The State Exists to Serve, Not Usurp, the Family

We are approaching, in this series, Pope Leo XIII’s great encyclical Rerum Novarum, on the condition of the working classes. I’ve been maintaining that it is impossible to discuss Catholic Social Teaching without specifying what Catholics understand as a society. I’ve also insisted upon the wise dictum of Saint Thomas, that grace perfects nature, which alone suffices to instruct the attentive Catholic that to sever faith from civic life is artificial and unnatural. Now it’s time to look at two societies which the Pope holds up for our affection and admiration: the Christian family, and the Church.

Far from seeing religion as a pleasant decoration superadded to civil society, the Pope affirms that “religion, and religion only, can create the social bond” (Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, 1892). History—and Leo is an historian with a long and broad vista—teaches us as much. The key word in his sentence is bond. This bond is more profound than the phantom “contracts” dreamed by Hobbes, Locke, and their followers. For Leo sees another dimension, the moral and spiritual depth of man—what makes it impossible for us to reduce him to his material wealth and appetites. I enter a contract, for self-serving and limited purposes; but I forge a bond. The bond is personal, engaging the whole of my being. And the social bond aims at the good of that whole human being. “When different families,” Leo writes to French Catholics during a period of severe secular agitation against the Church, “unite under the inspiration of nature, in order to constitute themselves members of another larger family circle called civil society, their object is not only to find therein the means of providing for their material welfare, but, above all, to draw thence the boon of moral improvement.”

“Otherwise,” he says—and did he enter a time-machine to inspect the United States in 2012?—“society would rise but little above the level of an aggregation of beings devoid of reason, and whose whole life would consist in the satisfaction of sensual instincts.”

He seems pretty prescient to me as well.

From the comments posted after the article, by ‘JERD’:

“Leo’s thesis is played out perfectly in the erosion of the marriage covenent in the United States since the mid 20th century. The law of the State built a society founded on no-fault divorce, contraception, and abortion, and now capped by same sex marriage.

Marriage has become more rare, divorce is common, and more children are born out of wedlock. As the number of intact families (mother, father, and children bonded together for life) declines, the morality imposed by law fills the void - tax payer funded abortions, mandatory contraception insurance coverage, and dependency on State benefits for impoverished abandoned mothers and their children.”

Not to mention that the state would actually work to achieve these things, as the more people dependant upon it the more power it has.

Pope Leo XIII warns about about this here:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_10021880_arcanum_en.html

Freegards, thanks for all the threads on FR

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