The world has fallen in love with Pope Francis, and I can’t say that I can blame it. He’s kind of a cool Pope. He doesn’t want the Church to focus too much on condemning abortion and gay marriage. He wants to talk about the poor and the oppressed. He believes in climate change. He sounds downright progressive.
But once in a while I hear something from him that reminds me why I have a problem with–not him, so much, but the Church that he represents. Such as when he says, in support of large families:
“Every family is a cell of society…but large families are richer and more vital cells.”
Are they? This is why I–and a lot of other people living in our times–feel such a disconnect with the traditional Catholic Church. When it comes to human lives, the Church still values quantity over quality. Does more automatically equal richer and more vital? What about a family which has fewer kids but puts more time and care into raising them? A family which gives them more–and I don’t mean strictly in the material sense, but also in the emotional and intellectual sense? I suspect the Pope sees large families as a bulwark against modern materialism and selfishness. And yet I’ve known childless people who lead very unselfish lives. On the other hand, I remember the abusive town drunk from my childhood days, with his miserable wife and his seven kids, most of them illiterate. That was a rich and vital cell of society? Give me a break.
For so many of us, the rules of “procreate!” and “more!” no longer satisfy. For the same reasons, we are less interested in following the rules of traditional marriage and more interested in the meaning of our relationship with our partner. The content matters more than the framework.
But hey, Francis is still quite the charming guy. And I love the way he confuses and irritates the laissez-faire capitalist Christian conservatives here in America. I will always give him brownie points for that.
01/05/2015 at 9:37 pm
Hiya. I enjoyed reading this: “The content matters more than the framework.” Say more appetising things like that. Try telling my tribeswomen that they should stop torturing themselves for the fairytale. I already got tomatoed out of the room. Perhaps you’ll have better luck.
01/07/2015 at 8:11 pm
I will do my best. I also have a hard time believing that you’ve gotten tomatoed out of every possible room. There have to be other rooms out there where you might be accepted, no?
01/07/2015 at 8:14 pm
If you find me one, I’ll get in. The point I’m making is that most women only pay lip service to the “content matters” idea. Hence the woman to woman censorship, which I’ve complained about endlessly, as there seems to be a determination to shape the framework without assessing the content.
01/08/2015 at 8:53 pm
Good point…I’ll let you know when I’ve found one myself. Completely agree about the lip service.
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01/06/2015 at 12:04 pm
I only have two kids myself, and no more in the pipeline. But I don’t have any trouble understanding what the Pope means, based on my own observations. My kids attended a school that had several large families, and you could see and feel the vitality in those families. I often found myself regretting that my wife and I didn’t have more (we might have but we started late).
What I found in my own case, is that when we had our second child, it was not twice as hard, but rather, half as hard as having one child. It’s hard to say exactly why. Part of it was just the fact that we were not as scared and uptight about the second one, as we had been with the first. Another reason was that our kids could play and spend time with each other.
To me, it stands to reason that if we had had a third and a fourth, they would have continued getting easier, as childbearing became more routine. And of course, each kid would have had that many more friends and playmates in his life.
Obviously, numbers alone don’t make one family “better” than another. If parents are neglectful or abusive, that’s a problem no matter how many kids there are. But on the other hand, I can easily imagine that if I were the child of abusive parents, I would be happier having 5 or 6 brothers and sisters to share my suffering with, than being all alone.
We are currently sharing our home with one of my wife’s nephews, and in the past we have hosted her parents, and an unwed niece together with her daughter. I have always enjoyed having a house full of people, as opposed to an empty house.
01/07/2015 at 8:06 pm
Hmmmm, well…I can see your point of view, too! It probably doesn’t help that I have somewhat of a hermit personality. A relatively short amount of time spent with a large group of people (including large families) tends to leave me cranky and exhausted. Just another reason why I won’t make a good Catholic anyway 🙂
01/08/2015 at 2:07 am
Very interesting – I’ve never thought about having many kids like that. Somehow my perspective has been that being two or three siblings is nicer, having more access to your parents and being a closer “knit” group.
It contradicts his general strain of thinking though.. maybe he’s just a little bit of a Vatican politician sometimes!
01/08/2015 at 8:55 pm
Either that, or–as I suspect–he’s more of a religious conservative than we think he is, but knows which things to say to appeal to the progressives…
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01/09/2015 at 7:07 am
Maybe so! Never crossed my mind.. I would’ve thought that his heart is with the progressives, but I’ll keep an eye on him from now on!