The Christian order demands the restoration of those areas of life which are life-growing, life-sustaining, and life-forwarding, viz.: the family. As from the impoverishment of cells in the body there flows the tragedy of death, so from the disintegration of the family there springs and spreads the dry-rot of the body-politic, the nation and the world. As the family is the school of sacrifice wherein we first learn to bear each other’s burdens, so the decay of the family is the unlearning of those sacrifices which bring on the decay of a nation as it faces the miseries and horrors of life.
That the family is disintegrating in our national life, no one will deny. The modern husband and wife, like isolated atoms, resent the suggestion that they should lose their identity in the family molecule. It is each for himself as against all for one and one for all. And when there is an offspring, never before have children been so distant and so separated from their parents. The family hardly ever meets. The family that once had permanent headquarters, now has none, as the mother assumes she contributes more to the nation by making bullets than by raising babies. About the only time the family meets is after midnight, when the home becomes a hotel, and the more money they have the less they meet. Less time is passed together than is spent at a motion picture, or a beauty parlor. Courtship takes place outside the home, generally in a crowded room with a low ceiling, amidst suffocating smoke, while listening to a tom-tom orchestra glamoured by a girl who invariably cannot sing. The wife listens to radio serials with their moans, groans, and commercials, wherein triangles are more common than in a geometry book. She reads magazine articles by women who never stay at home, saying that a woman’s place is in the home. The family Bible recording dates of birth and baptism is no longer existent because few read the Bible, few give birth, and few are ever baptised. The intelligentsia love to read George Bernard Shaw on the family: “Unless woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.” And as for Catholics there is hardly a Catholic man or woman in the United states today over fifty years of age who cannot remember that in the days of his or her youth the rosary was said every evening in the family circle and everyone was there. How many do it now?
The two most evident symptoms of the breakdown of the family are: divorce and voluntary or deliberate sterility, i.e. broken contracts and frustrated loves. Divorce destroys the stability of the family; voluntary sterility destroys its continuity. Divorce makes the right of living souls hang up the caprice of the senses and the terminable pact of selfish fancy; while voluntary sterility makes a covenant with death, extracting from love its most ephemeral gift while disclaiming all its responsibilities. It is a great conspiracy against life in which science, which should minister to life, is used as it is in war – to frustrate and destroy; it is a selfishness which is directed neither to saving not to earning, but only to spending; it is an egotism, which because it admits of no self-control, seeks to control even the gifts of God; it sees sex not as something to solder life, but to scorch the flesh; it is a denial that life is a loan from the great bank of life and must be paid back again with the interest of life, and not with death.
It is a world wherein musicians are always picking up their bows and violins, but never making music, a world wherein chisel is touched to marble, but a statue is never created; a world where brush is lifted to canvas, but a portrait is never born; a world wherein talents are buried in a napkin as life plays recreant to its sacred messiahship. It is therefore a world wherein the thirst for love is never satisfied for never will they who break the lute snare the music.
We as Christians have argued with those who believe in divorce and the mechanical frustration of love, but our arguments convinced no one. Not because the arguments were not sound. That is the trouble. They are too good! Good reasons are powerless against emotions. Like two women arguing over back fences, we are arguing from different premises. The majority of people who are opposed to the stability and continuity of family life, for the most part do not believe in the moral law of God. They must say they believe in God, but it is not the God of Justice. Few believe in a future life, entailing Divine Judgement, with the possible sanction of eternal punishment. Even professed Christians among them when confronted with the test: “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mark 10:9), will retort that God never intended that it should be so.
They argue from the need of pleasure, the necessity of avoiding sacrifice, and the primacy of the economic. We argue from the Eternal Reason of God rooted in nature, the teachings of His Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ the Redeemer of the world.
There is absolutely no common denominator between us. It is like trying to convince a blind man that there are seven colors in a spectrum, or like arguing with a snob that a ditch-digger is his equal.
Instead then of arguing against the modern pagan who believes in the disruption of the family, let us assume that his premises are right, namely, man is only an animal; that morality is self-interest; that if there is a God, he never intended that we should not do as we please, that every individual is his own standard of right and wrong; that the amount of wealth one has must be the determinant of the incarnations of mutual love; that when we die that is the end of us, or if there be a heaven we all go there independently of how we conduct ourselves in life.
Now, once you start with these principles, then certainly divorces are right; then certainly avoid children; then certainly shirk sacrifices. If we are only beasts, and love is sex, then there is no reason why anyone should assume responsibility.
But why not go all the way? By the same principle anything is right if I can get away with it. If the bonds between husband and wife are revocable at will and for the advantage of self-love, why should not the treaties between nation and nation be revocable at the will of either partner? If a husband may steal the wife on another man, why should not Germany steal Poland? If the possession of a series of lust-satisfying partners is the right of man, why should not the possession of a series of slave colonies be the right of a nation? If John Smith can break his treaty to take Mary Jones until death, who shall say Italy is wrong in breaking its treaties with Ethiopia, or that Japan is wrong in seizing Manchuria? If this life is all, if there is no Moral Order dependent on God, than any man is a fool for being true to his contract.
Why not do away with all business credit? Why should the government pay us for the bonds we buy? Why should we not repudiate our loyalty and trust? What guarantee have we of credit, when the most vital of all compacts can be “sworn” with reservations? Why should not international treaties be like marriage treaties: “not worth the paper they are written on?’
If divorces from marital contract, why not divorces from international contracts? If in domestic society moderns sneer at marital fidelity as “bourgeois virtue,” what right have they to ask that “bourgeois virtue” should be recognized in world society? “If the trumpet give forth an uncertain sound who shall prepare to battle?”
If the economic is primary to the human, they why should not the capitalist be more interested in profits, than in the right of subsistence of his workers; then why not artificially limit children for the sake of the economic and the financial? If a man outgrows his clothes why should he not starve himself; if he lacks bread, why should he not pull out his teeth; if there is not enough room on a ship, why not like mutineers at sea throw sleeping comrades to the sharks? In each case it is the same principle: the primacy of the economic over the human.
We are at war with Hitler because he makes the human secondary to the racial. What is so different to making the human secondary to the economic? If Marxist Socialism says that only those belonging to a certain class shall live, and Fascism that only those belonging to a certain nation shall live, and, if we say that only those who have a certain bank account shall live or have the right to live, we are emptying our cause of all morality. Universalize this principle and in the end no one will be permitted to play a piano unless he does it in a grand salon, nor shall anyone have the right to drink cocktails unless he is in evening clothes. Such snobbishness is anti-democratic. It is wicked, because it exalts the economic over the human. Some time ago a Nazi soldier in occupied France took his French wife into a hospital. Seeing a crucifix on the wall, he ordered the nun to take it down. She refused! He ordered her again saying that he did not want his child ever to look upon the image of a crucified Jew. The nun took it down under threats. The father’s wish was fulfilled to the letter. The child was born – blind. Now shall we say only those of an economic status have the right to bring children into the world, as the Nazi said that only those of a certain race had a right?
And so we go back to the beginning. If we are only animals and not moral creatures of God, then certainly act like animals; then permit divorces, and a pharmacopeia of devices, prophylactic and eugenic, to cultivate the animal that man is; make it a universe where the ethics of man are no different from the ethics of the barnyard and the stud.
Some day because of the refusal to live for others, to the full extent of our capacity, there will be the haunting conscience. As John Davidson puts it:
Your cruellest pain is when you think of all
The honied treasure of your bodies spent
And no new life to show. O then you feel
How people lift their hands against themselves,
And taste the bitterest of the punishment
Of those whom pleasure isolates. Sometimes
When darkness, silence, and the sleeping world
Give vision scope, you lie awake and see
The pale sad faces of the little ones
Who should have been your children, as they press
Their cheeks against your windows, looking in
With piteous wonder, homeless, famished babes,
Denied your wombs and bosoms.
In contrast to this pagan view of life, the Christian principles governing the family are these:
Marriage, naturally and supernaturally, is one, unbreakable unto death: Naturally, because there are only two words in the vocabulary of love: “You” and “Always.” “You,” because love is unique; “Always,” because love is eternal. Supernaturally, because the union of husband and wife is modeled upon the union of Christ and His Church, which endures through the agelessness of eternity.
The foundation of marriage is love, not sex. Sex is physiological and of the body: love is spiritual and therefore of the will. Since the contract is rooted not in the emotions, but in the will, it follows that when the emotion ceases, the contract is not dissolvable, for the love of the will is not subject to the vicissitudes of passion. A life-time is not too long for two beings to become acquainted with each other, for marriage should be a series of perpetual and successive revelations, the sounding of new depths, and the manifestation of new mysteries. At one time, it is the mystery of the other’s incompleteness which can be known but once, because capable of being completed but once; at another time, the mystery is of the other’s mind; at another the mystery is of fatherhood and motherhood which before never existed; and finally there is mystery of being shepherds for little sheep ushering them into the Christ Who is the door of the sheepfold.
Love by its nature is not exclusively mutual self-giving, otherwise love would end in mutual exhaustion, consuming its own useless fire. Rather it is mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery. As in heaven, the mutual love of a Father for Son recovers itself in the Holy Ghost, the Bond of Unity, so too the mutual love of spouse for spouse recovers itself in the child who is the incarnation of their lasting affection. All love ends in an Incarnation, even God’s.
Procreation then is not in imitation of the beasts of the field, but of the Divine God where the love that vies to give is eternally defeated in the love that receives and perpetuates. All earthly love therefore is but a spark caught from the Eternal Flame of God.
Every child is a potential nobleman for the Kingdom of God. Parents are to take that living store from the quarry of humanity, cut and chisel it by loving discipline, sacrifice, mold it on the pattern of the Christ-Truth until it becomes a fit stone for the Temple of God, whose architect is Love. To watch a garden grow from day to day, especially if one has dropped the seed himself and cared for it, deepens the joy of living. But it is nothing compared to the joy of watching the other eyes grow, conscious of another image in their depths.
At a time when the first wild ecstasies begin to fade, when the husband might be tempted to believe that another woman is more beautiful than his wife, and the wife might be tempted to believe that another husband would be more chivalrous – it is at that moment that God in His Providence sends children. Then it is, that in each boy, the wife sees the husband reborn in all his chivalry and promises; and in each girl, the husband sees his wife reborn in all her sweetness and beauty. The natural impulse of pride that comes with begetting, the new love that overblooms the memory of a mother’s pain as she swings open the portals of flesh, and the joys of linked creatures in each other’s fruit, are as so many links in the rosary of love binding them together in an ineffable and unbreakable union of love. Deliberately frustrate these incarnations of mutual love and you weaken the tie, as love dies by its own “too much.”
Since nature has associated private property in a very special manner with the existence and development of the family, it follows that the State should diffuse private property through the family that its functions may be preserved and perfected.
If the bringing of children into the world is today and economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God’s law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of the burden. The human must not be limited and controlled to fit the economic, but the economic must be expanded to fit the human.
Since the family by nature is prior to the State, and more sacred than the State, it is the duty of the State to establish such external conditions of life as will not hamper a Christian home life.
The head of the family should be paid a wage sufficient for the family and which will make possible an assured, even if modest, acquisition of private property.
The State should defend the indissolubility of the marriage ties rather than weaken the sanctity of contracts, for divorces are in the highest degree hostile to the prosperity of families and of States, springing as they do from the depraved morals of the people.
Such is the Christian position concerning marriage, and one that is, outside the Church, almost universally misunderstood. It is so often said: “They can divorce and remarry, because they are not Catholics,” or “the Catholic Church says that deliberate frustration of the fruits of love is wrong.” No! No! No! Divorce and voluntary sterility are not wrong because the Church says they are wrong. The Church says they are wrong because they are violations of the natural law, which binds all men. There is not one God for Catholics and another God for Hottentots. And all who violate the natural law will be punished by God. A modern pagan is no more free to break God’s law than a Catholic.
But why does almost everyone outside of the Church associate the objection to divorce and voluntary sterility with the Church? Because the Church is today alone defending the natural law. If a time ever came when the Church alone defended that natural truth that two and two make four, the world would say: “It is a Catholic doctrine.” As the natural law continues to be defended only by the Church, a day will come with Catholics have to be prepared to die for the truth that it is wrong to poison mothers-in-law and that apples are green in the springtime.
Sometimes nations and people learn through experience that a violation of the natural law is wrong. Such expressions as “crime does not pay,” or “you cannot get away with it,” or “it pays to live right,” mean that having burned our fingers, we learn that it is in obedience to law, and not in rebellion against it, that we find peace.
No country better illustrates this than Russia. In the first flush of its atheistic Marxian Socialism, it denied the necessity of marriage, established abortion centers, ridiculed fidelity and chastity as a “bourgeois virtue,” compared lust and adultery to drinking a glass of water, after which you could forget the glass in one instance the the person in the other; introduced postcard divorces, which required only that you send a notice that you were no longer living with a certain party, and all obligations thereby ceased.
Now, like a man who violates the natural law by over drinking and then learns to respect the law through ruined health, so too Russia, by violating the natural law of marriage, has learned through its tragic effects to respect it. In 1934, without even cracking a smile, the Russians repudiated their Communistic immorality by a complete somersault, as the government declared “divorces and remarriages were a petty bourgeois deviation from Communist ideals.” Divorces were made more difficult; fees for divorces were increased, so that, “silly girls would think twice before marrying a man with twenty or thirty records.” Postcard divorces were abolished. Frequent remarriage after divorce was legally identified with rape and punished as such. Abortion clinics were eliminated; desertion was considered “bourgeois.” On November 29, 1941 a tax was imposed on single persons and childless married couples, and a Decree of June 27, 1936, which sought to increase the size of the family, set up a system of payment to parents on the basis of the number of their children. Premiums were paid to mothers for every child after the sixth, and payments increased with the eleventh and subsequent children. Under this law a billion and a quarter million rubles were paid out by the government in the first nine months of 1941.
In 1919, Russia regarded the Christian concept of purity, chastity, and marriage with its unbreakable union, its forbidding of divorce and deliberate control of the number of children in a family, abortion and the like, as “bourgeois virtues.” But the Russia of today we find looking on divorce, voluntary sterility, desertion, abortion, and the breakdown of the family life as “bourgeois vices.” Such change reveals not only the inner inconsistency of Marxian Socialism, but more than that, how Russia has apparently learned something that we in America have not yet learned, namely, that you cannot build a strong nation by disintegrating the family. It is conceivable that, in this respect, Russian family life may stand higher in the eyes of God, than America’s.
If some of our “pinks,” intelligentsia, fellow travelers, and Reds, who are under orders to bore into Civilian Defense to disrupt this country, would keep up-to-date, they might learn that they are trying to impose upon America the very scum which Russia rejected. History testifies that the prosperity of the State and the temporal happiness of its citizens cannot remain safe and sound where the foundation on which they are established, namely, the moral, is weakened and where the very fountainhead from which the State draws its life, namely, wedlock, and the family, is obstructed by the vices of its citizens.
A downward step in the stability of the family was taken on December 21, 1942, when the Supreme Court of the United States held that a divorce granted in Nevada must be accepted by every other state. There were only two dissenting votes, one by Mr. Justice Murphy, the other by Mr. Justice Jackson. The latter wrote the dissenting opinion, calling the Court’s decision “demoralizing.”
A few of his many objections against the majority opinion may be cited: (a) “The Court’s decision…nullifies the power of each state to protect its own citizens against the dissolution of their marriages by other states.” (b) “To declare that a state is powerless to protect either its own policy or the family rights of its people…repeals the divorce laws of all the states and substitutes the law of Nevada to all marriages, one of the parties of which can afford a short trip there.” (c) “Settled family relationships may be destroyed by a procedure that we would not recognize if the suit were one to collect a grocery bill.”
The universalizing of easy divorce means that the institution of marriage is slowly degenerating into State-licensed free love.
Legalized polygamy and polyandry are recognized now on condition that husbands or wives, as the case may be, do not harness other wives or husbands together to the coach of their egotism, but that they hitch them up in tandem fashion, or single file. To the extent that the courts disrupt this natural unity of a nation, they will incapacitate themselves for international fellowship. For if we destroy this inner circle of loyalty through disloyalty, how shall we build up the larger international circles of loyalty from which world peace is derived?
Without realizing it we may be getting back to a condition which shocked Caesar. Plutarch tells us that one day Julius Caesar saw some wealthy foreign women in Rome carrying dogs in their arms and he said: “Do the women in their country never bear children?” Apparently, even in those days, maternal instincts which should have been directed to children were perverted, in certain cases, to pomeranians.
Men and women of America, raise altars to Life and Love while there is time! If the citadel of married happiness has not been found it is because some have failed to lay siege to the outer walls of their own selfishness. The purpose of war is not for the loot of the private soldier, neither is the purpose of marriage for the loot of life. Like Apostles husband and wife have been sent out two by two, not that they might only eat and drink, buy and sell, but that they might enrich the Kingdom of God with life and love and not with death.
The soil that takes the seed in the springtime is not unfaithful to its messiahship of harvest, so neither may husband and wife play recreant to the responsibilities of love. The fires of heaven which have been handed down to them as an altar have not been given for their own burning, but that they may pass on the torch that other fires may climb back into the heavens from which they came.
Marital love is happiest when it becomes an earthly Trinity: father, mother, and offspring, for by filling up the lacking measure of each in the store of the other, there is built up that natural complement wherein their love is immortalized in the offspring. If love were merely a quest or a romance, it would be incomplete; on the other hand, if it were only a capture and an attainment, it would cease to rise. Only in heaven can there be combined perfectly the joy of the chase and the thrill of the capture, for once having attained God, we will have captured something so Infinitely Beautiful it will take an eternity of chase to sound the depths. But here on earth, God has given to those who are faithful in the Sacrament, a dim sharing in those joys, wherein two hearts in their capture conspire against their mutual impotence and recover the thrill of chase in following their young down the roads that lead to the Kingdom of God. It was a family in the beginning that drew a world of Wise Men and Shepherds, Jews and Gentiles to the Secret of Eternal Peace. It will be through the family too that America will be reborn. When the day comes when mothers will consider it their greatest glory to be the sacristans of love’s fruit, and then fathers will regard it their noblest achievement to be stewards of love’s anointed ones, and when children realize that nature sets no limits on the number of uncles one might have, but that a man can have one mother – then America will be great with the greatness of its Founding Fathers and the greatness of a nation blessed by God.
The whole book may be read in full at Project Gutenberg:
Interplanetary Dust 