Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

family“ is false. „While it must be recognized that women have the same right as men to perform
various public functions, society must be structured in such a way that wives and mothers
are not in practice compelled to work outside the home, and that their families can live and
prosper in a dignified way even when they them- selves devote their full time to their own
family.“ 81
§ 4 Requirements of a Family Policy in Modem Society
1. The Economic Instability of the Family
As the most important unit of production and consumption, family business in agriculture and
handicraft gave the society of the pre-industrial age a special character. The family, the home
was an economic, moral, and religious stronghold, a place where people lived and provided
for themselves, prayed and worked in common, and found care and support in illness and old
age. The position of the family within feudal society was strong and respected, and every paterfamilias
participated, as it were, in the dignity and authority of the monarch. A great number
of children was considered an honor and at times may well have been a welcome help for
the family farm, although one must be careful with such statements. In speaking of the heavy
burden of his mother, Albrecht Dürer places a large number of children next to the plague.
The yield of the farmsteads frequently did not suffice for generations with many children that
were spared war and plague, so that in order to remedy need one had to seek assistance by
clearing lands and in Eastern settlements.
Even in the industrial age, the family is of irreplaceable value as a 'cell' of society; but its economic
situation has become very unstable. The family is no longer a production site; since in
the commercialized society only the individual 'earns', and the family appears not as an income-earner,
but only as a consumer. The result of this is that a greater number of children
only means an economic burden. Whereas in pre-industrial society a true family-policy was
unknown, it is today a socio-political requirement.
„The burdens in ushering in the new generation, without which no nation and no culture can
preserve and pass on its values, must be justly distributed, so that the nation does not endanger
its existence through a wrong distribution of these bur-dens.“ 82
2. The Decrease in the Birth Rate
Up until the beginning of the industrial age, the Western population remained more or less
constant in spite of many births as a consequence of the high mortality rate. Then, however,
medicine and hygiene began to overcome infant mortality and epidemic diseases. Birth control
was still almost unknown, so that the population of Europe rose in the first half of the
nineteenth century from 266 to 400 million. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a new
phase began which must be termed typical for the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas
the mortality rate remained low and continued to sink, the birth rate began to decrease also.
Numerous causes of this phenomenon of an economic, social, cultural, intellectual, moral, and
religious nature can be enumerated: the wage system directed towards the individual and not
to the family, the increase of women's work, the housing shortage, the loss of social prestige
among families with many children, the incursion of rationalism into marriage, the thinking in
terms of living-standard, religious uprooting, and the effort to make upward social mobility
possible for one's children. A correct appraisal of the drop in the birth rate will have to take
into consideration the excess of women over men, the rise in the number of the elderly, and
the frequent miscarriages. Nevertheless, with all these things it should not be overlooked that
not even the person in the so-called affluent society can do without the pristine and unspoiled
81 Familiaris Consortio, n 23.
82 G Mackenroth, Die Reform der Sozialpolitik durch einen deutschen Sozialplan (Berlin, 1952), 57
69