Clearly the family, as a millenary institution, is suffering a process of deinstitutionalization, which is, moreover, present at many levels and affecting the most diverse institutions of today’s culture and civilization. The author describes this deinstitutionalization provoked by modernity with the characteristics that we see every day: the break with the traditions of daily life, pluralization of modes of entrance, transmission and exit with respect to family life, the rise of divorce, sentimental and affective reduction, violence against women and children that is essentially rooted in the different ways of conceiving and incarnating marriage. The author evokes: the traditional marriage, of alliance, fusion and reason. In the face of this lush and polymorphic landscape, legislation tends to regulate not for the common good, but for a subjective good and for private actors: “Legislation seems to be reducing the family to affection and sex by assimilating all forms of affection with the family, while ignoring that the family is essentially open to life” (p. 15). Precisely for this reason, its social importance is primordial. The effect, the social dimension of marriage and of the family must be highlighted and placed in the center of reflection, not only so that justice may be rendered in temporary situations—for example in the current economic crisis, which sees the family as the true center of solidarity and as a “security mattress” for many people—, but also because its fundamental identity is relational and, therefore, naturally translated in social areas.
The author continues by stating that a family based on marriage and open to life can adequately serve the society and the Church. In that sense, he asserts: “No human or cultural weakness is able to remove the human predisposition to love forever. The faithfulness between a man and a woman is not an anachronistic fixation proper to Christians but it is rather an ingredient of love” (p. 23). Conjugal love is facing some particularly great challenges today: the transformation of the light man; the ability to grasp the greatness of the mystery; the life of faith in daily life; the challenge of education and continuous formation of one’s own children; gratefulness for God’s immense help; the necessity of communion, etc. The marital union in love, which creates one body, attracts God’s intimacy: “Where the flesh is one, one is the Spirit” (Tertullian, Ad uxorem libri duo, II, IX: PL 1, 1415B-1417A). The family could be a cell and a church within the large Family, people, body and temple of God.
