PARENTS. -
I. DEFINITION
Parents, from the Latin genitor, are those who have begotten us to life. St. Thomas calls them: “the particular principle of our being, as God is the universal principle” (Sum. Theol., 2a-2ae, q. 112, a. 5). For just as God created men, so parents procreate children; and just as God preserves creatures in their being and directs them to their end through His Providence, so parents safeguard their children with their care and, through their advice and example, govern and direct them to their end. The relations of parents toward their children belong to natural law, since the domestic society precedes any legitimate intervention by the State seeking to assume for itself the task of educating children, and such intervention would be illicit and arbitrary.The advocates of this view are well known. Parents, they say, very rarely have the ability to instill in their children the education and guidance necessary for the common good of the society in which they will one day live and work. On the other hand, the State has requirements of unity and defense to which all must contribute. Therefore, it is the State’s role to subordinate the various tendencies of parents to these requirements, which are ultimately those of the community. Those who reason thus forget that while the State has the right and duty to intervene and assist in the education of citizens and even to replace parents when they are unable to do so, it can in no case alter or abrogate the dictates of natural law, which are inscribed by God Himself in the heart of every man. The opposite error, no less dangerous, is that of those who, rejecting the authority of the State in the education of children, yet maintain that parents have no such right either, claiming that children are entirely independent of any authority and that only they themselves have the right to choose the kind of education they most prefer. Pius XI addresses these and other errors regarding the rights and duties of parents at length in his encyclical Divini illius Magistri of 31 Dec. 1929 and refutes them.