Family Life

 

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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.
    Luke 14:26

     

    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.

     

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    Notes

    § The name is a biblical pun with works in French, but less well in English. In French Noah's Ark is the arche de Noë, just one letter different from the arche de Zoë.

    § "Non Liberari potest Ecclesia a servitute laicorum nisi liberentur prius clerici ab uxoribus".

    § Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2, p 254, quoting St Bernard, letter number 247 (in Migne, JP, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, I (Patrologia Latina), Paris, 1844-55, vol. clxxxii, col. 447).

    § Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 2, p 254, quoting St Bernard, letter number 247 (in Migne, JP, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, I (Patrologia Latina), Paris, 1844-55, vol. clxxxii, col. 447).

    § The text of this excommunication in the "Varmondiano" code is preserved in the Diocesan library of Ivrea, in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy.

    § Cited by Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot, p 29.

    § The idea of a mutual fund to provide insurance for the families of Scottish clergy had been pioneered by a minister and mathematician, Dr Robert wallace who founded the Ministers" Widows" Fund in the middle of the eighteenth Century.

    § An account of the Edgardo Mortara affair and other such scandals is given in Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, pp 266-273.

    § Faulhaber Remains, item no. 8203, cited by Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, pp 300-1.

    § See Frances Williams, “Swiss Shame over Stolen Children,” Sunday Times (London), June 8, 1986, p. 10; Reto Pieth, “Switzerland's Secret Crusade against the Gypsies,” In These Times, January 27-February 2, 1988, p. 4. In 1926, Swiss authorities began systematically taking Romany children from their parents to provide them with a "better life." An explicitly Christian organization named Pro Juventute, motivated by “proto-Nazi ideas of race hygiene” sponsored a program called "Operation Children of the Road" for many years, its purpose being destruction of the Romany way of life.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 252.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 69.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 239. Out of thousands of child migration cases researched by Margaret Humphreys, only one involved a genuine orphan, p 363.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 199.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 240.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 236. A particularly well documented case is described on pp 365-369.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 65.

    § The recommendation was made by the Oversea [sic] Migration Board. See Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 358.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 361.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, p 364.

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles, pp 276-282.

    § The forced migration of children from Britain over a sixty year period was the subject of a four part series on Radio 4 in 2003. The series was based largely on the personal testimony of over 150 former child migrants sent to Australia, Rhodesia, Canada and New Zealand. As it pointed out “Particularly guilty were the homes of the Christian Brothers in Australia where several thousand children were accommodated over the years and where physical and sexual abuse and under-nourishment seems to have been rife.” And said of the practice that “despite warnings from governments and independent inspectors, it was pursued for almost 6 decades”. The series is still available on-line at the time of writing. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/child_migrants.shtml

    § Humphreys, Empty Cradles.

    § For details of systematic stealing of babies in Spain in the second part of the twentieth century see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12886441. See also http://anadir.es/ (in Spanish).

    § http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22700419-401,00.html

    § “Historical Wounds Underlie Outrage In Chad”, International Herald Tribune, 5 th November 2007, p2

    § For a more detailed account than most see http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/poller/1177

     
     
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