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THE FAMILY
- Alongside the traditional family based on marriage, there are also
nowadays families based on free unions. At the same time, divorce or separation
are creating one-parent families, involving a variety of rearrangements,
each one different depending on the ideas of the people involved, the number,
and age, of the children on one side or the other, and the eventual arrival
of any children born of the new union.
In spite of these separations and manifold rearrangements, the family
continues to be a value in society. The crisis places at risk a traditional
type of family which dates from the 19th century and which constitutes our
point of reference. Such a family is characterized in particular by the
strict division of labour between the man and the woman, making the woman
dependent on her husband. One cannot make this into an absolute ideal. What
we are seeing today is not the end of the family, but the coming into being
of a plurality of families. "People continue to believe that the family
constitutes one of the ideal means of achieving happiness and fulfilment"
. The home continues to be the warm place of intimacy, unconditional love,
renewal and fulfilment. All the new types of family settings tend, with
more or less success, to realize this ideal. The crisis in the family is
not due to a rejection of all values, but rather to the emergence of new
and important values such as the strong demand for autonomy and liberty.
Not only has each person, whether man or woman, been fashioned by his or
her own particular social and family links; each one also aspires to create
an autonomous self. Each one is seeking freedom of action within a context
of social constraints. This is a value which must not only be respected
but also promoted as being a true human value. The advances in medicine,
with the power they give over life and, to a certain extent, over death,
have made it possible in some cases to escape from the inevitability of
fate and to live more responsibly. There has been a qualitative change in
the way people behave. The movement of peoples around the world, and the
use we make of time, which has both speeded up and been prolonged, imply
personal trajectories that have not been determined in advance and that
offer many more opportunities for much greater variety in people's lives,
or parts of their lives. At the same time, the values of adaptation and
creativity are being developed.
A couple's yearning for happiness and self-fulfillment in their union
is not to be decried in the name of a certain realism; it needs, rather,
to be deepened. A capacity for love is one of humanity's precious gifts.
Then, too, women's desire for greater equality in the marriage relationship
and for a fairer distribution of the household tasks, and the wish some
men have to escape from their social role outside the home are conducive
to the kind of partnership needed to construct the families of today. These
aspirations also put in question the all powerful economic value of work
to the exclusion of relational values. One can only respect the emergence
of these ideas and work to develop them. This respect goes hand in hand
with a willingness to trust human beings in their ability to discover new
solutions and to manage their lives responsibly.
Civil and religious institutions are perceived as being confining and
obstructive. If they really wish to place themselves at the service of the
necessary stability of couples and of families, both these institutions
must integrate and develop a conception of life as an on-going and evolutionary
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