Pope Leo XIV has spent recent weeks telling Catholics that the family still holds. "Do not give in to those who dismiss the Christian family as outdated," he said Monday at a Mass in Buenos Aires attended by some 2.5 million people, by local authorities' estimate. Today more than ever, he said, the family "remains a pillar amid the many insecurities of our time." He posted the lines on X that afternoon.
Grace before meals, prayer at bedtime, grandparents teaching children to pray and Mass on Sunday pass on the faith "along with life itself," he said.
The day before, at the national shrine of Our Lady of the Thirty-Three in Florida, Uruguay, Leo spoke to fathers. Children learn much, he said, "by seeing that their father can kneel before God without feeling that he is any less of a man for doing it."
His homily for an Oct. 14 Mass marking 10 years of Amoris Laetitia, read by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle while Leo recovered from lung surgery, put it plainly: "The world has no future without strong families open to the gift of children."
On each point Leo spoke the Church's teaching plainly, and he deserves credit for it.
That teaching puts the family first. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the family "the original cell of social life." Pope Leo XIII, the present pope's namesake, wrote in Rerum Novarum in 1891 that the family has "at least equal rights with the State." The household, he reasoned, existed before the political community, so its rights come first.
That first society has a head. The family is a hierarchy, with the father at its head, and a society shaped by feminism badly needs wives who embrace that order. St. Paul names the husband "the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church" and tells wives to be subject to their husbands "as to the Lord" (Eph 5:22-23). Husbands, in turn, must love their wives "as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (Eph 5:25).
The popes taught the same order. Leo XIII called the husband "the chief of the family and the head of the wife" in Arcanum in 1880 and said the wife obeys "not, indeed, as a servant, but as a companion." The Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent tells husbands to treat their wives "generously and honorably" and wives to give "a willing and ready obedience" in all that is consistent with Christian piety. Pius XI, borrowing St. Augustine's phrase, called this the "order of love" in Casti Connubii in 1930. "If the man is the head, the woman is the heart," he wrote.
Rome answered the feminism of its day. Pius X put it bluntly to an Austrian feminist in April 1906, in remarks published by the Vienna daily Neues Wiener Tagblatt: "Women electors, women deputies? Oh, no!" In 1930 Pius XI wrote that the "emancipation" of women from the duties of wife and mother was "not the true emancipation of woman" but "the debasing of the womanly character and the dignity of motherhood."
Our age took that path, and homes lost what Pius warned they would: the husband his wife, the children their mother, the home its guardian. The remedy is to restore the order. Husbands must lead and give themselves for their wives. Wives must embrace their husbands' headship.
Leo XIV asked fathers to kneel before God and thanked the mothers who kept the faith at home. That is the order in small: a man who leads by first obeying God, and a wife whose heart holds the home.
St. Thomas Aquinas taught that man is "debtor chiefly to his parents and his country, after God." The state did not make the family, and it may not remake it.
Britain is testing that order this week. Under its draft Conversion Practices Bill, a court deciding whether conduct meant to change a person's sexual orientation or transgender identity was abusive would weigh any "psychological or emotional pressure," the published text shows. It never mentions parents. A pope who calls the family a pillar has given parents there a word to stand on.
Leo told Argentines that every family "can become a seed of genuine renewal for this country." Parents who pray with their children do work no government can do for them.
