Home and School

Extract

‘A child above all other gifts brings hope with it and forwardlooking thoughts,’ but to entertain hope means to recognise fear, and standing as we do at present on the brink of an unknown future, both hope and fear imperatively urge us to do now what we can to make that future safe for the child.

Of all the groups into which every Christian child is born, the family is the most divinely natural and the most fundamentally important. It is through the family that he becomes a member of that wider, more self-sufficing society, the State, whose function it is to provide for the temporal well-being of the community. Through the family also he becomes a member of that supra-natural society by whose instrumentality he is enabled to attain to full development and to his appointed supernatural end. In his encyclical letter on ‘The Christian Education of Youth,’ His Holiness Pius XI sets forth with authority and uncompromising clarity the respective rights and duties (as educators) of these three societies, ‘distinct from one another yet harmoniously combined by God into which man is born. The family holds directly from the Creator the mission, and hence the right, to educate the offspring ... It is the right and duty of the State to protect and foster but by no means to absorb the family and the individual or to substitute itself for them. It also belongs to the State ... to supplement the work of the family whenever this falls short of what is necessary . . . and to provide suitable means (e.g. education) ... in conformity with the rights of the child and the supernatural pre-eminent rights of the Church.’