Archbishop speaks to the synod

What follows is the text of my intervention at the Synod of Bishops. Participants had the opportunity to offer a 3-minute statement that highlighted a feature of the Instrumentum laboris or working document. I hope that you will find these thoughts on the critically important role of the family as an instrument and agent of human solidarity helpful. The “IL” references refer to paragraphs of the working document. — Archbishop Cupich

Part One (nos 6-36) of the Instrumentum laboris (hereafter, IL) identifies the many pressures on family life and ways in which families are stretched in multiple directions. The family experiences alienation, a kind of strange drift in this world. This experience of alienation is a remarkable counterpoint to Paul’s description of Christian life in the church: “… you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household [oikeioi] of God…” (Eph. 2:19).

Traditionally, when the nuclear family experienced difficulties and challenges, it could rely on the extended family and find support there. In many, if not most, cultures today, that is not the case, as families move for employment opportunities and other economic reasons, or are forced to emigrate from their homelands and sometimes even forced to become refugees.

Without the context of the extended family, a single family finds itself reduced to a kind of atomistic existence. People then envision the family simply as an economic unit or as a solitary demographic category. And, those who do not fit into the traditional model of family, i.e., with the marriage of a man and woman who bring children into the world, a sense of exclusion develops and they are relegated to the margins.

In response, the church needs to re-envision the mission and purpose of marriage and family in the context of faith and the life of the church, i.e., the family as ecclesia domestica, a building block of human solidarity drawing on its communion with the larger church. The Catechism of the Catholic Church n. 1655 offers this vision: “The Church is nothing other than ‘the family of God.’ From the beginning, the core of the Church was often constituted by those who had become believers ‘together with all their household.’ [Acts 18:8] … These families who became believers were islands of Christian life in an unbelieving world.”

Families linked to the life of the church draw on that larger community — as once they did with their extended family — to become a building block of human solidarity. Then, families become schools of communion, places of belonging and connection, and life-giving communities, especially in the local parish.

These families, as instruments of human solidarity, are families in mission. This differs from the closed and introverted model of the contemporary nuclear families. Rather, they are open families, ready to receive, connect, and integrate others into their life. As such, those named in the IL as excluded — from widows to the divorced or separated to the disabled and elderly to those with homosexual tendencies [IL, 17- 27, 104, 130-131] — find a place in the household of God, the family of God.

Again, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 1658) and Familiaris consortio (n.85) describe a challenging ideal of the family-in-the-church exercising a mission of human solidarity in a world beset by alienation. This must also include the condition of single persons. “The doors of homes, the ‘domestic churches,’ and of the great family which is the church must be open to all of them. ‘No one is without a family in this world: the church is a home and family for everyone, especially those who ‘labor and are heavy laden.’”