Family Life “Is The Backbone Of Civilisation”

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29824, 17 May 1962, Page 2

Family Life “Is The Backbone Of Civilisation”

Civilisation depended on the family, and the family was the backbone of civilisation, said the Bishop of Christchurch (the Rt Rev. A. K. Warren) in an address at the inaugural service of Christian Family Year, held in the Christchurch Cathedral last evening.

The relationship between the rise and fall of civilisations and the state of the family at the time had been very marked, he said.

Christian Family Year, sponsored by the Mothers’ Union of the Anglican Communion, was launched throughout the world yesterday. At last evening’s service more than 600 members of the Mothers’ Union and Young Wives’ groups in the Christchurch area rededicated themselves to service. Members of the clergy and many husbands of members of the union also attended. The Dean of Christchurch (the Very Rev. W. A. Pyatt) conducted the service.

Bishop Warren took his text from the Book of Genesis. the earliest reference to family in the Bible, which says: "And the Lord God said it is not good that man should be alone: I will make him an helpmeet for him”

“Our humanity rests upon patterns of behaviour which have been woven together, but which are extremely fragile and are never directly inherited.” Bishop Warren said Behaviour Patterns Behaviour was not imimbedded in physical structure. No child, who did not have the example of a previous generation, could exhibit the same kind of habits or patterns of behaviour as the post generation. This meant that in the family the child had always to be taught afresh and to learn from the example of its parents.

•‘The second point in the development of human society is that wherever you find any form of family, you find also some set permanent arrangement in which males help the females in caring for the children while they are young.” he said.

The distinctive thing about man’s family life was the way in which the male nurtured and helped to provide food for the women and children.

Human beings had by a long and laborious process

learned to be human, and history had shown that where humans deliberately and purposefully gave up what they had learned in this way, the nation suffered

If family life was to survive at its highest level of development and at its most ethical level of attainment —if Christian marriage was to survive—each generation must hand on to the next the knowledge of how to train succeeding generations. "Challenge To Church”

“It is just this that poses the challenge to the Church today, the challenge to which our response is this Christian Family Year,” he said. It was not without significance that the most successful and large-scale deflections from the highest form of family life had occurred, not among primitive peoples close to starvation level, but among the great nations which had ample resources and strong empires—the populations with power.

Soviet Russia had tried experiments such as legitimising abortion and cutting down parental responsibilities and found they did not work. Abortion was now illegal, and tremendous insistence on the responsibility of the family and its unity had been reinstated, Bishop Warren said Partnership

The family must be a permanent arrangement in which the partnership between man and wife was truly a partner-

ship and the children were a joint responsibility, especially jn association with their upbringing. Those who had studied all forms of society had come to the conclusion that no society had ever invented a form of marriage strong enough to stick that did not contain the “till death us do part” assumption, he said.

“May we in this country turn our backs on all such experiments as have taken place in other countries to destroy family life, and may we build such strength in our homes and families that the nation will prosper because it is both secure and happy,” Bishop Warren said.