Of relevance to us is that, with virtually full control of our lives from conception to death, one of the biggies of the Catholic Church was the protection of the integrity of family life.
Pictures of the Holy Family; Mary, Joseph and Jesus, had a revered place in the kitchens of our Catholic homes. I often wondered, (when I became old enough to wonder about such matters) how the ideal Irish Catholic Family consisted of 8, 9, or 10 or even more children in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, while Mary and Joseph got away with having only one. In the 1960’s, the picture of the Holy Family was joined by a picture of John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy – another family that obviously had some sort of ideal status for us Irish Catholics at that time.
I don’t remember anyone ever telling me why the Church protected and championed family life with such vigour. It just did! I probably guessed (if I thought about it at all) that it was because the Pope, bishops, priests, nuns and brothers knew that the traditional family of two parents of opposite sex who were happy together, joined by a number of children, was a place that would optimise the inculcation and then the perpetuation of honourable and positive (and, of course, Catholic) values in children, as they grew up in an atmosphere of safety, warmth, and security.
And because they said so – and it, kind of, made sense – I believed it.
While I am not going to examine how faithful the plain people of Ireland were to this ideal, it is true that many families thrived under the blueprint for living laid down by the Catholic Church that met all our spiritual, educational, medical and even dietary, (no meat on certain dates/days), social and sporting needs.
However a major down-side to granting the family such high status was that it became common to protect the institution of the family (and parents and the institution of Catholic marriage) at all costs when something went wrong.
I do not think that Ireland is unique here. Even in best-case scenarios, anywhere in the world, parents will often be defensive about their methods of child-rearing, discipline, how the quality of their relationship affects their children’s well-being and growth, how their busy-ness might be harmful to relationship building, and many other factors.
When a powerful entity such as the Catholic Church protects this natural (almost default) defensiveness rather than encouraging genuine enquiry, it is easy to see how external (and usually quick fix) solutions, i.e. solutions outside the family, were always favoured over the much greater challenge of internal enquiry.
So a very strong (almost unassailable) belief grew that suffering in a family could be eased (and problems could be solved) without upsetting the status quo within the institution – and without acknowledgment of what I will call non-surface-evident reasons.
And in doing this, parents’ (and other family members’) sufferings were alleviated and professionals’ consciences were salved.