San Giovanni Square VATICAN - WORDS OF DOCTRINE - 'Family Day', alias Dies Familiae,
Rev Nicola Bux and Rev Salvatore Vitiello -
Vatican City (Fides Service) - In just over forty eight hours there has been convoked in Rome a 'Family Day': expression chosen by Italian lay Catholics backed by the Bishops' Conference and no few non-denominational associations which nevertheless recognise themselves in the convocation's identity. But how did we come to this? How did we come to the point where we must organise a demonstration to defend and promote an identity which, before any religious belief or political opinion, is society's most natural identity: the Family?
The path, although its manifestation may appear swift and hasty has deep roots. They lie in that “dictatorship of relativism”, of Ratzingerian memory, which characterises our epoch and mainly the West.
In fact relativism cannot tolerate the existence of universally shared objective truths and consequently, tends progressively to annul all differences, including indispensable ones such as sexual differences. This is why relativism can be considered the “cause” of the unacceptable proposal to invent “new style families” juridically equal and to the Family and allegedly similar to it.
In the meantime we have all experienced that the Family is a real fact, the place of realism par excellence: the human, affective, educative and spiritual environment in which the individual learns necessarily to face reality, alterity, differences, entering in this way that dynamic choice between good and evil, true and false, which will mark his or her entire life.
Prospective, that of realism, at the antipodes of relativism and by the latter abhorred: it is impossible for relativists to affirm whether a thing is good or evil, and even less if it is true or false.
The attack on the Family, then, is not simply defending presumed non existent rights of recognition in the ambit of public law, of questions easily regulated by private law. Behind, there is much more.
To attack the Family, with the consequent proposal of a “weak family” (because weakly involved in the public forum), is aggression on the ultimate, perhaps only place left where we learn to be realists. The goal of cultural relativism is to remove all curbs from one's personal "dictatorship" and the greatest curb, impregnable because real, is the Family. In this sense the relationship between relativism and the attack on the Family is also of the final order.
However the relativist cultural set up, besides contradictory in itself, reveals all its “non liveability” and existential "suffocation": it is impossible to live without ever distinguishing between good and evil, true and false. The human heart, created for all that is good, true, beautiful, will know how to react to this new dictatorship rediscovering spaces of freedom and certainty. We are for reality, for the Family, for this Family Day which we would rather call Dies Familiae. (Agenzia Fides 10/5/2007; righe 36, parole 466)
