Prof. Francesco Belletti, President of the Italian Forum of Family Associations, and his wife, Gabriella, have commented on the Preamble.

 

«Before introducing the list of rights to be guaranteed to the family, the Charter of the Rights of the Family, in its Preamble, traces a detailed path of qualifying standards of the idea of family, by explaining a number of qualities and criteria that characterize this irreplaceable social place. They are founding “premises” and indispensable for the materialization of the requests that follow, and they are intended to eliminate any definitional relativism. Today, after thirty years of history, it is even a more urgent need to renew the precision of the meaning of the word family, to defend the “genome,” because “today around the family and life, the basic struggle of man’s dignity is being fought,” as Pope John Paul II said in Rio de Janeiro on October 3rd, 1997, at the II World Meeting of Families.

This is why the Preamble recalls that “the family is based on marriage, that intimate union of life in complementarity between a man and a woman which is constituted in the freely contracted and publicly expressed indissoluble bond of matrimony and is open to the transmission of life.” Now, it is comforting to note that these aspects are in deep harmony with the definition that the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss placed in the heart of his essay on the family in: Razza e storia e altri studi di antropologia [Race and History and other studies of anthropology] (1952), which Cardinal Ravasi recalled in his speech at the recent VII World Meeting of Families in Milan, in 2012: “The family as a more or less durable, socially approved union of a man, a woman and their children... it is a universal phenomenon, found in all societies of every type.”

The family is therefore a totally natural, deeply human value; one would almost say a “lay” value, if that word was not too often tarnished as synonymous with “secular,” or worse, anti-religious. For this reason, the Preamble also reaffirms that “the family, a natural society, exists prior to the State or any other community, and possesses inherent rights which are inalienable... constitutes, much more than a mere juridical, social and economic unit, a community of love and solidarity... where different generations come together and help one another to grow in human wisdom.”

  

The family, a “community of love and solidarity” (this is a beautiful definition, in its essential brevity), is therefore a natural antidote to the individualism and the selfishness that threaten to carry away contemporary man: it is, indeed, both a relational good in itself, as a place where socially relevant relational goods are generated, and hence constitutes itself as a place in which social capital, public responsibility, creativity and fertility are generated. Precisely because of its essentially relational and free nature, the family is particularly attacked and often reeling under the blows of the individualistic hedonism and relativism that are becoming increasingly widespread in common feeling, also in our Country. Consequently, those who argue that the family is an old or outdated social model are wrong; on the contrary, the public pact of love and solidarity between a man and a woman is the very topical and irreplaceable support of every human society, to which not the past but the future of society as a whole is entrusted.

 

If the family is, then—as the Preamble also states—this “society, [then] especially the state and international organizations must protect the family through measures of a political, economic, social and legal character.” The Preamble therefore represents a major challenge to the responsibility, both for the institutions and for every family: the institutions must recognize the family’s full ownership right, and respect its autonomy and subjectivity; families are responsible for putting their talents to good use».