I have often quoted the wonderful statement of the 1937 Irish Constitution on the nature of the family:
“The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.”
It goes on to say:
“The State acknowledges that the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family and guarantees to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children. Parents shall be free to provide this education in their homes or in private schools or in schools recognised or established by the State.”
The second passage is of course a logical consequence of the first. The original Bunreacht na hÉireann though not a perfect document (not least in the absence of the word ‘one’ from article 44.1.2) had the good fortune to be written in the reign of Pope Pius XI who, among many other great acheivements, wrote the encyclical Divini Illius Magistri a brilliant exposition of the true nature of education and of the right to educate.
(As an aside it also contains the most hard-line statement of Papal authority in temporals since Unam Sanctam:
“[T]he Church as a perfect society has an independent right to the means conducive to its end, and because every form of instruction, no less than every human action, has a necessary connection with man’s last end, and therefore cannot be withdrawn from the dictates of the divine law, of which the Church is guardian, interpreter and infallible mistress.”)
The Spirit of the Age (aka the Prince of this World) does not like marriage it being the symbol of everything he seeks to destroy and of his greatest defeat. He has invented his own version ‘Gay marriage’ and his alternative to the family: the Leviathan State. The Leviathan State doesn’t like home schooling or the principles enunciated in sections 41-42 of the 1937 Irish Constitution. In fact, they are a declaration of war to the death between the family and the Leviathan.
Hobbes may have christened Leviathan (well presumably it was a humanist naming ceremony) but it has found its natural home in the lands blessed with tongue of Luther. Germany has quite recently been imprisoning parents for home schooling. Austria is now keen to catch up. The law code in Austria (Leviathan loves law codes and hates common law) seems to allow for home schooling but the children have to be tested every year in German (the persecuted parents are not Austrian) with the same exams based on the same curriculum as the state schools. The group of parents seeking to resist are facing tens of thousands of Euros in annual fines, possible imprisonment, and have been threatened with the confiscation of their children.
They have an excellent website……support them!
August 21, 2012 at 7:29 pm
“Further, the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that. But things are defined by their working and power; and we ought not to say that they are the same when they no longer have their proper quality, but only that they have the same name. The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.” Aristotle, Politics, 1253a19
Sorry, I couldn’t resist; cut & paste is too easy…
August 21, 2012 at 10:28 pm
“A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father. Provided, therefore, the limits which are prescribed by the very purposes for which it exists be not transgressed, the family has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty. We say, “at least equal rights”; for, inasmuch as the domestic household is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature. If the citizens, if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire. The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error.” Leo XIII Rerum Novarum
Perhaps the resolution lies in the consideration that as sanctifying grace and divine law would have been transmitted through descent in an unwounded nature were it not for the fall, Adam would have been free to establish whatever public law seemed fitting for the transmission of directive political authority to his descendants after his assumption. Thus the family in a state of un-fallen nature was an all sufficient truly perfect society. Now sanctifying grace is transmitted through the Church and there are certain activities even for the end proportionate to nature for which the family is insufficient and which the Church is forbidden to undertake due to the conflict between fallen nature and her supernatural end. Consequently the state is distinguished from the family but with only those residual functions from which Church abstains.
August 23, 2012 at 11:35 am
St Thomas explains the passage more simply (commentary in loc.). The city is prior in the order of perfection, the individual in the order of generation.
August 23, 2012 at 2:55 pm
What about the family? The possible conflict consists in the apparent claim of Leo XIII that there are respects in which the state simply has no jurisdiction over the family.
August 23, 2012 at 3:51 pm
That the father’s authority does not derive from the State is shown by the fact that it would remain were the State dissolved. But it does not belong to him to decide whether the children whom he begets and the household that he founds shall be part of the State or not for as long as he remains living in its territory. So his own jurisdiction over his family is not from the State, but the State’s jurisdiction over his family is from the State and not from him. Does this resolve the problem?.
August 23, 2012 at 3:58 pm
But the key question is why does the family relate to the state as if it were a fellow sovereign authority when the family as such is not a perfect society?
August 24, 2012 at 10:18 am
Presumably because alone among authorities within the State, the father doesn’t receive his authority from the State.
August 24, 2012 at 10:44 pm
But neither does the president of the cricket club.
August 25, 2012 at 10:51 am
I meant, alone among those who have an authority binding in conscience to which others are obliged to submit: e.g. judges, policemen, traffic-wardens, tax-collectors, customs-men etc. The heads of voluntary associations can’t oblige anyone to submit to their authority, since anyone is free to leave the association; their authority doesn’t descend from God the author of nature but arises solely from the free consent of the governed.