Destruction of the Family
The relationship between natural realities and their supernatural origin and destiny is one of the most appropriate subjects of our times. Specifically, the Marxist ideological attack on the family is not understood unless one has first thought about this profound reality, that is, the family’s relationship to divine parenthood. In his “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx writes that if the origin of the celestial family is nothing more than the human earthly family itself, then the latter is the one that must be destroyed. The case of the family is nothing more than an example, since the global Marxist ideal is to destroy, deny, or stir up a revolution as is preferably said against all human reality that has any analogy with some divine reality.
Although the family is also threatened by the distortion of relationships between parents and children, the most essential attack is dealt in the same proportion as the destruction of the matrimonial structure. Since the nucleus of the family is found in matrimony, the attack against it not only affects relations between spouses, but it is also intentionally orientated toward the destruction of the parent-child relationship. This is in accordance with the definition of matrimony as an inseparable union between a man and a woman for the procreation and education of children. In fact, in the well-known work by Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the family is not mentioned except as the result of a certain concept of matrimony. According to Engels, it is sufficient to modify the concept of matrimony for the family as we know it to cease to exist.
The Marxist attack strictly consists in considering man as a sexual animal at the same time as a monopolizer of wealth. On the other hand, contradictions are abundant because of its intended foundation on a “primitivism” where monogamy would disappear and from its collusion with women’s liberation through their insertion in large modern factories. In general, an intimate relationship can be seen nowadays between the Marxist revolution and the feminist movements that deny the traditional meaning of the family. The latter could hardly operate in our society if they did not have the support of political parties along Marxist lines. Our topic therefore requires consideration of the meaning of indissoluble marriage as the basis and nucleus of the family. In other lectures in this series we have already heard several arguments for the indissolubility of matrimony. I would only like to add a basic sociological thought: no contracting party would accept any restrictions to the marriage union during a religious or even simply a civil marriage. Any act conducted under such conditions would be grotesque and would make the entire ceremony useless. Moreover, no legislation lists the same, certainly quite variable, causes as restrictions to the marriage union, which could later serve as arguments for divorce. The profound reason for this is that stating these supposed reasons for dissolving the marriage would denaturalize the marriage act itself. Then, instead of the right to divorce, what would actually take place would be illegitimate unions since through such a ceremony there would be no marriage in a strict sense. There is a radical hiatus between marriage and divorce. If the causes for divorce were included, as they should be in a fully logical legal act, explicitly mentioning the conditions under which the marriage is celebrated, the latter would be denatured ipso facto, not only theoretically but would also be impossible practically. No contracting party would tolerate his spouse saying at that moment what the law gives the right to invoke later. With divorce, one thing is the law and another, reality.
Ordering the marriage union to the procreation of children, which makes us participants in the same creative gift as God, requires matrimony to be indissoluble. It is obvious, and no one can deny it, that the inseparable union of matrimony is the only basis of the family. Moreover, the indissoluble union between spouses is the basis for parents’ concern, commitment, and dedication to their children. To renounce indissoluble marriage is to doubt paternal responsibility. There is a mutual agreement between natural generation and spiritual education. The parent-child relationship is guaranteed in theory and in practice by the permanent marriage union.
Marriage does not consist of establishing a voluntary relationship fixed by the spouses, because then we would not know what marriage is, since its nature would depend on the will of the contracting parties in each case. It could be an economic, social, political, cultural or simply hedonistic, etc., marriage. Marriage could not be spoken of as such. All the favorable or unfavorable aspects that come together in marriage influence it as mere accidents and do not form a part of its essential definition. The nucleus is a mutual, total donation without restrictions with regard to children. And so, just as procreation is not the fruit of art or technology, but of nature, so too education is not the fruit of suitability but of parenthood. Simply by being a parent one has the right to educate, and this parenthood is the result of fidelity.
Marxism, as we have stated, denies that monogamy is the natural family institution, yet must recognize that the only possible marriage for the future is monogamous matrimony. According to Engels, what should disappear from marriage is “indissolubility” and “the preponderance of the man.” But monogamy without indissolubility and the primacy of man is simply words. Without indissolubility, de facto polygamy is obviously confirmed; and without the primacy of the man, denial of the principle of matrimonial stability is intended, for there cannot be two principles of union in any society. Moreover, the latter is so evident that Engels himself upholds that the “liberation” of women will bring about the disappearance of the family. This will happen if women devote themselves to socially productive work and abandon domestic jobs. “The emancipation of women demands, as a primary condition, the entire feminine sex to turn to public industry. And this condition simultaneously requires the individual family to be suppressed as an economic unit of society.”
“When the individual family is no longer the economic unit of society,” writes Engels, “the custody and education of children becomes a public matter.”
If the primacy of the man, that primacy St. Paul expresses in a language that cannot be distorted in any way, is like the formal cause of the family; the “woman being at home” is like its material cause. That is why Marxism insists that women should be inserted in productive factory work and abandon domestic work and caring for the children, who would be taken care of by the State. Marxism is interested in presenting Christian marriage, indissoluble marriage, as “the first oppression of classes” where consequently “the man is the bourgeois in the family and the woman represents the proletariat.” Note that this criticism does not fall on a determined historical manner of understanding the preponderance of the man, but rather on the very factor of indissoluble marriage and even of monogamy.
The crass materialism from which the Marxist view of matrimony stems is very adequately revealed in a fragment of the above-quoted work by Engels which is good to review:
Neither an extraordinary experience nor elevated knowledge of matrimony is necessary to realize that this theory cannot be sustained under any aspect. But the Marxist idea continues today as it did in 1884 when the work we are commenting was published: The family is based on oppression which simultaneously has its justification in the accumulation of wealth. Consequently, the only possible liberation of women is by transforming the way they relate to their surroundings, or more technically, by terminating the current division of labor. Note then that the one who substantially changes activity is precisely the woman. The disappearance of the family takes place exactly when the woman reports for productive work “in the great modern industry” to use the words of Engels himself.
When reflecting on the Marxist thesis, we realize that the family is a natural reality based on a natural relationship and that the fastest way to destroy a family is to replace the idea of a domestic economy with that of social production. Economy, the administration of domestic wealth, is replaced by production, the manufacture of products for social exchange. Domestic work is the basic task of marriage. That is why Engels says that equality of condition with men will be impossible “as long as women remain excluded from productive work and confined within private domestic work.” Note that if “domestic” is the opposite of “social,” the adjective “private” should be the opposite of “productive.” But evidently it is not. What is really contrary to production, in the final analysis, is contemplation. And in the sphere of action, since it deals with work in both cases, the opposite of production is planning, distribution, administration, whatever is strictly called economy. Marxism is basically against such economy.
Marriage, which has the purpose of the procreation and education of children, is an economic unit but not a productive one. Within it, several of its members can carry out productive work, but there can be only one economy, one administration of this wealth. This administration is what confers material unity to the family and what expresses the more spiritual job of training children in human terms.
Harmony between the different temperament of the man and the woman in confronting work finds its natural fulfillment in marriage and in the family. But instead of recognizing that the family is a natural reality based on the different natural temperament of the different sexes, Marxism argues that the woman should conquer her “true being” through insertion in a determined productive social means: public enterprise. The attack against the family, the destruction of this social cell is necessary to create a new type of woman. Current conditions in our productive society facilitate and actually make the Marxist idea possible. The real family, the only possible, existing one is a continuous refutation of Marxism by its very presence. Therefore, its destruction is an irreplaceable project, especially in the current Euro-communist strategy to conquer political power by dominating society.
We must think in depth about the idea expressed by Marx in his fourth Thesis on Feuerbach. The natural order is not indifferent to the divine order, but rather participates in it. The greatness of the human being born in the heart of a family could not be compared to anything other than the very creative act of God. Therefore, the ultimate denial of all supernatural reality requires the denial of whatever participates in the divinity, as the primacy of the man does in our concrete case over the woman in matrimony, the indissolubility of this union, and the primordial dedication of the woman to the care of the children and domestic tasks. But all these realities that Marxism wants to destroy do not belong to a determined image of the family, but to the family itself as such, the only possible and only existing one. For the same reason, the values on which a family is based do not belong to a certain age or to the domination of a certain ideology or economic situation. Rather, they are based on the reality of the mission the family must fulfill. The greatness of procreation and education must be the viewpoints that lay the foundation of the requisites for marriage and the family. And these fundamental requisites are not at the mercy of any human individual or collective event.
The modern consumer society can create the most ideal material conditions for the practical destruction of the family in many different ways. But Marxism, with its fundamental idea of the transformation of reality, is the one that knows how to take advantage of these circumstances to promote the breakup of the family by presenting indissolubility as a bourgeois prejudice incompatible with women’s liberation. And Marxism is the only one that will benefit from all the sophisticated literature directed toward “overcoming” the age of the husband’s preponderance over the wife. Finally, Marxism will also be what manages to incorporate women into revolutionary tasks by taking advantage of and exploiting the shallowness that disparages and ridicules the value of domestic work nowadays.
To define as tension what is harmony and to present as equal what was first called contradictory, is the typical way the Marxist dialectic works. Applying this pernicious mechanism of seduction to the family offers these characteristics: the family, based on monogamous marriage, is an exploitation of the wife by the man. At the same time, the division of labor confirms the priority of the male by reducing the woman to domestic tasks that produce no wealth. The reality to be conquered by Marxism is simply the destruction of this concept of family by denying the indissolubility of matrimony and affirming the obligatory nature of leading women toward productive social work. Engels not only does not hide that these two suppositions are to destroy the family, but he also explicitly affirms it. There is no new model for the family, but rather its simple disappearance because the State takes over the support as well as the education of the children. The family loses its reason for existence and is not maintained except in the proportion in which humans cannot be manufactured, but must still be engendered. But the family has no other responsibility beyond this function.
In general, to conclude, we must consider that behind certain apparently progressive formulas there are doctrinal formulas that have existed for many years now and that fulfill radically opposed proposals and totally inverted ends to everything that upholds our concept of the family. The family is a traditional reality, we tend to say, but that does not mean that the foundation of its make-up is merely the result of human experience, which could be surpassed by the development of humanity itself. The foundation of the family, on the contrary, is transcendent and has no other mirror for seeing itself than the creative and provident divinity. And it even receives new illumination by contemplating the natural and supernatural reality of the Holy Family of Nazareth, and especially the role of Mary, wife and mother, model for all women of fidelity, contemplation, and daily domestic work.
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