The expression «traditional family» is frequently used today in contexts where different forms of unions, particularly homosexual ones, are presented for public approval. Indeed, this expression really states a pleonasm, because, according to what the most eminent anthropologists believe, the institution of the family established on monogamy and heterosexual marriage is seen in all human societies. It is true that the models of family organization present a real diversity; but beyond such diversity we always find a stable nucleus. The family is always reduced to the stable union of a man and a woman who love each other and plan to transmit life. The term family is unequivocal then, it has only one acceptable meaning, because it refers to a natural institution universally present before and outside Christianity. This institution seems to be debated today: the family would belong to an outdated paradigm, to an episteme of another age. It might be even a historical curiosity or a cultural product destined to be superceded. The expression «traditional family» is to be used cautiously then, because it contributes to undervaluing the natural institution that is being pointed out. With a specious semantic transfer, it can be used to make other kinds of unions benefit from the status that must continue to be reserved to the family which is monogamous and heterosexual. (Enlarged family; Family and Personalism; Single-parent Family; Recomposed Family; Motherhood and Feminism; New models of the Family; Patriarchy and Matriarchy)

The expression “traditional family” has in itself a substantial ambiguity. At least at first glance, in fact, the adjective “traditional” recalls the past, the family of yesterday, a type of family that in many ways no longer exists: the so called “extended” family with many children, grandparents that live under the same roof, a rigid distribution of roles, a more or less marked subordination of women, quite linear intergenerational relationships and social functions taken for granted, developed by a sort of automatism. But if it is true that “the more or less lasting union, with social approval, of a man, a woman and their children, is a universal phenomenon, present in every kind of society”[1] , then the adjective “traditional” could also refer to what constitutes a sort of constitutive element of the family, a permanent description that will not be eroded by the wear and tear of time and which is indispensable to continue speaking about the family.

In other words, besides the many transformations that, especially in these last years, have been registered about the family either in terms of structure or also in terms of functions, besides the proclamations of the pluralization of familiar forms as a characteristic and liberating feature of modern society, I believe it is still possible, even necessary, to establish criteria capable of distinguishing the family, we could even say the “traditional family”, from other forms of social aggregations. Such criteria could be formulated as follows: a family truly exists only where at least a heterosexual couple exists, or a parent-child relationship, that is socially recognized, that is sanctioned by a public, religious or civil pact.

To speak about the “traditional family” implies that we have to take into account the past, that is to say what’s inevitably changed or had a crisis, and also the present and future as authentic dimensions of the explanation of every authentically “traditional” reality, which is therefore living and vital. As Marcello Veneziani [2] wrote in a striking way, “tradition is what remains after the disaster, not what used to shine before the disaster and then was extinguished.” We should not consider the past of the institution of the family neither in a nostalgic way, nor in a vandalistic way, as if the “traditional family” is exclusively reducible to certain historical forms in which it was manifested and of which we have now definitely taken leave. In both cases in fact there is the risk of not grasping completely an essential aspect of each truly traditional institution: the fact that it is the red thread that unites the past and the future through the present, “the ancestors to their grandchildren through us,” as Veneziani [3] would say; in short, an intrinsically “relational” reality, which, just for this reason, does not suffer sclerosis in any of its forms, but it is also not indifferent to the forms that it takes from time to time.

As Pierpaolo Donati says, “in spite of the great changes in familiar forms, the criteria for the definition of the family remain distinctive as regards the ones used to identify other primary social units. They are connected by the fact that, in continuity with the past, but differently from the past: 1) the family still remains the place in which the prohibition to invert sexual roles (male and female) and generational roles (between parents and children) is enforced, including the prohibition of incest, even if the sexes and different generations are not segregated anymore, but interact profoundly together; 2) the family has become that specific social relationship to which is increasingly entrusted the irreplaceable task of personalizing the person, through specific processes of socialization that are essential for the maturation of the child and the adult, if and insofar as “making family” means to steer communication to the totality of the person according to a norm of solidarity and total reciprocity” [4].

The society we live in seems to have lost all interest in the family; sometimes we would even say that it wants to weaken its functions, banishing it to the completely private arena of emotions and of intimate satisfactions. And yet today, as never before, the quality of family relationships is decisive for the well being and happiness of individuals and for society itself. The more society becomes individualistic, pluralistic, ethically neutral, allowing persons to decide for themselves about their own “good” and their own “happiness”, the more demanding the need becomes for a “place” where human relationships are characterized by freedom, gift of self, and by a love that involves precisely the “totality of the person.”

After all, the question becomes one of taking seriously the problem of “socialization” in which the family has always exercised a key role. The tendency to reduce the family to an eminently private fact, to a sort of primary cell of individual life, rather than of society, seems to weaken its socializing function. The same process of socialization, instead of becoming a process of “formation”, tends to become a mere process of “communication”, where “informing” is much more important than “forming”. There is a lot of talk about autonomy, freedom, responsibility, tolerance and trust as indispensable resources in a pluralistic society like ours. This inevitably re-proposes the family in its formative and socializing role [5]. It is in the family that these resources, which are so important for society, begin to be acquired. They are also acquired much better when the family is a family in the real sense of the word, that is to say a place of reciprocity between the sexes and generations whose primary “good” is represented by the capacity to build relationships geared above all to the “totality of the person.”

In this sense it seems to me that we can continue to talk about the “traditional family” without falling into the reductionism of those who make it a simple archaeological form, definitely overtaken by the events that have marked and continue to mark our complex society. One name is a reference for all: Anthony Giddens, certainly one of the most authoritative contemporary sociologists.

The traditional family is, according to Giddens, the kind of family that developed during the period of time from approximately the Middle Ages to some fifty years ago. Its principal characteristics are summarized as follows [6]; first of all it was “an economic unit”–people used to get married and to start a family for economic reasons, without any regard for love or physical attraction. It was the place of “inequality between men and women”–women were considered legally as a kind of property belonging to their husband or father; it was the place where not even children were considered “for themselves”, but only “for the contribution they could give to the common economic commitment”; moreover, “except in some elite groups, in the traditional family, sexuality was always directed towards reproduction.”

Giddens lists the characteristics of the “traditional family” in the above mentioned terms, and insists on the unbridgeable abyss that separates it from our sensibility and culture. He feels the duty to point out something, that I consider very important in order to understand not only the way he reasons, but also a widespread way of thinking today: “What its supporters among the western countries call the traditional family represents, in reality, a late phase of transition in family development from the 1950s: in that period the percentage of working women was still relatively low and it was still difficult to divorce, especially for women, without this becoming a mark of shame. Nevertheless, men and women in that period were much more equal than they had ever been before, in practice and in law: the family had ceased to be an economic unit and the idea of romantic love as a basis for marriage had substituted the concept of marriage as an economic agreement” [7].

Unfortunately it is not clear who Giddens is referring to, when he talks about “supporters” of the traditional family. In any case, I seriously doubt the sense of defending the traditional family thinking that its model could be the one from “the 1950s”. In fact, it would be a battle lost in advance, a rearguard battle, led only with weapons of nostalgia, which would have the effect of confusing the substance of something, the idea of the family, with its concrete historical forms. Indirectly, in this battle one would end by agreeing with people like Giddens who are convinced that the family is nothing other than the forms that it assumed historically. They have no other argument against the family except for historical facts; they use phenomenology against ontology and try to strengthen their own confidence with the simple observation that «since then—the 1950s—the family has changed even more” [8].

Everyone knows the direction that, especially in the West, this change has taken: the upsetting of family roles, increases in the number of working women, an increase in divorces, fewer marriages, an increase in single people and in those living together in so-called “de facto couples”, less children, claims of a right to get married and have children even by homosexual couples, and more that Giddens does not fail to carefully point out. What is nevertheless striking in this long excursus from the medieval family to the present day is the nonchalance with which all these changes, without exception, are positively valued as a sort of necessary result of that “movement toward individuality” which Simmel talked about at the beginning of the XX century. It is almost as if, for example, the end of women’s subjection to men and the development of family relationships more and more marked by reciprocal responsibility and reciprocal respect have the same positive significance as giving an equal status to de facto couples living together and the family built on marriage.

In this context it becomes nearly impossible to talk about the family because the concept is ambiguous and slippery; it becomes even more difficult to subordinate the recognition of a true family to the presence of at least of one of the two conditions we were talking about at the beginning: the existence of a heterosexual couple or of a parent-child relationship that is socially recognized, that is to say sanctioned by a religious or civil public pact. There is nothing left to do but to observe a fact: the current pluralization of family forms and the definitive fading of the traditional family. Giddens reduces it, not coincidentally, to be like other institutions of our society, a simple “shell-institution”. It is an institution “that is still called the same, but its interior is fundamentally changed” [9].

Compared to the radically historicist strategy followed by Giddens, our attempt to define the family relationship “ontologically” presents at least one advantage. It offers criteria in the light of which to read and even evaluate the various forms that this relationship has historically taken. In fact, when the family is simply seen as “making a couple” or a “shell” in which to place everything, it is easy to risk losing a sense of its social meaning and functions. As Pierpaolo Donati observed, “it remains more convenient to start from the general concept of “family”, and then distinguish later the different kinds of “families”, instead of doing the opposite. In fact, if we start from the mere observation of a plurality of “domestic situations” (simply of the many different ways of living together), it becomes impossible to reach a sociologically adequate concept of the family. Mere cohabitation must never be confused with that specific relationship that we call, not by analogy or in an undifferentiated way, the family in the proper sense. It exists only if among those living together there is a specific relationship of objective and reciprocal belonging as a stable couple linked by a generative agreement and/or as a relationship of generational descent” [10].

I would say above all that this strategy allows one to see the ambivalence of certain developments, without any nostalgia for “yesterday’s family”, but not on the other hand accepting supinely everything that is happening to the institution of the family today. “The situation in which the family finds itself–writes John Paul II in Familiaris consortio–presents positive and negative aspects: the first are a sign of the salvation of Christ operating in the world; the second, a sign of the refusal that man gives to the love of God. On the one hand, in fact, there is a more lively awareness of personal freedom and greater attention to the quality of interpersonal relationships in marriage, to promoting the dignity of women, to responsible procreation, to the education of children. There is also an awareness of the need for the development of interfamily relationships, for reciprocal spiritual and material assistance, the rediscovery of the ecclesial mission proper to the family and its responsibility for the building of a more just society. On the other hand, however, signs are not lacking of a disturbing degradation of some fundamental values: a mistaken theoretical and practical concept of the independence of the spouses in relation to each other; serious misconceptions regarding the relationship of authority between parents and children; the concrete difficulties that the family itself experiences in the transmission of values; the growing number of divorces; the scourge of abortion; the ever more frequent recourse to sterilization; the appearance of a truly contraceptive mentality.”

To speak of “the traditional family” must have, among other things, a sense of encouragement to discover this weaving of “light and shadow” that is typical of today’s family. It is necessary to be able to see both the risks and the opportunities that are offered in our times to the institution of the family. Our conviction is that, in spite of the changes that characterize it, criteria exist that allow us to distinguish “what makes up a family, from what does not make a family” [11]. The concrete ways to articulate this “relational good” have certainly changed; certain rigidities and automatisms of the past no longer exist; but the family has not become for this reason a simple “shell of an institution” in the sense Giddens means. The family, that is to say a place of reciprocity between the sexes and generations following the meaning we used before, has become a goal to conquer day by day for the good of individuals and of society; “a task and a challenge,” that can be read in the Letter to families of John Paul II.