Holy Father,
The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences has devoted its Plenary Session to the major theme of the Family as a relational good. The challenge of love, fully accepting the heartfelt invitation contained in your 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
Virgil’s famous verse “Rari nantes in gurgite vasto” (lone swimmers in the vast sea) portrays the condition of the family in today’s society very well. The edifice of the family has not been destroyed; it has been deconstructed, taken apart piece by piece. We still have all the pieces, but the building is no longer there. All the categories that make up the family institution and define its genome continue to exist. That is, the relationship between two relationships: the relationship of reciprocity (conjugality) and the intergenerational relationship (parenting). However, these categories no longer have a univocal meaning, rendering the discourse on the family incomprehensible.
One of the goals of this Plenary is to understand how this deconstruction has come about. Nevertheless, there is certainly the influence of the Platonic and Neoplatonic vision of man, which ended up taking precedence over that of Aquinas. The most disturbing consequence of this deconstruction is the reduction of the family to a private emotion, without much public relevance. Yet the family is not a private matter, as it is very clearly explained in Amoris Laetitia, because it has to do with the common good of the human consortium and not with its total good.
This Plenary Session also aims to highlight the most serious problems for family ontology that arise from the vast diffusion of the cultural condition conveyed by the transhumanist project, whose ambition is both to merge man with machine to amplify his potential and, above all, to show that consciousness is not an exclusively human characteristic. Transhumanism is the apology for a human body and brain “augmented” by artificial intelligence, the use of which would allow a separation between mind and body, so the mind, in order to function, would not need to have a body. “Playing God” in this way hides a desire to take over the reins of evolution.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Since it is a question of deconstruction of the family, it is possible, if desired, to plan its reconstruction. Upon one condition: not falling into the trap of catastrophism and so-called catacomb thinking. It is unreasonable to think that today’s crisis can be overcome by returning to past family models, which confuse a particular form of being a family with family (and marriage) as such.
We must always remember that the family is not a self-sufficient cell. It never was, but today this is even more evident. The family only exists within an ecosystem that recognizes it as a subject endowed with its own agency and not as a mere object of public or private benevolence. Consequently, there is a need, first of all, to move from policies for the family to policies of the family, fully recovering the principle of subsidiarity. Secondly, there is the need to move from gender manistreaming to family mainstreaming in the design of a new institutional architecture.
As stated in Amoris Laetitia, the family is in harmony, it is a happy place, when gender diversity becomes an opportunity for mutual enrichment and not a justification for discrimination. Therefore, announcing the family as a relational good, that is, as a community of life centered on gift, reciprocity, generativity, and sexuality is the ultimate goal of this Plenary. As a seminarium civitatis, we must never forget that the family’s mission is also to make the State more civitas and less polis. And since civitas generates civilitas, we understand why today, more than ever, there is a great need for the family, a family which must always strive to cultivate the virtue of aspiration, without resigning itself to enduring passing difficulties and uncertainties.
And now, Holy Father, we are ready to welcome your word with open minds and grateful hearts.