Now that Iâ??ve spent the week unburdening myself of my big-picture critique of what happened at this monthâ??s synod on the family in Rome, I want to conclude this spate of Catholic writing by saying something briefly about what I think was the missed opportunity for the Catholic Church (and not just for the church) that those two weeks represented. That miss starts, in a certain way, with the very title and theme of the synod, and itâ??s a failure that implicates both the Catholic right and the Catholic left, whose shared focus on explicitly familial and sexual relationships may be crowding out Christian ideas, and Christian models of community and religious life, that the modern world is going to need, perhaps desperately, if current trends in social life persist.
Ever since the sexual revolution, Catholicismâ??s right (loosely defined) has looked at the decline of marriage and the two-parent family and argued that now more than ever the church needs to offer a bulwark of support to the embattled marital ideal, while the churchâ??s left (loosely defined) has argued that the faith needs to find a way to be more welcoming to and accepting of the new â??family diversityâ? (people in second marriages, same-sex couples, etc) that the revolution and its attendant changes ushered in. This is an important debate, obviously â?? if I didnâ??t think so, my recent output would be rather different! â?? but itâ??s also a pretty well-worn one at this point, and it hasnâ??t necessarily kept up with another major structural trend in human relationships right now: Not the rise of family diversity, but the rise of a more literally post-familial way of life, in which many, many more people arenâ??t married, donâ??t have kids, and/or live all by themselves.
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