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If any man come to me, and hate not
his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he
cannot be my disciple.
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Luke 14:26
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The biblical Jesus had little time for families, and his attitude
became the accepted Christian attitude for centuries, although
the modern position is quite different.
You can read examples of what Jesus had to say about families
here.
Relying on biblical passages, early Christians inferred that
family life was worthless and hailed virginity as the ideal.
Virgins were holy; others who indulged their carnal lusts were
filthy degenerates. Sex was an insufferable burden, inexplicably
imposed by God, and the creation of children was a sorrow to
all. In view of these ideas Christians cheerfully set about
the destruction of family life. Converts were lured away from
their parents, siblings, spouses and children. The children
of rich converts were often left destitute, their inheritance
having been diverted to Church coffers. Like many modern fringe
sects, early Christians discouraged members from communicating
with non-Christian relatives. The mainstream Church set out,
like a jealous mistress, to isolate or destroy her opponents.
By the fourth century some clergymen were being coerced into
abandoning their wives in emulation of St Peter and the other
apostles. As Pope Gregory VII put it "The Church cannot
escape the grip of the laity unless priests first escape from
their wives"*. Wives
were often left alone. Many were so desperate that they were
driven to suicide. Those who were not abandoned were liable
to be sold into slavery if the Church authorities discovered
them.
In the Middle Ages men were encouraged to leave their wives
and families for years on end. When preaching the First Crusade,
Pope Urban II cited the words of Jesus from Matthew 10:37 and
19:29: "He that loveth father or mother more than me is
not worthy of me…every one that hath forsaken houses,
or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children,
or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold,
and shall inherit everlasting life". Pope Innocent III
made explicit the right of husbands to go off without their
wives" permission: men could abandon their families without
a word of explanation, emulating Jesus" early disciples.
Preachers lured many hundreds of thousands of men away from
their families to take the cross. When St Bernard preached,
women went in fear. Mothers hid their sons from him, wives their
husbands, and companions their friends. Bernard proudly informed
the Pope of his success in extracting men from their families
"I opened my mouth; I spoke; and at once the crusaders
have multiplied to infinity. Villages and towns are now deserted.
You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere
you will see widows whose husbands are still alive*.
Most of those women were soon to become real widows*.
Back at home the Church remained in control of family matters.
People were expected to put their Christian duties before their
family duties and inform on any deviation from orthodoxy. Parents
dedicated their young children to monasteries. These "oblates"
were brought up away from their families, by monks, for the
service of the Church. Such children had no say in the matter.
Under Christian hegemony slaves were not entitled to a family
life either. They required permission to marry, and even in
nineteenth century America their children were taken from them
before reaching their first birthday. Christianity still did
not accord any value to family life per se.
When the Church wished a man dead it extended its ire to his
family, asking God to condemn his assets and so ruin his family
without regard to their guilt or innocence. The Church evinced
no sympathy at all for the family. Here for example is an extract
from a fairly typical text of excommunication:
We curse Arduino and his brother Amedeo, marauders and devastators
of God's Church; we curse every inhabitant of Ivrea who
gave them help and advice; may they be damned in the city,
in the fields, cursed be their properties and their lands
and herds and their animals, damned the place where they enter,
and they go out; may God send unto them hunger and pestilence:
may they be damned, vigilants, travellers, sleepers, resters.
May God afflict them with misery, fever, hard frost, scorching
heat, infirmity until death.May delirium, blindness, madness,
fury afflict them at all times, that their children may become
orphans and their wives widows soon*.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, priests assured
Roman Catholic women that they owed a greater duty to the Church
than to their husbands. For example they had a duty to help
priests wanted for treason even if their husbands did not approve
— even though by so doing they put their innocent husbands
at risk of death. Father Henry Garnet's Treatise of
Christian Renunciation contained many helpful examples
of families broken asunder by religious differences*.
Once again the point was clear: families were dispensable.
The Catholic Church had insisted on clerical celibacy (not
clerical chastity) for those in Holy Orders explicitly so that
the Church would retain its assets and would not be responsible
for maintaining the widows and orphans of dead priests. Protestant
Churches, aware that there was no theological justification
for prohibiting clerical marriage, found an alternative solution
to the problem. They allowed clerical marriage, but simply turned
clerical widows and orphans out of their houses when a priest
or minister died. No alternative accommodation was provided,
nor any pension, nor any other sort of support, so that widows
and orphans were liable to die of exposure or starvation, as
many did. It was this scandalous abuse that led to the growth
of insurance funds such as the Ministers" Widows"
Fund in the mid eighteenth century*.,
followed by insurance companies such as Scottish Widows
in the nineteenth Century. Clerical Medical was another
such company, formed a few years after Scottish Widows. Churches
could easily have been running their own schemes for centuries,
but had seen no need because they percieved no duty in supporting
hard pressed clerical families any more than any other destitute
families.
When the British authorities decided to deport the French Arcadians
from Canada in 1755, they called all the men to St Charles Church
in the village of Grand-Pré. There they were held and
promised that there women and children would sail with them,
while secret orders were given to Colonel Robert Monckton that
the men should be shipped off without them. The Arcadians were
treated appallingly, yet no one seems to have considered any
aspect of it unchristian, including the breaking up of families.
When Christian missionaries failed to make an impact on the
local population, they would sometimes kidnap the children and
dedicate them to God, even though their families needed these
children. By force or deception the children would have their
heads shaved, as a symbol of their dedication to the Christian
God. A missionary called Symeon did this around the Euphrates
in the sixth century, scorning the objections of the villagers
whose children he had shorn. Those who objected died in mysterious
circumstances, and the rest gave way. The abduction and indoctrination
of children became a standard technique when missionaries could
make no impact on adults, and would be used with effect for
many centuries. Children of members of any other faith might
be seized by Christian authorities. Sometimes whole families
were seized. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Jewish families were taken, often by force, by Christian authorities
and subjected to what we would now call brainwashing. If half
of the family converted and half did not, they were split up,
never to see each other again. Sometimes parents never saw their
children again.
As late as 1858, acting under clerical instructions, the Bologna
police seized a young Jewish boy, Edgardo
Mortara. Despite an international
outcry the kidnapped boy was kept in Rome by the Roman Catholic
Church and "re-educated". His re-education was so
successful that he eventually became a missionary priest. From
the age of seven until his death he was never to know a proper
family, either as son or father*.
Removing converts from their families in order to discourage
apostasy was extremely common. Indeed it was standard practice,
and still is among many Christian missionary groups. Converts
are transplanted to another community, often to another country,
so that they have to depend upon their new Church family rather
than their real family
An indication of the Roman Catholic Church's interest in the
family is provided by the practice of surgically removing boys"
testicles. After girls had been excluded from church choirs,
the Eastern Churches hit upon the idea of using castrated boys
to replace falsetto soprano voices. The idea was copied in Italy
and Spain in the sixteenth century. Popes and Church synods
declined to prohibit castration on the grounds that without
castrati churches would remain empty. So it was that castrati
were entertaining popes in the Sistine chapel into the twentieth
century. It was of absolutely no consequence that these boys,
when they reached adulthood, were denied the possibility of
an ordinary family life (the Church would not allow them to
marry because they could not father children). It was much more
important that clerics should be able to hear unnatural male
singing voices. The practice has stopped now, the last castrato
to sing at St Peter's having died in the 1920s.
Children, even Christian children, were not entitled to a family
life. Devout couples would give at least every tenth child to
the Church as a sort of tithe, normally at the age of eight.
At the age of fourteen, girls given away in this way to become
nuns underwent a sort of mock death similar to the one the Church
inflicted on lepers and condemned criminals: the victims were
obliged to lie in a coffin, wrapped in a shroud, while a burial
service was conducted and prayers said for the dead. The girls
were then resurrected with a new identity and immediately married
to Jesus, after which they lived with their new family of Mother,
Father and Sisters, and polygamous absentee husband.
The hereditarily sick were also regarded as less than deserving
of family life. When Hitler discussed them with Cardinal Faulhaber
in 1936 the two men had different approaches to the problem.
Hitler wanted to sterilise them, but the cardinal had another
solution: "The state, Herr Reich-chancellor, is not debarred
from removing these vermin from the national community in the
interests of legitimate self-defence and in conformity with
moral law, but preventives other than physical mutilation must
be sought, and such a preventive does exist: the internment
of the hereditary sick"*.
He was talking about what we now call concentration camps. The
cardinal's problem with sterilisation was that it would
allow people to enjoy sex without the risk of procreation, contrary
to the teaching of the Roman Church. To this extent the sterilisation
option was morally unacceptable, but there was nothing wrong
with splitting up families in order to put the sick into concentration
camps. Traditional Anglican attitudes to families were similar.
In Victorian times parochial charities found it perfectly consistent
with Christian teachings to split up the families who claimed
poor relief. Husbands would be sent to one poor house, women
to another, and children perhaps to a third. Untold numbers
of married couples were split up, never to see each other or
their children again.
With the complicity of the state Christians have been kidnapping
non-Christian children well into the twentieth century in order
to indoctrinate them. This practice is generally justified by
claiming that non-Christian parents are somehow unsuitable.
Native American children were being taken from their families
by the Canadian authorities until at least the 1950s. Aboriginal
children were being taken from their families by the Australian
authorities until the 1960s and put into Christian orphanages.
A Roman Catholic organisation in Switzerland was kidnapping
Romany children and sending them to be adopted by Catholic families
well into the 1970s*. The
children were routinely told that their parents were dead, and
that they had no living relatives. The same thing was common
amongst the children of unmarried mothers around the world —
from New Zealand to Ireland and Brazil. Children were taken
by force, with the complicity of the authorities, and given
up for adoption as "orphans" to right-thinking Christians.
The family unit was of no consequence.
In Britain children were not taken by force, but the effect
was much the same. Stigmatised single mothers often left their
children with Christian organisations, either to be adopted
or to be cared for until the mother could take the child back.
Many of these organisations sent children to the colonies without
their parents" knowledge or consent — even when the
mothers had stated explicitly that they would return to take
their children back*.
The children were told falsely that their parents were dead*.
They were described as orphans
and grew up believing themselves to be orphans in the usual
sense of the word*. They
were not given their birth certificates or other identification
documentation. Sometimes they were given new names and birthdays.
Sometimes their files were burned*.
In some cases when parents came back to reclaim their children
they were told, again falsely, that the children were dead*.
Even when they were told the truth, no effort was made to bring
the children back*. The
people involved seemed to have no qualms about separating children
from their natural parents. When Monsignor George Crennan, a
former director of the Australian Federal Catholic Immigration
Committee, was asked if he felt he had any responsibility to
children who wanted to trace their families he replied "Most
certainly not"*.
Sometimes two or more brothers and sisters might be sent out
at the same time. Usually they were split up — destroying
the last vestige of a family relationship. In 1956 a secular
government-appointed body recommended that this practice should
cease*. Even so, these
children were to remain in institutions throughout their childhoods.
Even when families came forward to foster children, traditionalist
Churches preferred to keep them in orphanages, demonstrating
once again their commitment to family life. An official report
in Western Australia in 1959 indicated that "practically
all children could be adequately fostered if the institutions
were not loath to part with them*.
When offers had been made to adopt children in Roman Catholic
orphanages, the answer had been the same*.
The children were not available for adoption and would spend
their whole childhoods in Church institutions. The Roman Catholic
Church was active in encouraging child migration*.
It had an interest in encouraging children to be sent to overseas
orphanages, and looked for ways to increase their intake. In
December 1954 a request was made to the Australian government
by the Roman Catholic Church to reduce the minimum age of child
migrants from 5 to 3. By now the Churches were finding it difficult
to fill their beds. The last child migrations to Australia took
place in 1967. By then between 100,000 and 150,000 children
had been shipped around the world, away from their roots and
their relatives. The practice was stopped not by the receiving
institutions, but by the authorities in Britain who were becoming
ever more aware of the type of future awaiting child migrants.*
As middle-aged adults, many of these "orphans" discovered
in the 1980s that they were not orphans at all. Some parents
discovered that their children were not dead, as they had been
told. The emotional turmoil caused by this "deceit and
deception" was documented by Margaret Humphreys, the woman
who discovered and exposed what had happened*.
In other countries the sheer inhumanity was even worse. In Spain
for example Catholic nuns stoile new born babies in hospitals,
telling the mothers that their babies had been stllborn, and
then selling the babies to infertile Catholic couples who could
afford "the price of a small flat"..
Such practices continued into the twenty-first century, for
example the Arche de Zoë
(“Zoë's Ark”) scandal of late 2007. French
volunteers “on a mission” were charged with kidnapping
103 children in Chad, making out that the children were orphans*
and reviving memories of similar kidnappings carried out by
the Catholic Church under King Leopold of the Belgians in the
late nineteenth century*.
The accused had gone so far as to mock up wounds on the children
in order to justify their removal. As in King Leopold's time most of the children were not orphans at all and had to
be taken from their families by force or deceit. As the President
of Chad pointed out, some of the kidnap victims had been “torn”
from their Muslim families*.
(Under pressure from the French government the convicted offenders
were pardoned in March 2008).
Even now missionaries are breaking up families, telling new
converts to leave their pagan spouses, siblings, parents and
children, just as Christian missionaries have done since Roman
times. Families are only important when they serve Christian
ends. Otherwise they are dispensable. The current attachment
to family values, so popular in certain quarters, is an innovation,
and runs contrary to the historical stance of all mainstream
Churches.
More social issues:
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