Summary
Young Catholic couples should not feel pressured to have large families by cultural or political messaging. Decisions about children must be made prudently and privately by husband and wife, based on their real circumstances, including health, finances, and social environment. Large families are not a requirement of Catholic teaching, and having many children should not be treated as an ideal in itself.
Couples must avoid unrealistic expectations about marriage and parenting, especially the assumption that they can easily raise perfectly devout children regardless of circumstances. Family life is long, demanding work that requires serious preparation, patience, and adaptability. Rather than isolating from imperfect surroundings, couples should maintain relationships and act as a steady influence over time.
The key is to reject presumption, think realistically, and prepare carefully for the responsibilities of married life and raising children.
Transcript
This morning, I received a contact from a friend of the academy asking some practical questions. And because I saw these as some very important questions that were deserving of some extended attention, I asked if it would be okay if I published a talk that addressed these questions, that would allow me to go into some detail and hopefully offer something helpful.
I’ll read this message in just a minute, but before I get into this, I want to say that this is my advice. I was contacted and asked for my advice, and I think that in a diverse society, which we talk about all the time, we’ve got to learn to be comfortable offering advice that’s simply our own. I don’t claim to speak as if I’m the Pope. I don’t claim to speak on behalf of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas or the Catholic Church. This is my own advice based on my own study, my own experience, and I present it as such.
It’s good for people, as the Proverbs teach, to seek a multitude of counselors. The problem with seeking counsel today is that rather than giving one’s own advice based on one’s own knowledge and experience, everyone tries to speak as if they represent the truth itself, as if they’re the recipients of some infallible answers to questions. There’s actually no pressure on us to give advice, because we’re simply sharing our own knowledge and experience to help someone as they deliberate an issue. And when you’re deliberating on an issue, you should take advice from different people—not respond to it, because that’s not necessary—but simply gather it together and use it to help direct your continued deliberation.
So I offer this talk as my own advice on the following topics, and I’ll read the message that I received.
Hello, Mr. Michael. I have a few questions that I’d appreciate your advice on. [Again, note the language: your advice. This is my advice.]
My husband and I have been married for a few years. We don’t have any children yet. I have some health issues. Over the past couple of years, we both converted to Catholicism recently. I know you have a large family, [for the record, my wife and I met in high school, have been married since 1998, and we have 10 children]. I know you have a large family, but have warned about being too eager to get married and start a family. What would your advice be on family planning within the Church’s teaching? Would you encourage young couples to lean into generosity and to have large families if God grants them one? This is the first question of two. I’ll read the other later if I can get to it.
To establish some context here, what I’ve explained in the past is that there is a modern, politically charged message coming from the conservative side, which is urging young people to get married and make babies, and that’s how it’s presented: “Get married and make babies. Have lots of kids, have large families, go, go, go.”
This urging of young people into marriage and family life—and I’ve explained that this is a message that we need to pump the brakes on and be careful with—because it’s not necessarily coming from the mouths of any saints or wise men in history. It’s coming primarily from politically active individuals, and it usually has a strong Protestant influence.
Now, for Protestants who reject the notion of religious vocations, celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of God, and so on, marriage and family life is considered the highest calling in this life. It’s considered the highest calling to be a father and a husband, or to be a wife and mother, and raising children in the faith is considered the greatest fulfillment of the Christian mission.
But the Catholic Church has never taught that. The Holy Family in Catholic tradition has but one child. Most—almost all—of the canonized saints are celibate, men and women who consecrated themselves to contemplative or religious life rather than married life. So the message of the Catholic faith does not seem, for obvious reasons, to be the same as the message of a Protestant interpretation of the Christian religion.
And so what I would advise young Catholics to do is to really examine their thoughts and feelings and ask: Where has the messaging come from that they’ve received this message of “get married and have lots of kids”? Because I don’t know that it is a conclusion that’s drawn from Catholic teaching.
Now, I know that there’s a joke that runs in our society: when anyone meets a couple that has a large number of children, they ask, “What are you, Catholics?” The reason for that is not really that Catholics are taught to have lots of children. The real reason why Catholics are joked about for having more children is because the Catholic Church forbids the use of contraception. And so the idea is not “Why do you have lots of kids? Oh, you must be Catholics because Catholics make lots of babies.” The real argument there is: “What, you don’t use contraception? What are you, a bunch of Catholics?”
So you can see it’s sort of a negative jab at the Church’s radical position against contraception. So we’ve got to realize that the fact that Catholics are associated with large families isn’t necessarily because Catholics are urged to have lots of kids. It’s because they’re forbidden to use contraception. And therefore, if married people have sexual relations, they’re usually, in normal circumstances, going to also have children. Whereas many non-Catholic groups allow contraception, so you can have a married non-Catholic couple sexually active as a married couple with one or two children over the course of a 15-year marriage.
So we’ve got to be careful that we understand why things appear the way that they do.
The motive behind this “get married and have lots of kids” messaging relates to political concerns about population. Well, here are people in politics. One famous example is Elon Musk. He argues all the time that some cultures are reproducing at a great rate, and other cultures, especially European culture, have a very low reproduction rate. And therefore, over the course of a century, the population will change significantly, and we could see other races or other cultures, other religions, other worldviews, taking over countries that were traditionally guided by Western civilization, European countries, even America.
And so there’s a political or cultural concern that, to be frank, white people need to make lots of white people, or else the colored people are going to take over. And this same argument will apply to religion or politics: Conservatives need to have lots of babies; they need to make lots of conservatives, or else we’ll lose elections. Christians need to have lots of babies—that is, make lots of Christians—or else the Muslims will take over our society because they are having children.
So there’s these political and cultural and religious messages all mixed up, but none of this messaging is coming from the Catholic Church. None of this messaging is coming from the magisterium, the Pope and bishops of the Church. So what I advise Catholics, young Catholics, is to be careful that they think about the source of the information that they’re receiving, the messaging that they’re hearing, the advice that they’re getting, and so on. Because there’s a lot of misinformed, misguided, insincere urging of Western/white/conservative/Christian people to have lots of kids. It’s seen as some sort of political strategy, and we shouldn’t be thinking about family life in that way for many, many reasons.
And I’d like to share some of them, because I think that they’ll make this point very clear. There are just so many contradictions in modern Catholic culture that I think about all the time. And before I continue, let me make one more clarification about my own life.
I mentioned before that my wife and I met in high school. I was an unbeliever; she was an evangelical. I began attending an evangelical church with my then-girlfriend. After I started reading the Bible, I was born and baptized Catholic, but after receiving First Communion, didn’t continue in the Church. My parents didn’t go to church, and so I was living as an unbeliever after making my first communion. I never made confirmation and went through public schooling. Around age 18, this girlfriend, my wife Dania, asked me to go with her to church. And having been in church as a kid, I never had anything but positive experiences in church and warm memories. And so I did. I started reading the Bible, going to an evangelical church with my wife, really just focused on reading the Bible, putting some things together that I had learned as a kid, and making my way through all of the books of the Bible as I graduated high school and got into college.
So we were both dating as non-Catholic Christians, and we were married as non-Catholic Christians, and we went into marriage with that whole mindset of “we want to have a large family. We want to have lots of children. Large families are signs of God’s blessing and favor.” All of that teaching—in some Protestant circles, there’s even a system of theology that’s called Covenant Theology, which teaches that the covenant of salvation is made between God, men and women, and their children. And so there’s this Covenant Theology that we find in reformed Protestant churches.
There’s a lot more to understand with all that, but we began our marriage as Protestants with that sort of Covenant Theology idea in our heads. So we weren’t Catholics, and we weren’t thinking like Catholics when we got into that.
Now, as Protestants, my wife and I were weird, because even though as evangelicals or Protestants we had lots of freedoms—because we weren’t bound by any Catholic moral teaching—and yet we still, in our own consciences, believed that contraception was unnatural. And I don’t think we would say that it was wrong, but we felt that it was unnatural, and it just wasn’t in our interest. We weren’t interested in using contraception or trying to control the number of children or anything like that. We were both eager to have large families.
I came from a family where I had two siblings, but we had a very large extended family. The house was always full. I grew up in a very large family. My wife grew up with five siblings, also in a busy, large family. So both of us were looking forward to building our own family.
The point of this is that none of our family life was founded on any Catholic teaching. So don’t look at us as a couple with 10 children and say, “Ah, they’re Catholics. They had lots of children because they were Catholics.” That’s not true. We did not have lots of children because we were Catholics. We weren’t even Catholics until we already had four or five children—I think five children.
So we converted in the midst of our married and growing family life. And when we converted, as we were coming into Catholicism, we were constantly receiving that “have lots of kids, have a big family” messaging on all sides. So as we became Catholics, we were 30 or 31 years old at that time. We just felt that our family life was normal and Catholic, and we were received into Catholic communities warmly because we seemed like a great family—quote, unquote—meaning that we had lots of kids. So none of that had to do with any Catholic thinking on our part.
And then my studies as a Catholic began to deepen. My experience with religious life and contemplative life, religious communities, and so on began to deepen. I began to learn more of what the Church actually teaches on these subjects. And I realized—and I’ve been explaining this for years now—I realized that there is a Protestant message about family life, and there is a modern Catholic conservative political message about family life that is very similar to the Protestant message. But that conservative Catholic pro-family message is really not a truly Catholic message at all.
It’s not wrong, and we need to make this clear. It’s not wrong. Men and women can get married and have as many children as they please, and we can think of many families, even families in history, that had large numbers of children. But it really has nothing to do with any kind of Catholic mission.
There are lots of circumstances, lots of factors, influencing a couple’s decision to have lots of children. My concern is that they be good reasons. My concern is that they be right reasons. And I’m not even going to judge anyone’s reasons, because, like I said, there’s nothing wrong with having lots of children for whatever reasons a couple pleases. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying “we’d like to have lots of children because we’d like to raise children who share our religious beliefs. We’d like to raise a large number of future adults who share our political views, whatever it may be.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I would think that that’s pretty natural.
But what I would like to push back on is the idea that Catholicism teaches that people should have lots of kids. That I think misrepresents Catholic teaching. So I want to make that clear. I don’t believe that it’s wrong to have lots of kids for any reason. What I do think is wrong is telling people that the Catholic Church teaches that married couples should have lots of children. That’s the message that I think needs to be examined and pushed back against.
And as I always say, I present the Holy Family as a great objection to that argument, to that line of thinking. The Holy Family has but one child.
Now, when we come to the next question—”Well, my husband and I are wondering, as a young couple, what we should do. Should we have a large number of children? Should we seek to control or restrict the number of children that we have?”—my answer to that is that’s completely between the two of you. And my advice is to keep all of these issues as private as possible, because no one understands the details of your circumstances except for the two of you.
No one knows the details of your circumstances, and we can talk about some of these circumstances. First of all, one was mentioned in the message I read earlier: there was some history of health problems. That’s a pretty significant circumstance.
So physical health is obviously a big deal—not just with conceiving a child, carrying a child, delivering a child, but also raising a child. Not just breastfeeding an infant, but actually raising a child for 15, 18, 20-plus years. Being a mother, being a father is very demanding work. And so if there are physical problems, I think it’s definitely prudent to think about what the implications of those physical problems may be.
I would also advise you not to exaggerate physical problems. My wife, as an example, is an oddball. My wife, throughout our marriage, was healthier and stronger when she was pregnant than when she was not pregnant. My wife would have all kinds of health issues and problems until she got pregnant, and then she would enjoy perfect health through pregnancy. And after pregnancy was over, she’d get into the nursing phase and start having health problems again, until the next time she was pregnant and she’d be back to greater health. So she was an oddball.
But there’s one thing that we learned as we were going through that child-bearing phase of life. She once had an old lady approach her at the grocery store and nastily warn her, telling her, “You’re going to kill yourself having all these kids. You’re going to kill yourself.”
There’s a few things to think about that make those warnings unreasonable, that prove them unreasonable. First of all, unhealthy women are not going to get pregnant and carry babies to full term. The ability to conceive isn’t automatic, and even when one does conceive, the ability to carry a child to full term requires great health, stable physical health.
So I always used to tell my wife, “The fact that you can conceive and carry a child to full term argues against any claim that you’re unhealthy, or that you’re getting unhealthy, or that you’re going to kill yourself, or anything like that. If you weren’t healthy, you would likely not be able to conceive a child, and you would likely not be able to carry a child to full term.”
And so if you have real health concerns, having children will probably not be a concern at the same time. So there’s some unreasonable anxiety in popping out 12 children with great physical illness. That really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s not likely that you’re going to have real health issues and conceive and bear lots of children. So I think that’s an irrational, groundless fear—that the sick woman is going to reproduce abundantly.
I would argue that if you’re capable of reproducing abundantly, you’re probably a healthy woman. You might have some health issues, some different kinds of problems. My wife always had different kinds of problems through the years. But that’s different from saying “I should not reproduce because I have health problems.”
Anyway, I don’t want to get into that too much, because there’s a million different circumstances that could be discussed. And like I said, only a woman and her husband are going to know all the details of these circumstances to be able to make good decisions.
So the first thing is: with health, remember that unhealthy women are likely not going to have this problem of having lots of children. And also remember that the child-bearing years don’t last forever. My wife had children over the course of 14 years, and then stopped. There were no more babies after that. So all of that initial anxiety and questioning, nasty things said—it assumed that you could just go on getting pregnant and having children forever, unless you decide to stop. And that’s not even true.
There’s a window of time in a woman’s life where she is even able to get pregnant, carry babies to term, bear the children, and so on. And that’s a phase of life. And for my wife, that phase began in 1999 when she conceived our first child, and it ended in 2014 when she delivered our last child. That was it. That was the end of her child-bearing phase.
And now my wife is a 50-year-old woman with an 11-year-old youngest child, enjoying a very happy life completely free from pregnancy, child-bearing, nursing. She’s got 10 children, ages 11 through 26, and she’s enjoying this new phase of life after having done her child-bearing and now enjoying relationships with all of her children, most of whom are adults.
So you just see that when we put these things into perspective in time, a lot of the anxious talk really doesn’t even prove to be true.
My wife also had very healthy pregnancies, as I said, but she also had very healthy deliveries. And this is another thing to consider. If you’ve never had a child, you really don’t know how your pregnancy or delivery is going to go. So that’s an unknown.
For my wife, our first pregnancy, she had a perfectly healthy pregnancy, and when she went into labor, she quickly delivered and almost couldn’t believe how quickly it went. I hate to say “how easily,” because it was obviously painful. But relative to what was expected, I can say it was shockingly easy for her. We expected so much more trouble. We heard all of the constant horror stories, and our experience was nothing like any of those stories.
That was another reason why we were open to having a large number of children. It just seemed—and again, I say this relatively—it seemed easy for her to bear children, and it was, in fact, easy. To the extent that our last four children, she didn’t even want to go to the hospital. She bore them at home with a midwife because she felt like going to the hospital actually made her experience more anxious, more difficult, and she just would rather have the babies at home with a midwife.
My wife feels much more comfortable in an environment where she can maintain spiritual thoughts and pray and handle her own difficulties within a spiritual context than surrender herself to the care of a bunch of unthinking, unfeeling medical care experts and technicians. She feels much more comfortable relying on religion than on medical care. And again, that’s her own thing.
In fact, when she first discussed wanting to explore having a child at home, I told her, “That’s entirely your decision. Don’t even ask me about it. That’s entirely your decision based on how you feel, how comfortable, how confident you feel, how you feel about the midwife. All of that’s all of your business. I’m ready to go to the hospital whenever you need to go. All of that is your business.” And I just left that to her, because that really is a decision that only the woman can make.
So you just see how there’s all of these different factors that influence these decisions. For us, we just never thought about limiting the number of children. We never thought that having children was a burden. We never thought that there was a certain number that would be too much. We just never had any thoughts like that. We loved each other, we loved our family, we loved having children. We loved having a big family. But our circumstances were unique, and that extended into not just the child-bearing activity, but also the parenting activity.
Well, in the early years of our marriage, I was teaching full time, and as a teacher, I had lots of time off. I really only worked 180 days a year, so I could be home anytime. So my wife, during those early years of pregnancy and child-bearing, she always knew that I could be home. I wasn’t traveling, I wasn’t away, I didn’t have a rigorous, stressful business life. I could always be home. I could always be home within 20 minutes—a phone call to the school office, and I’d be home in a little bit. So we never had any separation stress or anything like that. Again, more circumstances that led to our lifestyle choices.
And then in 2008, when I was 33 years old, I started the classical liberal arts academy, and I was self-employed and worked from a home office ever since. So from 2008 through to the end of my wife’s child-bearing years, as our family was growing to its largest, I was working from a home office. So we were always together, and my wife was never alone with all the children. Again, unique circumstances.
Both my wife and I were experienced educators, both college graduates, both studied classics, both experienced school teachers, planned to homeschool from the beginning. Education of the children was never a concern. It wasn’t an expense. It wasn’t a concern that we needed to find help with. We didn’t need to find people to tutor our kids or find curriculum. Our circumstances were unique.
My parents also retired in 2004, moved down to North Carolina, bought a bunch of land, and invited my wife and me to build a house on their property. So in 2005, my wife and I moved with four children to North Carolina, built a brand new house that cost us only $125,000 to build, and raised our kids out in the country. So all of those other concerns—expensive suburban living, having a place for the kids to grow up and be safe, and all of that—all of those things were provided for us. Again, unique circumstances.
I’m sorry if there’s a little bit of noise in the background. I think there’s a tree shredder running on the other side of the farm.
But what I want you to see is that there were all of these different circumstances, all of these different influential factors that affected our thoughts about family life. And so I would never turn around and say to someone with completely different circumstances to do what we did. I would never say that. I would never say, “Oh, it was so great for us. It was so easy for us. Your circumstances don’t matter. You should do what we did. This is the best. This is God’s will.” I would never say that, because I’m aware that not everyone has the same circumstances that we do.
And when I see other families with large numbers of children trying to have this large family, I see them going through all kinds of trouble that we did not have to deal with. And so the circumstances are just different.
Physical health, as I said, I see women go through very difficult pregnancies, have very difficult deliveries. We didn’t have that. I see families go through all kinds of financial stress. We never had that. I see families give birth to children that have health issues, physical deformities. We had one child born with a cleft lip that was surgically repaired and was never an issue. Outside of that, we never had an issue. We had a daughter who had a seizure, but she was three years old. We never had health problems with any of our children.
Our children enjoyed perfect health their entire lives. We never had health insurance, we never went to doctors, we never had health issues. And as our children have proven in their adult years, they’ve moved very easily into military careers because their physical health is just so great. That’s not something that we accomplished, and we can’t recommend our lifestyle to others, because we know that other children don’t have the kind of health that, to this day, our children enjoy.
We’re not like health nuts. We’re not like the organic people. We eat very simply. We’ve had kids with perfect health. So I just want to make sure that anyone who looks at our life and says, “Oh, look, they have 10 children. They did this. They do this. We should do that”—I just want to make sure you’re aware of our circumstances. I think they’re somewhat unique, and I don’t think it’s something that we did or we had a certain strategy or any kind of philosophy to accomplish. I think it was very providential. And that is what it is. That’s why we live the way we do.
There’s also—so let’s get out of physical concerns and let’s look at some more cultural and financial concerns. My wife and I are both first-generation Catholics. Like I said, I was baptized and I was sent to CCD class as a public school kid, but my family was not religious. My wife’s family were evangelicals. We’re first-generation Catholics.
When we converted to Catholicism, we were the only Catholics that we knew. I remember when our priest—when we joined the Church and the priest started talking to us about sponsors and godparents and things like that—we looked at them like, “We don’t know anybody who’s Catholic.” And that was true. We didn’t know any Catholics. I converted as a result of my own studies and experience as a Christian. I wasn’t brought in by anyone. No Catholics ever came and talked to me. It was entirely independent.
So we’re first-generation Catholics, and I think one error that we made when we were young was we thought that because we were smart and devout, and because we were strong and healthy and we were zealous for the faith, we thought that we could just raise children who shared our convictions, who loved our culture, and so on. And in that we were very presumptuous and we erred.
I think that we expected things from our children in our circumstances that were unreasonable and that caused a lot of trouble as we raised our children. I think we expected our children to be much better than they should have been expected to be, and that caused problems.
Thankfully, I became conscious of that—conscious of the negative effect that not having Catholic family members, lots of Catholic friends, relatives, neighbors, attending a relatively weak parish, and so on. I began to become conscious of the effect that that would have on our children, and I began lowering my expectations. Not in an irresponsible way, but I think in a way that saved our family from lots of trouble.
And I see Catholic families who make the mistakes that we avoided, because I think they get started with those same presumptuous expectations. They get connected in communities of other Catholics where they share a certain culture and level of expectations, and then when their children don’t live up to those expectations, the parents stick with the community and separate from the children.
And for me, I think that that thinking is backwards. And my wife and I, when we became conscious of this problem in our family life—that we were expecting fruits in the lives of our children that our circumstances really didn’t justify—we chose to lower our expectations to what was responsible and reasonable in light of our duties as parents and the reality of our circumstances. And that kept our family relations very close.
As my children grew up, my wife and I were often the only Catholic voices that they heard, the only Catholic influences in their life. And so it was our children with my wife and me in one ear and a million people in the other ear. And it was a real difficulty for our children.
And again, I could empathize with that, and I could see how difficult that was for them. And I didn’t interpret it as them being evil, but I interpreted it as them reacting reasonably in unfavorable circumstances.
And so my wife and I were very patient with our children, especially through teenage years and into early adulthood. We always maintained very close relationships. We were very forgiving, patient, gentle to them, empathetic, supportive. And as they got into adulthood, they went through all kinds of challenges, made all kinds of bad decisions, but our relationship stayed very close.
And now that they’re entering in—our older children are through their mid-20s, and they’ve got lots of experience. Now it’s all starting to come together for them. They are starting to understand why things were the way they were, why things felt the way they felt, why we did things the way we did. And our relationship is as close and happy as it possibly could be.
So I offer that again as a warning, because I think that many Catholic couples get connected with a Catholic culture that their circumstances are not going to make sustainable. And they develop expectations thinking about what their Catholic family life is going to be like. They think about a Catholic family life that’s not realistic. The expectations are presumptuous and, to an extent, arrogant, because parents think that they’re just so smart and so good and so devout that they’re just going to make their children great Catholics. And that’s just not realistic.
So I think that we’ve also got to look at our cultural and social circumstances and reflect on what the effect of them, under ordinary circumstances, will be on our children.
I always get people asking me for advice on time spent with family members. “Oh, you know, it’s Easter weekend, and my parents want us to visit and bring the kids over there, but they’re so worldly, and there’s…” And you see that conflict. You see that challenge that we have. We’re not bringing children into some—at least most of us are not bringing children into—this devout, established, multigenerational Catholic family and culture. We’re often the only ones, and that’s going to have an effect on the children.
What some families do is, for the sake of that cultural vision, they cut themselves off from their family members. They isolate the children from their grandparents and relatives. And while I can understand the thinking behind that, I have to ask the question: Is that really God’s intention for the effect that Christianity will have on families? Christianity comes into a family and the Christians choose to separate.
Now we can say, well, in the Bible, Jesus says, “I have come to set a man against the members of his own household.” But we’ve got to be careful with passages like that, because there are a number of different ways to interpret them. First of all, a man can be turned—or I could say family relations can be disrupted—because the non-Christian family members reject the Christians, or they could be disrupted because the Christians reject the non-Christian family members.
I don’t believe that God teaches that Christian people should isolate and reject all the non-Christians around them. I think the idea is that in Christ’s time, he was calling Jewish people to follow him, and he was warning the Jewish people that if you choose to follow him, your family is likely going to reject you. I don’t think he was telling Christians to reject their families.
Now, when we think about family relations—when we’re devout Christians or we’re Catholics, and we’re trying to raise our children in our culture—we can see our parents, relatives, even neighbors, friends, whatever, as a real obstacle, a real source of distraction from the life that we’re trying to promote. And that’s one of those issues where I think that our expectations can be unrealistic and we can end up doing more harm than good in Christ’s name.
I don’t want to consign my non-Christian relatives or send them to hell because I’m trying to raise a Christian child and actually take the Christian influence out of their life and leave them to unbelief. So you see, that’s a real challenge.
And in our life, we chose to stay engaged with our family members on both sides of our family—Catholic and non-Catholic, Christian and non-Christian. And we see ourselves as being a good influence in the family, an influence that we don’t want to remove from them spitefully. And over time, yes, sure, when we were young, it was difficult. But over time, we have established ourselves as a happily married couple, as a good Catholic family. Our children have grown up to be impressive young adults. And now, later in this life, down the road in these relationships, our influence is very great. And we’ve earned that influence by sticking through those difficult times.
So again, my advice for young people is to think about all of these circumstances and their effects. Think about your unique circumstances and what their effects, in ordinary circumstances, are going to be. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say, “Oh, well, with God, anything is possible.” Of course, that’s true. But God could have also given you a whole family, four generations deep, of devout Catholics and saints. He didn’t. So I don’t know that it’s reasonable to presume God is going to suddenly flip everything upside down and backwards, contrary to the conditions that actually exist. Possible, but not to be expected.
So I think we need to think about those circumstances and how we’ll deal with them, how we’ll deal with them as we live through them.
Now, that’s not to be negative. I know a lot of that sounds negative, because all that we usually hear in modern circles, in modern Catholic circles, we just get this exaggeratedly good pro-family message that romanticizes family life. And I think it leaves young couples unprepared for the challenges that they’re going to face.
As I said before, I’m not suggesting that anyone limit the number of children they have. I’m not discouraging anyone from having as many children as they would like to have. But I’m saying that these circumstances need to be reflected on—not with a spirit of anxiety, not that these things would discourage you from having children and even having a large number of children, if God wills and you’re healthy and all is well—but it would help you to prepare for the work that’s ahead of you. It would help you to actually prepare to succeed in this work.
Because that’s what I think is wrong about this pro-family messaging. I think it presents a romanticized, unreasonably optimistic view of family life that causes young Catholics to not take preparation seriously. And that actually becomes the cause of the trouble: not taking precautionary measures, preparatory measures, to get ready for the challenges, to set realistic expectations, to think about what life should look like in a reasonable way, in your own unique circumstances.
So I don’t intend this to be a negative message. It shouldn’t be heard or received as a negative message, not as a discouragement. It’s just a very serious and practical message.
The work of married life, child-bearing, parenting, maintaining professional life at the same time—because you don’t get free groceries when you have kids—and then thinking ahead also, because you’ve got to raise children into their adult years and help them transition to independent adult life. It’s very difficult work, and it lasts a very long time. And so there has to be realistic preparation and planning for the full duration of that work, for the full task. Not just for the silly years, not just for reproduction. You know, the cows out in my field can reproduce. There’s nothing holy about that. There’s nothing glorious about reproducing. It’s that these children need to be cared for. Our marriages need to be sustained. Our professional lives need to be sustained. We need to learn what a spiritual life looks like, a responsible spiritual life in such a family.
And many of the things that are said and done by young Catholics, Catholic families, are simply wrong. And that’s another topic of discussion. But you’ve got to have realistic expectations. You’ve got to realize that when you choose to marry and have children, you’re moving away from monastery conditions into more and more secular, entangled conditions. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that many people want to pretend that they are going to live like monks and nuns after they’ve chosen to do the opposite of what monks and nuns have done. And it just creates a whole mess of problems.
My wife often writes about these problems for women. Women decide they don’t want to become nuns. They want to get married. Then they get married, and then decide they want to live like nuns. And you just see what a disordered worldview that is. And men do the same thing. They choose not to be monks, not to be priests or friars, but to get married and have children. And then they decide it’s cool to protest against working a lot, and they want to stay at home, and they want to pray all the time and become theologians and philosophers. It just doesn’t make any sense. They’re seeking two different lives. And in fact, they’re seeking neither of either of those lives.
So there’s a lot to think about. But let’s consider this part one. We’ve talked about how our circumstances need to be considered, how we think about these things, and how we ought to avoid the political Protestant messaging that’s common today. And think about this soberly and realistically. Again, not in a discouraging way, not in a way that should create anxiety, but in a way that should help us to think ahead and make preparations so that we can actually succeed and enjoy the life.
Because my wife and I, at this point, I would say that we’ve enjoyed success as a family, and we enjoy very happy relationships with our children. But our life is very, very different from the common Catholic family life that is promoted today. And we’re thankful that it is so.
So I hope that’s helpful. Let’s consider that part one, and I’ll go on to the second part of this message about making those preparations and getting ready for that life in another talk, God willing, tomorrow. I hope that’s helpful. God bless you.