Thinking ahead to session 3 (Wednesday 8 Oct)

As I mentioned last week, in  many ways the individual was the wrong place to start our account of Catholic social teaching: unlike modern (non-Catholic) social contact theories which tend to portray the formation of the state as a matter of individuals coming together to form a state by agreement, Catholic approaches tend to regard the household as the building block of society.

So one of the things I suspect we'll be talking about this Wednesday is why Catholic social teaching starts off with this emphasis (and is it right to do so?). Another important question is what do we mean by a family or household? We've just been through the question of legislation about same sex marriage in which there was clear, official Catholic opposition to the proposal in Scotland. In part, this opposition was based on the idea that the man/woman/children unit was natural and thus not something the state should interfere in. (This raises the question of subsidiarity: what is the power of the state over entities within its territory? Should power be retained (not devolved) to 'lower level' institutions such as the family?) But it also raised the question of the makeup of that household unit: even if Catholic social teaching was right about its importance in society, is there one model of the household, and, in particular, does that model have to be based on a female/male couple in a lifelong commitment? (And if it does, how does that model reflect the reality that such a unit is increasingly uncommon?) To deal with such questions, we're going to have to address traditional Catholic claims about the procreative and educative function of the household, together with the issue of the role of differences between the sexes in human flourishing.

Key questions to have a think about:

a) How important is the family to society?
b) What is a family? Is there any restriction to its shape? (And if so, why?)

Reading:

You could try St John Paul II's Familiaris consortio (link here) but it's long and densely written. Short excerpts from relevant teaching documents on the family can be found here.
Chapter 5 of the Compendium of Social Doctrine on the Family can be found here.