Franciscan at Home

Recognizing the essential role parents play in the lives of their children and seeing the challenges parents face today, I wish to address parents in this column.

It is good to recall words taken from the Declaration on Christian Education from the Documents of the Second Vatican Council, in which the Council reminds us that ‘the primary and principal educators’ are the parents in the family who set the example of what it means to be a Catholic for their children.

‘…[P]arents ...are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators…. Parents are the ones who must create a family atmosphere animated by love and respect for God and man, in which the well-rounded personal and social education of children is fostered. Hence the family is the first school of the social virtues that every society needs. It is particularly in the Christian family, enriched by the grace and office of the sacrament of matrimony, that children should be taught from their early years to have a knowledge of God according to the faith received in Baptism, to worship Him, and to love their neighbor.’

On the day of their children’s baptism, parents promise to ‘accept the responsibility of training’ their children ‘in the practice of the faith.’ This responsibility is to be their ‘constant care.’ Parents are to ‘see that the divine life which God gives them (their children) is kept safe from the poison of sin, to grow always stronger in their hearts.’ Let us reflect on these words to understand what they mean for parents today.

In the fourth part of this series, we conclude our discussion of the Stages through which we grow in our way of loving. In Part 3, we discussed the importance of recognizing, confronting, and healing dysfunctions in our ways of loving - for example, habits of manipulation, control, demeaning others, loving conditionally, indirect communication, and co-dependency. We rely upon the power of forgiveness, grace, and our own efforts to understand and change those dysfunctions. With this realistic outlook on our life, we become better prepared for life-long commitment. We can see ourselves as well as our potential spouse more clearly. We also become prepared to accept the challenges that love in marriage demands: not only as including the thrilling love and romance of eros but also the courageous and steadfast self-sacrifice of agape.

Never as much as during the past several decades has Christian thought so greatly deepened the theological, spiritual and anthropological dimension of human love. If the Church has dedicated much of her reflection on the natural dimension of human love, it is by reason of a profound deficiency that characterizes the two past generations, namely, that they often find themselves within the impossibility of giving a natural clear response to the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the question of love. Within this sphere, the Church today is doing that which no other institution has the capacity to do.

By way of fundamental issues, we hear today the many questions at the heart of each man and woman, along with the profound aspirations that remain within them. John Paul II spoke much regarding the fundamental experiences of man, and also at times, what he described as: man’s elementary experiences, which he explained, was the most profound longing at the heart of man: the desire to love, and the desire to be loved.

We are in the presence of a cultural context very much marked by a dispersion of values that drives us unmistakably toward individualism. It befits us to be sufficiently realistic in order to analyze with lucidity that which specifies such a cultural conditioning of social life and, in particular, of affective and familial life. This will comprise the first part of this article. We will then look at the impact of these ideas on marriage and the family today.

Finally, in the midst of alternatives concerning the breakdown of conjugal and familial units (which has its origin on the misconception of love), I will present an exposition of the vision of John Paul II and Benedict XVI on love, to enable us to appreciate love in its true glory.

In the third part of this series, we continue our discussion of the Stages through which we grow in our way of loving. After looking at Stage I—where we learn how to love and be loved by our parents—we can see how our parents have truly been a blessing to us and also how they have failed us. In order to overcome these failures in love, the child must find its love in God, the perfect Father and parent, the one who loves us unconditionally, completely, and selflessly. Unless all wounds are healed, a pure development in love cannot take place. As we proceed through the next two stages, the reasons for this healing will become more evident.

In Stage II, a friendship with a person of the same sex, boys learn the masculine soul’s way of loving and girls learn the feminine soul’s way of loving. It is important to note that the differences between male and female are both physical and spiritual. Masculinity or femininity is written within the very depths of the person’s soul. The friendships we build and sustain with a person of the same sex affirms and strengthens our masculine or feminine identity as well as our masculine or feminine way of loving. The following are the other significant developments that occur during Stage II.