family's outward form is therefore subject to historical change, and, without a
doubt, this change has assumed enormous proportions since the beginning of the industrial
age.
§ 1 The Family as a Community of Life of the Parents with their Children
That parents live together with their children belongs so much to the essence of the family
that all attempts to destroy the family usually begin here. This trait shows itself clearly in the
communistic social utopias which, with their strange intermingling of phantasy and reason, of
secularized eschatology and collectivistic actuality, are more subtle than it would seem at first
sight. In the fifth book of the Republic, Plato designed that ideal state in which for the sake of
guardian class every 'mine' and 'yours' becomes taboo, so that „no one has anything of his
own except his body.“ „The guardians may possess neither houses, nor lands nor any other
good.“ Even women and children are common, „so that neither does a father know his child,
nor a child his or her father.“ Immediately after birth, children are brought to the nursery,
which the mothers may enter only for a short time for feeding, and the nurses „are to prevent
in every conceivable way that any mother recognize her child.“ 65 Under the influence of
Plato, Thomas Canpanella designed a social order without families at the beginning of the
seventeenth century in his 'City of the sun'. Men and women are housed in barracks in this
communistic dictatorship and sleep in separate halls. On the basis of medical and astrological
considerations, the couples are brought together to mate by the authorities, so that parents and
children do not know of each other. 66 In the year 1949, George Orwell described in a very
drastic way the spectre of the communistic society of the future without families: „A world of
fear and treachery and torment, world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which
will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself...We have cut the links between child
and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a
wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.
Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct
will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration
card. ..If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.“
67 After the epigonic revival of socialistic utopias in recent decades, anti-family ideologies
are again spreading. The family has allegedly generated „that specifically authoritarian
behaviour on which the existence of the bourgeois society depends to a large degree“ (Max
Horkheimer).It is the „vassal factory of authoritarian societies“ and a presupposition of capitalism.
Collectivities such as 'communes' and 'elective clans' must take the place of the family.
68 Only then will man be emancipated. It was an outrageous impertinence that these neo-
Marxist phrases were taken up in the Report of the State of the Family published by the German
federal government in 1975. 69 The totalitarian educational practice of the family, which
is founded on late capitalistic production relationships and power structures, must, according
to this report, be overcome by a family policy „oriented towards socialization.“ The education
of children is a „task of the whole society“ the performance of which society entrusts to
„families and extrafamilial pedagogical institutions.“ This monstrous thesis, which contradicts
Article 6, Paragraph 2 of the Basic Constitutional Law, overlooks the fact that society cannot
entrust what it does not possess. The task of education belongs originally and inalienably to
65 Republic 457d-464d
66 Civitas Solis. German translation by J E Wessely (Munich. 1900)
67 George Orwell. Nineteen eighty-/our. (New York: Harcourt. Brace and Company, 1949), 270-271.
68 Cf Max Horkheimer, Traditionelle und kritische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main, 1970); E Fromm, „Autorität und
Familie“, in Marxismus, Psychoanalyse, Sexpol 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1971); W Reich, Die sexuelle Revolution
(Frankfurt am Main, 1971); D Cooper, Der Tod der Familie (Reinbek, 1972). 4a Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache
7/3502, Apri115, 1975
69 Deutscher Bundestag 7/3502 April 15, 1975
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