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In 1981, as a result of a Synod of Bishops specially devoted to further awareness of the (then) current understanding of marriage and the Christian family in the modern world, Pope John Paul II promulgated an apostolic exhortation entitled Familiaris Consortio (On the family).

The well-known biographer of John Paul II, George Weigel, claims that in private conversations held with the holy father he came to learn that the pope regarded Familiaris Consortio as one of his favorite letters he had ever written as pope to the family of God (Witness to Hope, 385). The document is a wide-ranging and broad one in terms of the sheer breadth of the content covered therein, and it is therefore hardly any wonder that a prominent Catholic encyclopedia should say of the apostolic exhortation that it is one of the most important sources for the theological meaning of the sacrament of Marriage (Stravinskas, Catholic Encyclopedia, 628).

Many writers who have taken this exhortation as their springing point to launch into various issues, which are ancillary to marriage per se, have nevertheless been able to employ specific portions of Familiaris Consortio, owing to its vastness of content. What we will focus on in the following pages is a kind of reception of the document by Catholics (whether clergy or laypeople) and its teachings over the more than two decades since its promulgation. There are certainly areas of overlap among those who have commented on the document, and these ought to be paid attention to in coming to an understanding of an authentically Roman Catholic awareness of the various aspects of married life among Christians.

Opening Observations Made in Familiaris Consortio

Section one of the document expressly opens up the contents and applications of the document to a broad audience. It is written for (1) those living in fidelity to the Church's extant teachings and practices in the area of matrimony, (2) those who have become bewildered by the contemporary challenges encroaching upon the family, and even to (3) those who live in unjust unawareness of the freedom and human rights guaranteed to them to have all the fullness that marriage might offer. In other words, the intended audience of the document is an intrinsically ecumenical one. It is not merely addressing Catholics in good standing with the Church, but the holy father reaches his hand out to assist everyone struggling with the sundry difficulties in contemporary married life. This is significant, since most prior documents, whether Casti Connubii of Pope Pius XI, Humanae Vitae of Pope Paul VI, or even documents of the Second Vatican Council, the intended audience has been, if not exclusively, certainly mainly Catholics.

Pope John Paul II notes in section six of the exhortation that the situation of marriage and the family in contemporary life is an ironic one in the sense that there are both commendable advances being made in Western culture and enormous setbacks. It is not so simple a situation as to claim that Western culture is doing nothing other than attacking and hindering the family and married life. Some of the good understandings reached by the contemporary Western world are the following: an appreciation of human freedom for both sexes, a promotion of education and love for children, and a promotion of the dignity of women and responsible procreation. However, some of the setbacks against the family should also be noted. They include the following: the respective freedom of the spouses has been carried to an extreme sense of autonomy, the misconstruction of authority and the handing on of values with respect to the relation of parents to their children, and the ongoing scourges of abortion, growing divorce rates, sterilization, and an overall contraceptive mentality. It is for these reasons and many others besides that the Synod of Bishops met and wished Pope John Paul II to be the primary spokesperson for their conclusions reached. Everything is not well for the contemporary family, and Pope John Paul II reasons that the family is not merely a part of an overall society (rather, it is the very foundation of all society, as we shall explore later), any attacks on its welfare must not go unanswered. Social injustices toward the family must be dealt with directly, and this is a primary reason for the appearance of Familiaris Consortio.

Building on Prior Teaching for Fundamental Precepts

Prior to the appearance of this apostolic exhortation, there had appeared two very important documents on the nature of marriage and the family. They were the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae and an authoritative document coming out of the Vatican II Church Council called Lumen Gentium. Pope John Paul II, as all popes throughout history have done, takes the prior teaching on marriage and the family (especially that seen in the twentieth century) as his starting points on which to build. He references several times throughout his apostolic exhortation the encyclical Humanae Vitae (HV), especially when the content of his teaching has to do with the most explicit portions of HV on the conjugal act and contraception.

Freedom Versus Autonomy

There appears in this succinct encyclical Humanae Vitae a very profound line, which undoubtedly could be expounded upon. In section 21 of the encyclical, Pope Paul VI declares that selfishness is the enemy of true love. This recalls an earlier point made in our essay. John Paul II notes the dangerous tendency of contemporary spouses to exemplify an isolationist and autonomous attitude in marriage (FC, 6). In fact, for the problems listed above which are antithetical to marriage and family life, the Pope believes there is one problem most fundamentally the cause of the others. He writes, At the root of these negative phenomena there frequently lies a corruption of the idea and the experience of freedom, conceived not as a capacity for realizing the truth of God's plan for marriage and the family, but as an autonomous power of self-affirmation, often against others, for one's own selfish well-being. And if selfishness is thought to be the enemy of true love, then any spouse acting almost exclusively in his own self-interest is destructive toward the very bond of his marriage to his spouse, which bond is love itself.

There is an interesting irony involved in selfish individualism versus a flourishing and mutually reciprocating action of love toward another outside of oneself. Whereas one would suppose that, as is often frankly admitted, couples will tend to not want to marry because they simply want to continue enjoying the other person in the relationship without giving over to a serious commitment (Cf. Barbara Markey, Cohabitation: Response over Reaction). Or, further than this, some married couples will either put off children indefinitely or decide to not have them at all for the expressed purpose of wishing to sexually enjoy the spouse in an uninhibited manner. The strange consequence though, as Pope Paul VI noted in Humanae Vitae, is that this eventually leads to becoming overly self-centered sexually, which eventuates in man (or woman) coming to see the other as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment and no longer as the desired companion for life (HV, 17).

Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo notes that the having of a family in a natural and ordered way (such as the Church teaches couple to do) does lead to the exact opposite of selfishness and isolationism in a marriage relationship. And this is a necessary consequence (as in, it is intrinsic in nature itself) of having children. Cardinal Trujillo offers some examples that it is the nature of family to be other-centered in even the simplest ways. He notes, Everyone has to help everyone else in the family, (FC and the Family, 3). It is simply a matter of being practically impossible to be rapped up in oneself in the context of a family with numerous children. The older children will have to help the younger ones at times (e.g., to put on their shoes before they go outside), and the adults will constantly have to help all of the children to grow into responsible adults. It is simply intrinsic to the nature of having a family that one grows to be concerned with the well-being and interests of others around.

In these comments by Cardinal Trujillo there is an explication of the fundamental doctrines expressed in sections 42-43 of Familiaris. In these sections, Pope John Paul II notes that the daily life of a good family is characterized by sharing and deep communion. The community of a family is the very answer needed to thwart selfish isolationism. This type of other-centered communion is seen in various aspects of which the Cardinal has elaborated. For example, the family is guided by an overriding principle of free giving, and this free giving takes the form of heartfelt acceptance, encounter and dialogue, disinterested availability, generous service and deep solidarity (FC, 43). Children helping younger children whenever there arises a need for such help is a ready example of disinterested availability. The older child helps the younger not because he is gaining something for it, but rather because when a child needs help, especially your own sibling, you simply help that child. This also fosters a recognition of the intrinsic value in each individual human being.

Love and Life the Very Foundation of Marriage and Family

In his recent speech Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo agreed with Pope John Paul II in seeing the family as that which forms societies. According to the Pope, the family is society's foundation, which continually bolsters society by being its continual giver of life (FC, 42). Cardinal Trujillo notes that this thinking is in opposition to current worldly sentiment most readily embodied by the United Nations in their recent conferences. The general attitude expressed in these U.N. conferences has been to think that societies are simply collections of individuals (Familiaris Consortio and the Family, 3). But, nature seems to argue against this mistaken idea. Societies are not the ones producing and nurturing and giving the individuals to the society. These duties are fulfilled by families, and the individuals produced usually repeat this fundamental cycle of nature by creating their own families and producing and nurturing their own offspring.

Underlying the teaching of the family as the ultimate antidote to isolationism, are the two most fundamental realities of marriage: love and life. The two are hardly mutually exclusive, reasons John Paul II. On the contrary, conjugal love expressed as it out to be expressed according to the nature of man tends toward the creation of life. Procreation is a natural fruit of the conjugal act, according to Humanae Vitae. Many thinkers since have latched on to this fundamental Catholic point, including John Paul II in this exhortation. According to Catholic teaching, man is a hylomorphic unity. That is, he is composed of matter and form, which for man correspond to the body and soul, which are fundamentally united. That is, what it is to be a human is to be a soul-body unity (FC, 11). But, man is also created in the image and likeness of God, who is love. It follows that Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being, (11). In marriage, the love that man longs to express is done so most fundamentally in conjugal love, the mutual and complete self-giving of a man and a woman. So sexuality could never be seen, on this understanding as something purely physical, nor purely psychological either. It is the whole human who engages in the sexual act, so the act itself is intrinsically physical and spiritual. This is how one communicates his or her love for another, by the mutual self-giving in the conjugal act.

However, love is not the only principle intrinsic to conjugal acts. This fact is easily demonstrable by noting that birth control contraception amounts to little more than artificial means of birth prevention. But since it is ever thought that this or that birth is needing to be prevented, it must be the case that there is a natural product of conjugal love. So, Donald Asci reasons, this is the other aspect of Pope John Paul II's theology of the conjugal act. The body by its very nature in sexuality is fecund - it is open to fertility (The Conjugal Act as a Personal Act, 138). Total union occurs with the giving of one's body and all of its finalities. In male climax, a finality is the releasing of semen, in which is contained the possibility of forming a new human life (if united with the gift of the woman-the ovum). There is a principle of totality inherent in this reasoning - the giving of one's total self - his spiritual, physical and (innately contained within the physical) his fecundity.

But, if by some various means the conjugal act is not completed according to its intrinsic order something like a contradiction takes place, according to Christopher West who cites section 32 of Familiaris Consortio. West argues that one cannot possibly hold that he gives his entire self to the other if at the most important (i.e., climactic) moment of intercourse - the very moment when the unity between the two ought to be felt most of all - one withdraws him or herself from the union. Fecund is what adults are by nature. Therefore, when one does such a thing as what West describes, he is engaging in a type of lie - a serious contradictory statement which says, I give you all of myself except my fertility. I receive all that you are except your fertility, (Good News about Sex and Marriage, 108). Thus, as John Paul II reasons in this section of FC cited by West, the innate language of the total and mutual self-giving inherent in the conjugal act becomes overlaid with a contradictory idea when man acting as the ultimate arbiter of his own being and sexuality decides in a moment to not totally give of his self (since his whole self includes, as Asci has shown above, his fecundity as well).

The Essential Tension of Becoming What You Are

The discussion thus far leads naturally to what many later came to see as a profound and highly important teaching of Familiaris Consortio: Families, you are to become what you are! This passage so often quoted runs thus,

The family finds in the plan of God the Creator and Redeemer not only its identity, what it is, but also its mission, what it can and should do. The role that God calls the family to perform in history derives from what the family is: its role represents the dynamic and existential development of what it is. Each family finds within itself a summons that cannot be ignored and that specifies both its dignity and responsibility: family, become what you are" (Familiaris Consortio, 17).

Of course, such an exhortation is paradoxical at first blush. As David Michael Thomas remarks concerning this papal principle, This pope is a complex blend of realism and idealism. The tension between the two is not relaxed for a minute (Pope John Paul II's Advice for Families, 7). And Cardinal Trujillo asks, how can something become what it is? (7) More specifically, how does a family become what it already is?

Donald Asci has some insight to share on this front. It is essentially a cart-and-horse dilemma. It is not always easy, in terms of action, to identify which is the horse that is pulling the cart. The family has a nature, and it is given this by God. However, it also has a mission, which is also given by God. These are two dimensions of the same reality: namely, the family (Asci, 126). The family has a static nature, but it also has a dynamic mission, which is to be realized. But the mission is never realized without an already extant family, which has the necessary nature to realize the mission. No family; no mission. However, part of the mission is the having, nurturing, and promulgating of good families. No fulfillment of mission; no families. It is a scenario of interrelation and reciprocation. Each gives rise to the other.

Ecclesia Domestica

A phrase that first appeared in recent times in the Second Vatican Council document Lumen Gentium with reference to the nature of the family was that of ecclesia domestica (the domestic church). As David Michael Thomas notes, the Council got this phrase from the writings of the Church fathers, and rightly so since from the very beginnings of the Church it has always been comprised of those who wished to convert together with all [their] household, as the official Catechism of the Catholic Church states on this matter (413). The metaphor to describe this in the Catechism is that the families of converts were as little islands of Christianity lived out in a pagan world. Leon Suprenant offers the biblical metaphor of the body of Christ (which is the Church, according to St. Paul) being comprised of the little cells of families. Furthermore, for those Catholics living in fidelity to the teachings of the Church and having children as the natural result of conjugal love, they have as their primary responsibility the education and formation of these children according to the Gospel of Christ (The 'Real Presence' of the Marriage Bond, 253). Surely, individual parishes in union with the Holy See of the Catholic Church contribute to the education and formation of children, but this is primarily to be done in the home - which is one of the qualities that make it the domestic church.

In continuity with all this, Pope John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio employs the phrase with some frequency and further elaboration. It is a result of parents begetting in love and for love that they procreate new offspring, for which they in turn take the responsibility of educating these new beings who stand in potential of great growth and development (FC, 36). It is their duty, but more to the point of love, it is their solemn privilege to be able to take the sacred product (i.e., their own child) of their mutual love for each other and see its development through to completion. In this way, the parents fulfill their own duty and honor to be the first evangelizers of their own children in teaching them of the love of Christ.

Concluding Thoughts

As was stated at the outset of this brief essay, the apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio is a document rich in depth and broad in the topics to which it extends its teaching. However, we have only tried here to give what seem to be some of the most important and widely commented on portions of the text. It certainly seems to have had a welcome reception by many of the most well-known contemporary Catholic writers on marriage and the family. It also appears to have filled a void that existed to some extent in the wake of Catholic teaching on conjugal love and marriage prior to the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. One can reasonably expect that future pontificates will continue to focus on the theology of the body so ably developed by Pope John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio.

Bibliography

Asci, Donald P. The Conjugal Act as a Personal Act: A Study of the Catholic Concept of

the Conjugal Act in the Light of Christian Anthropology. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2d ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997.

John Paul II, Pope. The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan. Boston,

Pauline Books and Media, 1997.

Familiaris Consortio. Vatican Translation. Boston: St. Paul Books, 1982.

Markey, Barbara. Cohabitation: Response over Reaction. The Priest, November, 2000,

19-24. Available online from Catholic Culture.

This encyclical in its entirety is contained within a work listed in our bibliography. The Theology of the Body, which is a compilation of various teachings of Pope John Paul II on marriage and conjugal love, has Humanae Vitae as its first appendix. The reader may freely find the encyclical here and many places elsewhere (including the Vatican's official website).

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