Chad Pecknold: The Pope’s Wisest Warning: On the Ideological Colonization of Our Families
The Pope’s recent addresses to other countries can be a helpful guide as we look forward to the Holy Father’s visit. America has been experiencing a kind of social transformation around the nature and definition of the family, and I’ve wondered what he might say to us. It’s his recent missionary journey to the Philippines that strikes me most.
Chad Pecknold
In his “Meeting with Families Address” at the Mall of Asia Arena last January, Pope Francis reminded the people of the Philippines that the family is a gift from God, and gifts from God are often threatened. He spoke to the people of the Philippines of the dangers which threatened Jesus and Mary, and how Joseph gathered up his young family, and fled to Egypt, finally settling in Nazareth. “So too, in our time,” Pope Francis told the crowd, “God calls upon us to recognize the dangers threatening our own families and to protect them from harm.” And then the Holy Father gave one of his most profound and penetrating warnings yet about America’s own struggle to understand the nature and meaning of marriage and the family:
“Let us be on guard against colonization by new ideologies. There are forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family. They are not born of dreams, of prayers, of closeness to God or the mission which God gave us…they are forms of colonization. Let’s not lose the freedom of the mission which God has given us, the mission of the family. Just as our peoples, at a certain moment of their history, were mature enough to say “no” to all forms of political colonization, so too in our families we need to be very wise, very shrewd, very strong, in order to say “no” to all attempts at an ideological colonization of our families. We need to ask Saint Joseph, the friend of the angel, to send us the inspiration to know when we can say “yes” and when we have to say ‘no.'”
Later he identifies the threat to the family as coming from those who would “redefine the very institution of marriage.” And the pope says that these efforts are in turn fueled “by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life.” There is, in other words, a kind of atheistic materialism which absolutizes relativity, and relativizes truth; which considers every standard arbitrary except the one it chooses for itself. Yet this strikes at the heart of the American experiment in “ordered Liberty.”
When liberty means the unfettered pursuit of anything we desire, the human soul is not liberated. It is merely enslaved by infinite desire. And this is what Pope Francis means by “ideological colonization.” In the context of the Philippines, whose people understood the ways in which political colonization had amounted to a kind of enslavement, so with the ideological colonization of the family.
America needs a similar message. Our very origins as a nation are bound up with the idea of an unjust colonization. But now the colonization is not political. It is ideological. Pope Francis says we must be “very wise, very shrewd, very strong, in order to say ‘no’ to all attempts at an ideological colonization of our families.” The very idea of an “ideological colonization of our families” is very wise, very shrewd, very strong. I expect it is an idea we will hear more about this fall.
— Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.
