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First Sunday after Christmas. The West celebrates Holy Family Day. Saint John Paul II, the pope who came from communism, had a great devotion to her. The usual when you come from communism or socialism, or radical individualism. If there is something in which total individualism and collectivism coincide, it is in despising, undervaluing or even attacking the family.
The family is the social institution par excellence. It is not born of a contract, even if the commitment of the spouses is a manifestation of their will, forever and ever. The family is the place where we all learn the most basic values and virtues: love above all else, but also respect, generosity, forgiveness, gratitude, voluntary cooperation and obedience. But it is also in the family that we learn to suffer, to show solidarity.
The progressive destruction of the family is another sign of the crisis of Western civilisation. Yesterday, I wrote about the holy innocents, those thousands of human beings who die in a clinic, aborting their growth and birth. Thousands of families become unproductive. The family has been replaced by public schools, the state, local authorities or associations.
One of the most important conservative measures, and a challenge in our time, would undoubtedly be to give back to the family what has been taken away from it in the name of the welfare state.
The family must be the main – the only – protagonist in the education and upbringing of children. It has rightly been said that a society with strong families is a strong community, protected from the interference of ideologies, governments and pressure groups. On the contrary, a society with divided or confrontational families, in which there is an ‘atomisation’ of interests and desires, is a society that is weak in the face of any attack from political, social or economic powers.
The family is the place where one learns to love. To love is to want to want to want. It is the desire to give oneself without expecting anything in return. Neither collectivism nor radical individualism teaches this. The family is the place where one learns to be free. To make decisions, to make mistakes and to take responsibility. Parents will lovingly correct mistakes and the child learns, without suffering the inhuman consequences, to take responsibility for his or her decisions.
In the family one learns economics and politics. In the family one learns to save, not to spend more than one earns or what one can pay back to a lender. In the family one learns that order and hierarchy are fundamental for any community to function properly; without that hierarchy being either totalitarian or autocratic. Everything in the family is democratic because all decisions are made by the family as a whole and in the interest of the family and each and every member.
History is learned in the family. Real, lived history. In family memory, in family histories, there is no interference from the State, nor from cheap intellectuals or university professors who charge a fee for their brainy and manipulated studies.
The family is tradition, that is to say, it gives itself away. Parents pass on to their children what they received from their parents, and their children from their parents’ parents. In an endless chain where each generation keeps what the new generation needs, improved.
That is why, when national, local or regional institutions, or even the Brussels institutions, promote measures or actions that undervalue, damage or expropriate from the family that which is its own, a sensitive soul must react. It is not a whim to oppose private associations with very specific ideological interests indoctrinating children and young people in a certain notion of sexuality and ‘teaching’ children and young people sexual practices, inappropriate for their age, and which enter into the deepest spheres of human intimacy.
This is an attack on the family. It is also an attack on the family to compulsory and coercive sectorisation of schools so that if you live in such andsuch a neighbourhood you can only go to the school where the state or whoever the hell it is has assigned you so many or how many points. It is an attack on the family that its taxation is worse than that of companies.
Because a family is also a company. A wonderful company where the profit motive is shared and generous and always tends to be reinvested in the community. Prosperous families are a source of joy, healthy consumption, wealth and investment. A family generates social and economic wealth.
The strength of the family is the strength of an open and sincere conversation at the end of the day, where parents share with their children the hopes and illusions of the day, the triumphs and defeats, the deep aspirations, dreams, needs and urgencies.
May 2025 be the year of rebuilding families in Europe. This is a wish that runs counter to the reality of the policies being developed today by the elites. But we are in the Year of Hope. And that must never be lost.