Familiaris Consortio

Background and Occasion

The Synod of Bishops met in Rome in the autumn of 1980 on the theme of the role of the Christian family in the modern world. At its close the bishops presented the Pope with a list of propositions. Familiaris Consortio, published on the solemnity of Christ the King 1981, is John Paul II’s response. It came out of the same period as his Wednesday catecheses on human love, later collected as the Theology of the Body (1979–1984), and it reflects their themes.

The exhortation addresses what the Pope calls the bright spots and the shadows of family life today: on one side, a greater awareness of personal freedom, of the dignity of women and of responsible parenthood; on the other, a mistaken idea of independence between spouses, divorce, abortion, sterilisation, and a contraceptive mentality.

Structure

The exhortation has four parts: Bright spots and shadows for the family today; The plan of God for marriage and the family; The role of the Christian family; and Pastoral care of the family: stages, structures, agents and situations.

Central Teaching

God’s plan for marriage

The second part grounds marriage in creation. God created man in his image out of love, and so called him to love; love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. Because the human person is an incarnate spirit, love includes the body. Sexuality is realised in a truly human way only when it is part of the total self-giving of a man and a woman until death, and the only place where this is possible is marriage. Marriage is a sacrament that makes the spouses a real image of the relationship between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:25–32). Its unity and indissolubility follow from this.

Family, become what you are

The third part, the longest, is built around a famous phrase: family, become what you are. The family is a community of life and love, and its tasks follow from that identity. The Pope names four:

1. Forming a community of persons. The family is founded on the love of husband and wife and extends to the relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters. The exhortation speaks of the rights of women, the role of men as husbands and fathers, the rights of children, and the care of the elderly.
2. Serving life. This includes the transmission of life and the education of children. Here the Pope reaffirms the teaching of Humanae Vitae on contraception. He explains that the difference between contraception and recourse to the natural rhythms of fertility is not merely one of method, but involves two irreconcilable concepts of the human person and of sexuality. Parents are the first and principal educators of their children.
3. Participating in the development of society. The family is the first and vital cell of society. It has a social and political role, and the state must respect and support it. The exhortation proposes a Charter of Family Rights, which the Holy See published in 1983.
4. Sharing in the life and mission of the Church. The family is a domestic church: a believing and evangelising community, a community in dialogue with God, and a community at the service of man.

The law of gradualness

The exhortation introduces a distinction that has been much discussed. Married people may grow gradually in their understanding and living of the moral law, and pastors should accompany them patiently. This is the law of gradualness. But it is not the same as a gradualness of the law, as if there were different degrees or forms of precept for different people. The moral law is the same for all; what grows is the person’s capacity to live it.

Difficult situations

The fourth part treats pastoral care, including what it calls irregular situations: trial marriages, de facto free unions, Catholics married only civilly, those separated or divorced who have not remarried, and the divorced who have remarried. On this last group the Pope asks pastors to help them with solicitude, to encourage them to take part in the life of the Church, and to make clear that they are not separated from it. But he reaffirms the Church’s practice of not admitting them to Eucharistic communion, because their state of life objectively contradicts the union of love between Christ and the Church signified by the Eucharist. Reconciliation in the sacrament of Penance, and so access to the Eucharist, is possible for those who, for serious reasons such as the upbringing of children, cannot separate, if they take on the duty of living in complete continence.

Theological Significance

Familiaris Consortio is the fullest magisterial treatment of marriage and the family between Gaudium et Spes and the Catechism. It joins the theology of marriage as a sacrament with an anthropology of love and self-gift, and its account of the family as a domestic church has become standard.

Its paragraph on the divorced and remarried became the subject of renewed debate after the Synods of 2014 and 2015 and Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (2016), whose eighth chapter proposed a process of pastoral discernment for such situations. The interpretation of that chapter and its relation to Familiaris Consortio remains disputed among theologians and bishops.

For readers of this site, the exhortation is a companion to the tract on Matrimony, to Casti Connubii and Humanae Vitae, and to the course’s lesson on the sacraments of service.