Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    1/11

    Thursday, July 31, 2014

    Revolution in the Home: The Marxist Theory of the

    Family Featured

    Written by Dr. John Senior (RIP)Whose Side Is This Guy Really On?

    Introduction

    by Michael J. Matt

    The following article was published in The Remnant back in 1987. It was written by the late,

    great Dr. John Senior, and it is so excellent that I fear I lack the necessary skills to sum it upwith due justice in a few words. It is long, very longso, alas, I suppose most bloggers andtweeters working diligently in the cyber vineyard will likely not bother with it -- the days of thethoughtful, well-developed article having long since passed in order to make room for the videoclip, the meme and the one-sentence paragraph.

    The article is so inherently Catholic, however, that it makes one wonder: What has happenedto us?We spend our days and nights on the Internet rummaging through the ruins ofChristendom in a cyberspace filled to capacity with sound bites and pointless proofs oflingering consciousness around the globe, but we never really seem to get anywhere. The

    most valiant among us make Quixotic attempts to combat the ubiquitous effects of social andspiritual revolution in our world and Church, but even we are too overwhelmed bydisinformation and apathy to confront the actual causes anymore. We expend almost all of ourenergies combatting the heinous crime of abortion as if that were the fundamental cause of allthat's gone wrong in the world. But is it? Abortion is much less of a cause than an effect, anduntil we can learn to target the root causes of such evils I wonder if we will ever really eradicateany of them.

    We respond, react and reply as best we can while continuing to lose huge tracks of ground tothe very worst enemies of Christ, even as the vast majority of our own co-religionists, jadedand confused, begin to resemble the brainwashed and benighted citizens of Oceania describedso prophetically by George Orwell.

    Its not our fault, really. After all, weve been systematically dumbed down from kindergartenon; our attention spans are being fried a bit more every day by the puppeteers of Google andYouTube and Facebook and all the rest. Were growing addicted to little blinking lights, thumbsup and down symbols, smiley faces, view counts, selfies, email, tweets and retweets. Andthen there are all those thousands of friends we have collected along the waylike bonuspoints in a video game. Were oblivious to the fact that weve become increasingly isolated,alone, and unaware of our surroundings, our actual friends, even our own children. Lulled to

    http://remnantnewspaper.com/web/media/k2/items/cache/c5c0a28a3994ca1491828123987c79bf_XL.jpg
  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    2/11

    sleep by a virtual reality animated by pixels, moving lights and ruthless marketeers, we arebecoming just like the song sayscomfortably numb.

    The men who pioneered the traditional Catholic movement fifty years ago were among the

    last generation that was still awake, which is abundantly obvious in their writings. From theirgraves, then, they have so much to say that could wake us up even still-- if we canonly remember how to read. They jotted post-it notes that were more useful to the commongood than most of what passes for excellence on the blogosphere these days. They forgotmore about living the Catholic life than most of us will ever know.

    Read the following article by John Senioryes, all 6,000 words of it. It can remove blindfolds,and even help solve the mystery of what has happened to our families, our Church and theworld in which we live. And then it provides a roadmap for how to get out of this nightmare.Question is: Can you handle the "criminally" politically-incorrect truth? If so, read on MJM

    Revolution in the Home

    The Communist Manifesto had two co-authors; later on in the division of labor between them,Karl Marx developed the economics of Communism, especially in Das Kapital, while FredrickEngels developed the cultural and philosophical side. The principal Marxist work therefore on atheory of the family is not by Marx, but by Engels; it is The Origin of the Family, PrivateProperty, and the State.

    This book, written about a hundred years ago, in 1884, turns out to be a blueprint for the stateof things today. Engels posits Darwin's evolutionary descent of man from apes, but not asliving naturally in families. On the basis of a book by Louis Morgan, a 19th century Americananthropologist who lived among the Iroquois Indians, he believed that man lived first andnaturally not in families but herds. One can see the importance of an idea such as this toCommunist theory, because it grounds mankind by nature as a communistic species, livingwithout private property or monogamous marriage. Primitive man, he says, lived by foodgathering rather than food production, moving from place to place according to need,propagating indiscriminately, even including incest. Women ruled the domestic economy of thetent or cave, while men marauded, hunted and fished. In such a society government wasmatriarchal, that is, women ruled because since no one knew his father, rights and privilegescould only be established through the female line, by mother-right as it is called, even down tothe succession of chiefs and kings. But, he says, when mankind first turned from foodgathering to food production, that is from hunting and fishing to the domestication of animalsthe cultivation of fields, the human herd became the patriarchal tribe. The men establishedfarms, and had to know their sons in order to secure their inheritance. This was the first of theworld's great revolutions, according to Engels.

    The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex.

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    3/11

    He continues: in order to establish patriarchal right, a kind of temporary marriage was struck forthe first time, lasting about a year so that a man could at least be sure who a particular child'sfather was. Engels calls this "pairing-marriage", following the anthropologists of his day, andsuch relationships indeed exist in primitive societies throughout the world. And, as weknow, they are recurring again today in civilized ones under the cover of multiple marriagesand divorce.

    The second revolution issued in the bourgeois or the capitalist state. Where a more intensecultivation of animals and fields results in surplus, farming turns from sustenance to profit. In aword, we no longer have food gathering or food production, but commodity production, that is,for profit; and therefore personal private property, with certain boundaries, deeds, money, etc.;where a father's children must be known exactly and permanently and when, worst of all, saysEngels, women become commodities themselves, the private property of their husbands with alifelong lease that we call monogamous marriage.

    The third and last revolution, yet to come, will result in a return to communism. When profitproduction reaches the monopoly stage, and the State which was called into existence toprotect private property in the first place, achieves such power that it effectively ownseverything; the conditions of the herd on a higher level, the industrial level, but still theconditions of the herdrecur.

    Today, Engels says, writing now a hundred years ago

    We are at that stage where then economic division of society between owners andworkers, bourgeois and proletariat, is reflected in the relations between men andwomen.

    If you want to destroy private property, he says, and advance history to its natural communisticstate, you must exterminate the family, which is its nucleus, and liberate women from theslavery of households, and from marriage bond and bed.

    Those who think that the fight against communism is a political or military affair, are wrong;reading of this book will cause them alarm. The barricades in kitchens and in bedrooms are farmore dangerous than those in jungles or in city streets.

    Here are Engels' words:

    In the great majority of cases today (again he wrote this a hundred years ago), atleast in the possessing classes, the husband is obliged to earn a living and supporthis family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy without any need forspecial legal ties and privileges. Within the family, he is the bourgeois, and the wiferepresents the proletariat. The peculiar character of the supremacy of the husbandover the wife in a modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality

    between them, and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day whenboth possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the firstcondition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back intopublic industry, and that this in turn demands that the characteristic of themonogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished.

    Well, you have to give him credit; that is very plain and clear. To achieve the next and finalevolutionary stage of human society, he says we need a revolution in the home. Women haveto go to work on equal terms with men, in every kind of industry and the professions; and withher exile from her natural place the family simply self-destructs. You may not learn a lot about

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    4/11

    the origin of the family in Engel's book, but anyone can learn about the origin of the women'sliberation movement.

    Listen to what he predicts:

    With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership the single

    family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping istransformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomesa public affair. Society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate ornot. This removes all the anxiety about the consequences. (He means pregnancy!)which today is the most essential factor that prevents a girl from giving herselfcompletely to the man she loves. (He means any number of men she wants!)

    We shall see in a minute what he means by love, but to continue:

    Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexualrelations, and with that a more tolerant public opinion in regards to a maiden'shonor and a woman's shame? What will certainly disappear are all the featuresstamped upon marriage through its origin in property relations. These are, in the

    first place, the supremacy of the man, and secondly the indissolubility of marriage.The supremacy of the man in marriage is a simple consequence of his economicsupremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear of itself. Today it isalready broken through at a thousand points. If only the marriage based on love ismoral, then also only the marriage is moral in which love continues. But the intenseemotion of individual love varies very much in duration from one individual toanother, especially among men; and if affection comes to an end or is supplantedby a new passionate love, then separation is a benefit for both partners as well asfor society. Only people will then be spared having to wade through the uselessmire of a divorce case.

    So you see what he means by love, and the new communist marriage based upon it; he meansconcupiscence, having no idea of married love at all.

    But, one last word from him:

    What can we now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will beordered after the overthrow of capitalist production? That is mainly of a negativecharacter, limited for the most part to what will disappear, but what will there benew? That will be answered only when a new generation of men who never in theirlives have known what it is to buy a woman's surrender with money or any othersocial instrument of power, a generation of women who have never known what itis to give themselves to a man for any other consideration than real love(Remember what he means by love!) or refuse to give themselves to their lover forfear of economic consequences (Remember that he means the fear of havingchildren) - - when these people are in the world, when this new generation is in theworld, they will care precious little what anybody thinks they ought to do. They willmake their own practice and corresponding public opinion about the practice, andthat will be the end of it.

    The end of it indeed! He prophesied this a hundred years ago, and they are here. I mean insidethe home itself, where according to the doctrine of the class struggle between the proletariatand the bourgeois, a wife is set against her husband. So whatever may happen to the politicalorder, Christendom is killed from within. There has never been a war like this in history. We lostthe War in Vietnam not only in the jungles and the universities with the demonstrations and all

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    5/11

    that, but quietly in the family, which had weakened to the point where a whole generation wasdestroyed. How can you win a war abroad if you lose it in the home? The foundation ofcivilization is the marriage bed and that is where the battle has now been pitched, right now,exactly as Engels predicted.

    The first step in the process had already begun in Engels' day with the suffragette movement,

    which broke the unity of families and weakened the position of men as heads of households bygiving women separate votes, converting the discourse between husband and wife fromconversation to debate, preparing the way for what has happened in our time when womenhave entered what Engels called the socially productive workforce, competing for jobs againstmen, and driving the price of labor down so low it takes them both to meet the family budget. Ahouse divided against itself cannot stand, and everywhere around us now the primary relationof love, strong as death, stronger than the ties of blood, has turned back again through thestages he described, to pairing marriage, and for some even to the herd.

    Quousque irruitis in hominem? How long do you rush in upon man, as if you werethrusting down a leaning wall, and a tottering fence?

    St. Robert Bellarmine says of these verses from Psalm 61, the first at Thursday Matins:

    The Psalmist here turns to deplore the dreadful ruin of souls by the evil spiritsthrough the agency of the various concupiscences. In truth nobody can calculatethe numbers brought to ruin by the evil spirits through the agency of avarice,ambition, lust, anger, envy, and such evil passions. Full of indignation thereforeagainst the evil spirits he exclaims: "How long do you rush in upon a man as if hewere a leaning wall and a tottering fence, making war upon our poor fallen humannature so weak and corrupt that it may aptly be compared to a tumbling wall or arotten fence.

    In the famous poem by Robert Frost, as you may remember, the old New England farmer saysgood fences make good neighbors. Husbands and wives are the closest neighbors that there

    are, closer even than parents and children, because a man must leave father and mother andcleave to his wife, and the two become one flesh, but always with that happy fence between us,that one is man the other woman. As another farmer said, looking at the weeds in his cornfield:"An enemy has done this!"

    Now, the origin of the family, private property, and the state is God; and the authors of their ruinaren't really Marx and Engels, who are instruments, but the evil spirits rushing in as upon aleaning wall and a tottering fence.

    The word "lady", in the old Germanic English, meant "maker of bread." And it isn't any accidentthat Bethlehem in Hebrew means "house of bread." A totalitarian attack is launched against theladies of the world. What do you think, seriously, about the change from Mrs. to Ms., theextermination of the suffix " - man" in words like "fireman" and the like, the roles of men andwomen equalized and even reversed in novels, movies, TV shows, and songs, in fashiondesign, in color, shape, pattern. Everything feminine has been rushed in upon as a totteringfence. At the House of Bread there is no one home. Christ in all His little ones is now alatchkey child.

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    6/11

    Washington, Associated Press:

    The co-pilot of a US surveillance plane monitoring Soviet missile tests wastemporarily blinded by a light beam that Pentagon officials believe was fired from a

    laser on board a Soviet ship. The Pentagon statement issued Friday said theincident occurred over the Pacific Ocean earlier this week as US forces monitoredSoviet test firings of two missiles launched from Central Russia in the direction ofHawaii. The Pentagon said the woman copilot whose identity and rank werewithheld recovered with no serious injuries

    The worst is not that the Soviets are firing laser beams at us, but that girls are out there fightingthem. Not that a woman cant but that she is. What does this do to the imagination, the heart,the soul, of the next generation? What becomes of girls made by God in their nature to be theirhusbands helpmates and to bear and raise their children, whose influence, stronger than themoon's on the tide, attracts a man's rougher self to all the gentle, tender, soft, sweet, loving,moments that make love possible; first the husband and wife, then their children, and theirneighbors, and from thence to God whose love is the natural law.

    Over there, over there, . . . . the girls are coming! And the boys are nursing the babies! I neversaw a cow who thought she was a bull, or a bull that thought he was a cow. Water doesn'tflame like fire, and fire distill like the morning dew. Things in nature want to be themselves, andif moved seek their rest in what they are. And there is the rub: Engels denies these elementaryfacts. His philosophy of Dialectical Materialism posits a universe in total rebellion against whatis.

    He wrote another book more frightening in its way even than The Origin of the Family, calledThe Anti-Jury, in which he says all reality is contradictory process. Everything that seems to be,like water, fire, or woman, is both what it is and what it is not at the same time. This is really notnew or revolutionary at all. It is the old argument again of the ancient Greek philosopher

    Heraclitus, who sitting by the river said; "Because the water flows I cannot touch the same rivertwice; therefore there is no river." But trees are moving too, and rocks are just slow rivers;therefore nothing ever really is. This philosophy is an attack on the existence of things, on Godtherefore, whose name is "He Who Is", and on His creation which exists because He made itwhat it is. This is not just atheism which claims the nonexistence of God, but anti-theism whichasserts the right of non-existence over existence. It is Teilhard de Chardin's nonsensicalevolutionary idea that God is the "Omega Point."

    If that sounds confusing, take comfort at least in knowing that it is too much for the internationalcommunist movement too, which has never really understood what it means by DialecticalMaterialism. The words can be said but the philosophy cannot be thought because it is acontradiction. How can you have motion unless there is a thing that moves? Philosophies of

    total flux deny experience, they deny what we call common sense. A river is a river; a rose is arose. It is necessary to add however that though as philosophy it is sound signifying nothing, inthe practical order Dialectical Materialism is fury. Those acting out its fiat have brought thewhole of Christian culture down, especially in the United States behind what we thought werewalls against the enemy. It is a paradox that Communism is not as far advanced in Russia as itis in the United States from the cultural point of view. And it is worth our while to ponderEngels' book because it accurately describes much of what has happened here.

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    7/11

    When private property is taken as the end of human life, as it often is among us, and not as ameans to the end of the good human life, it is true then that no one's place is in the home. Ifeverything is measured by money, marriage really is the legal cloak of prostitution, as Marxand Engels said. There is a certain kind of man who thinks that the acquisition of property isthe purpose of his life. He doesn't buy a house because he wants a home, but an investment.

    And if he pushes that view further he will look upon his wife as an investment too, and children

    as unnecessary expenses which he prevents.

    It isn't any accident that since the 1960s especially, thousands of wives and children have fledhomes such as this to go out on the road as they call it in their songs; whereas all of our songshave always been about returning home. Civilization has its roots in ancient pagan Greecewhere far wandering Odysseus, after all the tribulations of the wide world's road at last camehome. And now, the wives and children flee, because it is true, as Engels said, that our houseshave become a marketplace, and with all their labor saving devices even look like littlefactories. We are a nation of materialists who measure progress by a very gross nationalproduct, and happiness by money and success.

    I am not suggesting that we surrender; it is not an option The first and last line of defenseagainst the enemies of man is in the home; and the heart of the home which is the love ofhusbands and wives.

    Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is thehead of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church. He is the savior of His Body.Therefore as the Church is subject to Christ so also let wives be subject to theirhusbands in all things.Husbands, love your wives as Christ also loved the Church and delivered Himselfup for it.

    For a detailed disclosure of what St. Paul meant by a wife's subjection to her husband's love,read the Song of Songs. It is the perfect opposite of tyranny or any exploitation, so passionateit would be indiscreet to read it aloud in public, the Holy Ghost's post-Cana Conference, His

    own secret manual of married love, so intimate that I have taken other texts here, like this one:

    How long do you rush in upon a man, as if you were thrusting down a leaning wall,and a tottering fence?Vain are the sons of men, the sons of men are liars in the balances. . .

    Liars in the balances, . . . St. Robert Bellarmine says of this difficult phrase that, conscious ofthe small number who would follow his advice, the Holy Ghost inveighs against the multitude ofthe wicked, saying:

    The greater part of men are quite devoid of true wisdom though they apparentlyabound in it, but it is rather that wisdom designated by the scriptures as theprudence of the flesh; and therefore most men are vain, senseless, and imprudent,

    because they are liars in the balances, in false and fraudulent weights andmeasures.

    You see, the word balances means the scales. Liars in the balances. Mendaces in stateris.Buying cheap and selling dear, skimming unjust profits, paying unjust wages, sellingadulterated goods with false publicity and hype . . . he means Coke, potato chips, and shoddyworkmanship; all those things that the Marxists exploit in attacking us within our homes andschools. And it's no wonder that boys and especially girls who see us putting profit overfriendship and the arsenal of mixmasters and microwaves over home and hearth. It is no

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    8/11

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    9/11

    God gives us supernatural habits readymade. We don't have to acquire them in the painful waythat we learned to ride a bike, but that same mysterious moment of discovery occurs. Wesuddenly get our balance and can do the thing we couldn't do before, like love, and joy, andbeing at peace. However, we shall not obtain the Kingdom of Heaven merely with the habit.These gifts and fruits, these infused habits, must be in exercitu; we have to ride the bicycle asit were, of our spiritual life and actually do these things. We must walk in the Spirit, St. Paul

    says, not sit or lie down.

    Perhaps you remember the difference between cardinal and ordinal numbers from your schoolarithmetic not just to count how many, those are the cardinal numbers, but to put them inorder, the ordinal numbers, such as first, second, third, etc. In every ordinal enumeration thereare two directions, down and up. From the beginning at the top, in this case God commanding,in the order of revelation; and the other from the bottom back up, us executing the commandsback up to Him in the order of learning.

    The way to restore the family is to bring to incandescent exercise the latent fruits of love inhusbands and wives, which they have received as supernatural habits in the sacrament ofmarriage. They are strong as death, stronger than any poison, with which no family ever failed,even when the war outside was lost. The Holy Ghost has given us these twelve fruits of Hislove. Biblical manuscripts don't agree exactly on the number or the order, but St. Thomas in hiscommentary enumerates them in theological order, from charity to chastity, in a slightlydifferent way than the Vulgate text that we use today.

    From the point of view of us learning how to love, that is in the order of learning, as a practicalexercise, let's take a look at the Twelve Frui ts of the Holy Ghostin reverse, beginning at thebottom, where most of us really are, confronting the problem of chastity.

    Chasti tyis the virtue by which we withdraw ourselves from all unlawful desire. By exercisingthe supernatural habit of chastity, we take the first real step immediately accessible to us, upthe staircase to charity, the love of wife and husband as our closest neighbor and hence toGod. Chastity, as St. Thomas defines it, here note well, is the resistance to all unlawful desire

    reflect that that includes those things that make us liars in the balances. For example, in amarriage, women working when economy at home might do as well. It is against the naturallaw for women to engage in socially productive industry unless necessity demands it.

    According to the law of nature a womans place is in the home because by nature she is nurseand nurturer of children. Chastity is not just control of sexual desire, it is really the desire to be

    just what we really are and if we exercise this freedom from all unlawful desire then we shall beready to mount the second step of continencewhich St. Thomas says is freedom from desirefor even good and lawful, but unnecessary, things. This is the very difficult step St. John of theCross describes in the first book of theAscent of Mount Camelending with the famous lines Inorder to arise at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing; in order toarrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing. Philosophical happiness,Edmund Burke said, is to want less, not to have more. St. Thomas says that theologicalhappiness is to want absolutely nothing but what God wants.

    The third step up is modesty, which means doing things according to the mode like singing onpitch. In each of the Gregorian modes the scale is set upon a single note, the melody hoveringand stretching above and below it but always with a kind of tension in relation to that notespresence even when it is not at that moment being sung. Modesty is not only to dressaccording to certain specifications, but to dress with taste and tact, with a sense of theoccasion. Not just dress, of course, but in every speech and action to say and do the right thingat the right time and the right tone of voice. Modesty means tact and tone towards self,demanding neither too much nor too little of yourself. Not to make your piety a burden to

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    10/11

    yourself and to your friend, but doing all with cheer, cherishing fruits not swallowing pills ofthe Holy Ghost .

    Husbands and wives, if every day we would take a single one of these good habits andpractice it the way you do a sport or a musical instrument, think what progress we would makein the interior life! Think what modesty could do in just a day, if husband and wives would think

    of each other as the mode or note of the Gregorian Chant. To make that person the attractivepoint of all ones words and actions all day long, to make the days activities a melody that findsits rest in him or her.

    Faithis taken here in the ordinary, not the supernatural sense. It means here fidelity, to be thekind of person one can trust. It means to be steadfast and true, by keeping promises andshowing up on time.

    The fifth step, meekness, curbs anger when our spouse and closest neighbor does us wrong.

    The sixth step, longsuffer ing, is patience and waiting for the good that never seems to comealthough it has been promised, and we say Lord, how long. But if we practice waiting for the

    good, the waiting in itself, though painful, becomes a kind of good. St. John of the Cross, inperhaps his greatest poem, cries out O dark more lovely than the dawn.

    The seventh step is goodness, which almost seems self-explanatory. It means to actively willthe goodness of the other. Husbands and wives must each realize that, as Frank Sheed said,each has a destiny with God in eternity, and they must help each other to get there.

    The eighth step, benign ity, is the active desire of kindliness. Not only to be true, fair, and eventempered, but to passionately sympathize, to feel with the other person. I heard a widow farinto her eighties just the other day say, when someone asked how much she missed herhusband, Not at all. We sympathized so closely that hes here in everything I think and do.That is benignity.

    If we practice waiting for the good with equanimity (i.e., evenness of temper) we will beexercised to bear with evil when it comes, which it will. That is the ninth step, patiencein theproper sense, related in the Latin to passion that is, to suffering as in the passion of Our Lord.

    The tenth step up is peace, which St. Thomas says means not to be disturbed. It is achieved,he says, by fixing our desires upon a single object, not restlessly wishing upon a dozen othersat the same time. Many a man is faithful to his wife in not desiring other women, but is not atpeace with her because his heart is on his business or the football game, or the writing of abook. Peace is making her the apple of your eye. If there is music, sing it just for her, celebratethe dinner which she cooked in praise of her. Peace is singleness of purpose, such as servantshave, whose eyes are always on their mistress hand.

    If we practice peace, we shall arrive at the penultimate step, joy, which is rest in thepossession of what we love, and the practice of joy is praise. There must be music in thehome, not on the stereo, no matter how good, but as the old Irish Tenor, John McCormack,used to sing in his most famous song about a man whose wife had died And all the ringinggladness of your voice, the words that made my lonely heart rejoice, you spoke; do youremember? All my heart still hears the distant music of your voice.

    You have to sing and play the instruments yourself and read poetry aloud, and really enjoy it.Yes, husbands and wives must do these things if they are to be friends together. Taking music

  • 8/12/2019 Revolution in the Home -The Marxist Theory of Family.docx

    11/11

    now in the wide sense of anything artistic, tender, beautiful and sweet, it is a message sent toone you love, like a splendid cherry pie or a freshly ironed shirt.

    Charitythen, is the twelfth step, wherein St. Thomas says theHoly Ghost is given in a specialmanner, as in His own likeness, since He Himself is love. Caritas rises above dilectio andamor, to where we obey the novum mandatum: "Love one another as I have loved you." So by

    these steps, these fruits, we learn the love husbands and wives have in Him because the HolyGhost is present in His gifts.

    One last thought you could make an honest complaint about all this: These are really justpious platitudes and none relates in any real way to our actual marriages. Few of us will findthis famous love, joy and peace, at least not for very long. Well, if it is true that love ishappiness, then we always seem to fail. But I have something for your consolation. Do youremember on the birthday or the wedding, just when you cut the cake? That is really the bestmoment, the eating always seems sort of a letdown. You expected who knows what, and it wascake. Love is not just cake. It is the moment just before. Thats the mystery of it, because alllove is a waiting for something we dont even know about yet. Especially the love of husbandsand wives will always be a yearning and a sigh. This isnt an argument. Perhaps you can take itas a thought to cheer your heart.

    http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07409a.htmhttp://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07409a.htm