Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

speaks of a new „metropolitan matriarchy“ or of a „female rule“ as part of the „modem metropolitan
form of life.“ 71 The management of the family household places great demands on
the woman, so that it has been said in jest that a man whose wife suddenly got lost would
have to publish the following advertisement: „I am looking for a woman to do my housekeeping.
Fifteen to seventeen hour working day including Sundays and holidays. Training or good
experience in cooking, sewing, and other household chores as well as book-keeping, health
and child-care, and garden work. Must be healthy, cheerful, independent, flexible, and willing
to work. No right to payor vacation.“ 72 On June 8, 1982, the Federal High Court of Germany
established that a housewife
works sixty hours a week.
If in the course of the years a family succeeds in saving enough for a home of its own, that is
due in large part to the capable and provident management by the woman. If, however, a
woman fails in housekeeping, then, in spite of the good income of her husband, a 'secondary
poverty' comes over the family, i.e. that poverty arises not from the income of the man being
too small, but from its poor administration. 'Secondary poverty' arises above all when the
housewife man- ages affairs according to the principle that „a living standard in accordance
with our social standing amounts to twenty per cent more than the income of my husband.“
The Family in the Service of Spiritual, Moral, and Religious Values
The family is the most important and formative community for human society. Because love
and affection are the vital principle of the family, an educational and personality forming
power issue from it that is without equal. Here the different functions of the parents, siblings,
and grandparents respectively can be distinguished.
„The first and fundamental structure for 'human ecology. is the family, in which man receives
his formative ideas about truth and goodness. and learns what it means to love and to be
loved, and thus what it actually means to be a person, ... in which children become aware of
their dignity and prepare to face their unique and individual destiny“(Centesimus annus 39,1)
a) The task of the parents
According to Thomas Aquinas, we owe our parents three things: they gave us life, they raised
us, and they educated us (11-11, 102, I). The goal of education, as Thomas adds, is to lead one
to human perfection. The family is, as it were, the second, the spiritual womb in which the
child born of the mother should mature to moral personality (continetur sub parentum cura,
sicut sub quodam spirituali utero, 11-11, 10, 12). Without the loving 'address', the child
threatens to atrophy psychically in spite of the best physical care, as one not seldom sees with
institutionalized children (the danger of 'institutionalization'). Therefore the gainful employment
of the mother outside the home represents a serious harm especially for the small child
whose mental aptitude must be awakened by the loving 'Thou' of the mother: „When the
mother smiles at her infant, the sec- ret invitation to smile back lies therein. From that day on,
when this first hap- pens, the mother knows that she is understood by her child emotionally“
(August Vetter).
Education requires a common effort on the part of the father and the mother. However, in
modem society, the man is especially threatened by the danger of becoming alienated from his
fatherly status and of paying the 'role of the outsider' in his own family, partly because he
must spend the better part of the day outside the family professionally, partly because he
withdraws himself from the family, partly because his figure and authority are obscured by an
all too mechanical interpretation and application of the principle of equal rights, as if there
71 W Brepohl, Der Aufbau des Ruhrvolkes im Zuge der Ost- West- Wanderung (Recklinghausen, 1948), 220.
72 Ruth Dirx, Welt der Arbeit, November 15, 1957.
63