A Great and Pernicious Error
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First, there was the anti-spanking bill. Now there is Senator Leland Yee’s bill to establish the “Comprehensive Pupil Learning Support System,” which, in trying to involve parents in the education of their children, would seem to supplant parental authority. And then there is the ever present threat of Child Protective Services taking one’s children for some perceived abuse (against which the parent has the burden of proof.)
More and more, it appears the state conceives of parental authority as an extension of its own power. Parents are becoming state-sanctioned guardians of their children whose upbringing is to be regulated by legislative fiat. Some call this phenomenon the “Nanny State,” but it is worse than that. A better term is Dorothy Day’s ironic one; the state is not a nanny, but a mother — “Holy Mother the State,” as Dorothy put it.
Though more pronounced today, the state as mother is not a new phenomenon. Is his From Cottage to Work Station, sociologist Allan Carlson noted how in 1839 the Pennsylvania supreme court reinterpreted an ancient concept of English chancery law, called parens patriae, to justify a state law that removed, as Carlson put it, “so-called neglected or delinquent children from parents” and placed them “in institutions to ‘prevent’ them from entering a life of crime.” Parens patriae originally meant that the state had the right to care for orphans; but in its decision, the Pennsylvania supreme court made the term mean that the state could remove parental rights when it deemed the natural parents “unequal to the task of education or unworthy of it,” in the court’s words.
Parens patriae means “parenthood of the state” — not too far from “Holy Mother the State.” One hears the echo of the concept in court cases involving children, where it is the court, no one else, that decides what is in “the best interests of the child.” The state, and the state alone, becomes the arbiter of child welfare, and the rights of parents become merely an appendage of state authority, revocable whenever the governing authorities see fit.
Though often called statism, this at root is nothing but rank individualism. Our modern theory of the state is derived from a vision that conceives of human society as basically only a collection of individuals. It has things called families and other associations, to be sure, but these are no more natural or any less artificial than the state itself. Finally, all lower associations are mutable, for the only natural reality is the individual. What’s more, being mutable, the family may take on new forms according to individual whim and, most importantly, by the recognition of the state.
In seeking to fight state intrusion, defenders of the family have no stronger ally than the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church. For the Church teaches that the family is not a chance association of individuals, culturally determined and, therefore, subject to legal manipulation, but a natural society with its own rights and duties.
And the family possesses these rights and duties apart from the state. In the encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII said a family, “no less than a State, is ... a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father.” As long as the family operates in accord with the common good of society, said Leo, it “has at least equal rights with the State in the choice and pursuit of the things needful to its preservation and its just liberty.”
The family or “domestic household,” moreover, Leo said, since it “is antecedent, as well in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into a community ... must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community, and founded more immediately in nature.” The rights of the family derive from its duties, which include the education of children. From this duty comes the right to determine the content and the means of a child’s education — a right the modern and post-modern state continually seeks to assume.
Pope Leo roundly condemned the notion “that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household.” He called it “a great and pernicious error.” Leo, however, did not mean that state has no role in the family; for instance, he said, “if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth.” He also allowed state intervention in the household if “there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights”; in such cases, “public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due.”
But in intervening in the household, the pope warned, “the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop.” And Leo continued, making his own the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, “paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. ‘The child belongs to the father,’ and is, as it were, the continuation of the father's personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that ‘the child belongs to the father’ it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, ‘before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents.’”
Basically, Leo’s point was that the family has its proper sovereignty, which the state must respect. In fact, the state relates to the child, not directly, but through the father; the state has no direct authority over a child living in a family. The pope even uses the striking statement, “the child belongs to the father,” which Aquinas used to argue that no one could justly baptize a Jewish child against his parents’ will. Since the family pre-exists the state, parental authority is not derived from the state nor may it be abrogated by the state. Nor may the ruler sit as judge over the father. A father’s authority is his own. It does not belong to the state.
It's not hard to imagine what Pope Leo would have said about the authority-consuming tendencies of our modern state. He certainly would not call it “holy” nor “motherly.” As for a state that ignores family sovereignty, Leo's 1891 encyclical already passed judgment on it. “If the citizens,” he said, “if the families on entering into association and fellowship, were to experience hindrance in a commonwealth instead of help, and were to find their rights attacked instead of being upheld, society would rightly be an object of detestation rather than of desire.”
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