In one of several talks this past week, during his visit to Argentina, Pope Leo XIV reminded his audience that the institution of the family occupies a more important place in society than any institution of civil government. According to Leo: “The family is the first natural society, with rights of its own. This means that the family precedes every written law. The law’s role is simply to recognize and protect it, while public institutions must support the family, not replace it.”
This, of course, is not a new position, and this basic position—that the family is a natural and primordial institution of human society—can be found in countless Church documents for centuries. Importantly, when this description of the family is employed, it is generally done to contrast the family with “the state” which is legitimate only when it respects the rights of the family.
For example, Leo comments closely follow those expressed by Pope Pius XI who, in his 1929 Encyclical Divini Illius Magistri, “On Christian Education.” Within that text, Pope Pius repeatedly maintains that the rights of families come before those of civil government. This largely stems from the fact that family members share obligations to each other that are nothing like the societal “obligations” between the civil government and its subjects. Contrary to many claims made by secular theorists over the centuries, the state is not just a family writ large. The real family of close —usually biological—bonds between a parent and children is in its own category quite separate from that of larger society. Consequently, Pius writes that the rights of the family:
therefore holds directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth.
That penultimate phrase is key: “a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State...” As with Leo, Pius recognizes that the family is natural to all societies, and not a peculiar invention of society like the state.
Pius takes this a step further to conclude that, since the family precedes the state in both time and importance, it would be absurd to conclude that children belong to the state. He continues:
On this point the common sense of mankind is in such complete accord, that they would be in open contradiction with it who dared maintain that the children belong to the State before they belong to the family, and that the State has an absolute right over their education. Untenable is the reason they adduce, namely that man is born a citizen and hence belongs primarily to the State, not bearing in mind that before being a citizen man must exist; and existence does not come from the State, but from the parents, as Leo XIII wisely declared: “The children are something of the father, and as it were an extension of the person of the father; and, to be perfectly accurate, they enter into and become part of civil society, not directly by themselves, but through the family in which they were born.” [emphasis added.]
The function therefore of the civil authority residing in the State is twofold, to protect and to foster, but by no means to absorb the family and the individual, or to substitute itself for them.
It is also worth noting that when the state threatens the family, it also threatens the individual. After all, the individual and his rights are also anterior to the state, and the natural place of any individual—as is shown in every society—within a family unit. This relationship between the individual and the family is further recognized in the 1982 Charter on the Rights of the Family:
The rights of the person, even though they are expressed as rights of the individual, have a fundamental social dimension which finds an innate and vital expression in the family;
To respect the rights of the family is the respect the rights of the individual.
As a final note, to avoid some confusion, it should also be said that within this context, the word “state” simply means “civil government” and does not presuppose the existence of a modern state, defined by a monopoly on the means of coercion. St Augustine, for example, used the word “state”—that is, its Latin equivalent—to mean what we now call “society.” For Augustine, “the state” was simply the community. Moreover, Aquinas uses the term “state” but given the context of his time and place, it would thoroughly anachronistic to assume that he is speaking of modern sovereign states. After all, the sovereign state as we no know it was exceedingly rare in the thirteenth century, and certainly was not considered normative by churchmen. Indeed, Aquinas rejects the idea of the sovereign state, and Aquinas’s model for civil government was most likely something approximating ancient Israel, governed by a confederation of family groups.
So, when Leo or Pius speak of “the state,” or the responsibilities and roles of the “the state,” it is wisest to interpret this in light of a historical use of the term as “polity” or community without assuming that the intervention of a sovereign state is necessary at all. In any case, the key takeaway is that the family is more foundational to a just society than any political regime.
