According to American speaker and author Mary Eberstadt, ‘long-standing Church teaching on the family is being vindicated’ by an objective look at some of the world’s most recent social-scientific studies. The Archdiocese of Melbourne, in association with the Australian Catholic University’s PM Glynn Institute, hosted Eberstadt at an afternoon conversation with Archbishop Peter A Comensoli on the topic ‘The Future Passes by Way of the Family’. Addressing about 150 people at the Catholic Leadership Centre in East Melbourne, she argued that the effects of the sexual revolution have proven many aspects of Catholic teaching right.
Author of many books, including Adam and Eve after the Pill (2012), How the West Really Lost God (2013), It’s Dangerous to Believe (2016) and, more recently, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics (2019), Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC and is Senior Research Fellow at the Faith & Reason Institute.
The centrality of the family is a major theme of her work, and in her talk on Tuesday 25 October, she began with a word of encouragement: ‘The idea that the Church is scoring a major win these days is surprising, but it is real and it is good.’
Despite decades of the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage and family being derided in many quarters, deep changes in society testify to the enduring goodness and nobility of the Church’s vision.
Beginning in the 1960s, the sexual revolution was an attempt to liberate society from traditional sexual mores. Although its promises were championed as positive, the negative consequences are now clearly on display, according to Eberstadt:
Today, people can see in retrospect what no one in 1968 saw coming: the atomisation and fragmentation of society that would follow the sexual revolution as night follows day.
While contraception was argued to be good for marriage, its mass adoption has proven otherwise, she said: the numbers of cohabiting couples has increased, as have the rates of divorce and abortion. Eberstadt highlighted especially the ‘explosion’ of loneliness studies emerging across the Western world.
‘The problem of loneliness has become so conspicuous that perfectly secular people are noticing and talking about it,’ she said. What these studies indicate is that ‘family rupture’ is a key factor in ‘increasing the likelihood of loneliness’ among young people. She pointed to a few places—including Sweden and Norway, with the island of Manhattan following closely behind—where rates of single-person households are approaching 50 per cent. The real fruits of the sexual revolution have been isolation, loneliness and the breakdown of human relationships on an unforeseen scale, Eberstadt said.
Throughout human history, the institution of the family has been a vital one, providing a locus of connection and protection for the vulnerable. But recently, ‘The fracturing of the family has empowered the predatory and further hurt the weak, including, most of all, children.’
Although the social statistics Eberstadt shared were far from encouraging, she challenged her audience to see the current situation as an opportunity. Rather than backing away from the Church’s teaching, we should be embracing it all the more:
The ennobled vision of men, women and children put forward by the magisterium shines all the more brightly against our social realities … Don’t capitulate. Don’t soft-peddle Church teachings about the family when their truths are being highlighted as never before.
She called people of faith to reach out to ‘the walking wounded’—those whose lives are in need of grace, and who need to hear that they are made in the image and likeness of God, that their lives have meaning and purpose.
Eberstadt predicted that grassroots movements will play a central role in the Church’s response to this reality, launching ‘on-the-ground’ initiatives to help struggling families to know the Church cares for and values them. She recommended that parents remain vigilant regarding their families’ use of smartphones, arguing that the rise of this technology has only deepened the crisis of loneliness among the young. Paying attention to our use of language—so that we speak and live in ways that bear witness to the goodness of the Church’s teaching—is also critical, she said.
Ultimately, she said, people are struggling to catalyse an identity for themselves in the wake of the sexual revolution, and this is an area the Church can usefully speak into:
As people lose ties to their families, as the gravitational pull of family and Church recedes from people, they become desperate to find alternatives … It’s easy to caricature some of this identity politics, but at the same time the people who are drawn into it, I think, are desperate and lonely and don’t have access to better answers for how to construct their identity.
In his response, Archbishop Peter A Comensoli reflected on how, in recent years, extended periods of lockdown across the Western world have exposed this crisis of loneliness we are facing. He also reflected on the many dysfunctional families that appear throughout the Bible, and how there is much there that might resonate with families today. Amid the goodness of family life, there is also difficulty and brokenness.
‘Families aren’t whole but they are holy, and that difference is very, very important,’ he said.
‘Somehow, family is the way of God,’ he went on, and taking the way of the Gospel also means embracing the way of the family, entering into ‘the way of humanity God has set out for us.’
Mary Eberstadt was here with her husband, political economist Nicholas Eberstadt, on their first visit to Australia. They are participating in multiple speaking events in Melbourne and Sydney.
