Never mind the F-word

Happiness is heart-warming but depends on the embrace of cold truths. Real bears aren’t cuddly. Beaches in the Bahamas are plagued by mosquitoes. Blind luck is a critical factor in our personal lives and careers. Gender reassignment surgery cannot make a woman out of a man… Ignore such truths and a million others like them and you’ll be in for gnawing disappointment.

(Mgr Mario Grech’s) idiosyncratic definition... is based on a Catholic understanding of marriage as permanent- Ranier Fsadni

This week, the Bishop of Gozo dished out a claim about the family as one such cold truth whose recognition is important for our welfare. Mgr Mario Grech said reason showed that real families are only those based on permanent marriage between a man and a woman aimed at cultivating mutual love and begetting and educating children.

So, is this really cold truth, a truth beyond the power of anyone, Church or state, to wish away? Is it true to claim that a family formed outside marriage is like rice wine, a wine in name only?

My take, in brief, isn’t just that Mgr Grech is evidently mistaken. Many people got there first. I also think that the consequences of any institution, Church as well as state, acting on his advice would be absurdity and irresponsibility.

Mgr Grech is right to say that he isn’t offering a Catholic definition of family: there is no such institutional definition and he has ignored the online Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry. His idiosyncratic definition, however, is based on a Catholic understanding of marriage as permanent.

Since marriage, for much of history in much of the world, has not been understood or practised that way, Mgr Grech is effectively saying that most human societies, from hunter-gatherers on, haven’t had real families. He’s also saying that Swedish couples, who typically marry after having one or two children, aren’t raising a real family until they say “I do” (if then) even if how they behave with their children and kin before and after the marriage is exactly the same.

If the state had to pay heed to Mgr Grech, could the Family Court be used to hear custody or maintenance cases involving civil unions? If yes, where’s the consistency? Or would we be reduced to the absurdity of calling it the Court of Family and Kin?

Would a priest, counselling a cohabiting couple with children, have to find circumlocutions when urging the virtues of family unity and sacrifice? If yes, and if it hinders the rhetorical and ethical force of his advice, how responsible is that?

It’s evident that Mgr Grech hasn’t thought things through even when one keeps in mind his real aim, which is to urge the state not to equate – in terms of rights and benefits – married couples with children with any other form of family. But, by eliminating most family forms from the category of “family”, he is actually undermining the rational basis of his aim.

There is a body of academic work that claims that marriage and engaged fatherhood are indispensable for the good not only of the child but also of society. One quote from a prominent work: “children develop best when they are provided with the opportunity to have warm, intimate, continuous and enduring relationships with both their fathers and their mothers”.

It’s not just Catholic literature or even exclusively socially conservative. Some of the works have been published by academically prestigious imprints like Harvard University Press. But none of this work – used by certain lobbies to urge states to invest money in marriage-promotion programmes – would be possible if the researchers hadn’t treated the diverse family forms that are part of the historical record (and they really are diverse) as representing real families that are comparable.

Only then could the marriage factor be interpreted as crucial. Only then could you have researchers appeal to the “millennial experience” of humanity. If a Harvard textbook (2002) had followed Mgr Grech’s definition of family it wouldn’t have been able to claim that “monogamous pair-bonding and nuclear families were dominant throughout human history in hunter-gatherer societies”. The ethnographic record is clear that “monogamy” here includes serial partners.

Nor would certain social scientists – secularists as well as religious conservatives – be able to describe the nuclear family, involving fathers as well as mothers in the raising of children, as practically rooted in the physiology of human beings. Nor, indeed, would they be able to argue for policies that mitigate the perceived disadvantages of certain family forms.

As it happens, this case for the timeless nuclear family, as well as the case for the social and family advantages of stable heterosexual marriage, are not as robust as the literature makes them out to be. For over 10 years, a counter-literature has made the case that it is shared childcare – by grandparents, kin and family friends as well as fathers – that’s crucial both in history and to present-day society.

The argument is not just academic. On it turns whether it is prudent or reckless to follow the example of George W. Bush and invest heavily in programmes that seek to teach people the skills of how to maintain a long-term monogamous relationship, instead of funding childcare programmes.

But if Mgr Grech wants to urge the government to follow President Bush, he has to ditch his definition of the family. None of the serious academic work he would want to cite uses it. If it did, it would rule its own evidence as inadmissible. No evidence, no case, no reason.

ranierfsadni@europe.com