Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

The encyclical“ Laborem exercens „ furthermore describes the family as'' a community made
possible by work and the first school of work, within the home, for every person.“ It therefore
„constitutes one of the most important terms of reference for shaping the social and ethical
order of human work“ (10,1). This is clearly not the picture of a family splitting up into different
individuals and merely held together by external purposes but the perception, which is
almost a matter of course among ordinary people in particular; that all members of the family
support one another and together build up their existence.
2. The Law of Dispatch
As a cell of human society, the family stands under the law of dispatch. Upon the joy of leading
one's own child to maturity, to independence, and to fitness for life there follows the sorrowful
knowledge of the near departure of the children, which results from the nature of the
family. Indissolubility holds only for marriage, not for the family. The modem family of industrial
society in particular has something very ephemeral about it. Whereas agrarian families
often stay for centuries on the same farmstead, so that the family household continues to
exist without interruption from generation to generation, the modem urban family is founded
in order to pass away again after a few decades. The clan no longer has a permanent homestead,
which is, no doubt, a loss.
That the children gradually outgrow the family should not lead to emotional alienation. Nor
should it be a carefree sliding part from another, but a sending off that is neither selfish nor
jealous. St. Augustine therefore calls the family a „nursery of society“; 79 God has gifted the
family with fruitfulness not only that the deceased may have successors, but also that the living
may have companions. Understandably, it not infrequently happens that the father as well
as the mother resist the children's becoming independent. In the father's case, patriarchal motives
may now and then playa part here even today. On the mother's side, the danger of wanting
to tie her child to herself in an exaggerated way is particularly great when he or she is an
only child and when the father is lacking, as is the case with unmarried mothers and with the
divorced or widowed woman. Such overly strong ties often have unfavorable consequences in
the later marriages of these children, since unconscious impediments stand in the way of emotional
devotion to their spouses. In other cases, the parents seek to keep their grown children
with them for economic reasons such as cheap labor. In surveys, farm daughters make resigned
comments such as: I had to „help at home“, „was indispensable on my parents' farm,“
and now lie professionally „on the reject pile.“ It is wrong to deny a solid professional training
in agrarian families to the departing heirs, including the daughters. All the more should
the conscience of the children not be coerced when it is a question of choosing a spouse or of
a vocation to the priesthood or religious life. An Arabian proverb says: „You are the bow
from which your children are shot as living arrows.“
§ 3 The Family's Loss and Change of Function in the Industrial Society
1.. The Loss of Function.
It has become customary to make troubled complaints about the crisis and the decay of the
family in the industrial society: The number of divorces in the last fifty years has more than
quintupled. In the same time, the birth rate has sunk to a third. A terrible loss of function has
undermined the family. No wonder husband, wife, and children live mutely and unhappily
along- side each other and would like most of all to run away. This generalization is false. In
the midst of all threats and with all necessary adaptation to new conditions, most families
have remained true to their essential form, as if from a mysterious inner power. In a factual
evaluation of the loss of function, two things are to be distinguished:
79 De Civitate Dei, Lib. 15, c. 16 (II, 95).
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