Family Matters

One way or another, families have been in the news this week.

That is not a good thing.

Families gathering on a beach planned on celebrating the first day of Hanukkah last Sunday. Then a father-son duo killed 15 of them and wounded dozens more. That father’s dead now, too.

News media covering the break in finals week routines at Brown University cycled through to discussions of the dead students’ family connections.

Rob Reiner and his wife abruptly stopped living last weekend. Police arrested Reiner’s youngest son, charging him with killing the couple.¹

That left me feeling even less happy than usual about what’s in my news feed: which, together with a quote I saw in an Advent calendar, got me started thinking.

Life, Death, and Duties

If you’re bracing yourself for a rant about how “All in the Family” and “The Princess Bride” destroyed the American family, or why we need tougher university control laws, relax.

I won’t do that, partly because it’s silly. Besides, there’s a superabundance of sound and fury getting flung around as it it is.

On the other hand, I’ve got a thought or two to share.

For one thing, I think that murder isn’t nice and we shouldn’t do it.

That’s my personal opinion, but there’s more to the idea than a single individual’s preferences.

Since I’m a Catholic, and take my faith seriously, I’ve got some counter-cultural ideas about life, death, and making sense:

• Human life — all human life — is sacred, a gift from God
  (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2258)
• Murder, intentionally killing an innocent person, is wrong
  (Catechism, 2268)
• Suicide, intentionally killing oneself, is wrong
  (Catechism, 2280-2283)
• It’s complicated
  (Catechism, 2258-2317)

For another, families — mom, dad, kids, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, cousins and all that — are important. Again, not just my personal opinion.

Families are the “original cell of social life”. Each family matters. But families aren’t all that matters. The top of my priority list is where God belongs. (Catechism, 2113, 2207)

There’s more I could say about families and what I believe. Basically, it’s complicated. (Catechism, 2199-2233)

I’ll settle for sharing an excerpt from something Pope Leo XIV said in June, along with some of my thoughts.

Good Ideas

“…I encourage you, then, to be examples of integrity to your children, acting as you want them to act, educating them in freedom through obedience, always seeing the good in them and finding ways to nurture it. And you, dear children, show gratitude to your parents. To say ‘thank you’ each day for the gift of life and for all that comes with it is the first way to honour your father and your mother (cf. Ex 20:12). Finally, dear grandparents and elderly people, I recommend that you watch over your loved ones with wisdom and compassion, and with the humility and patience that come with age.

“In the family, faith is handed on together with life, generation after generation. It is shared like food at the family table and like the love in our hearts. In this way, families become privileged places in which to encounter Jesus, who loves us and desires our good, always….”
(Homily, Holy Mass for the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and the Elderly, Pope Leo XIV (June 1, 2025)) [emphasis mine] [second paragraph quoted in USCCB’s Advent Calendar for 2025]

About saying ‘thank you’ every day, I’m pretty sure the pope didn’t mean using those exact words — or even using spoken, or written, language to get the idea across. How we act matters at least as much as what we say. Maybe more. Probably more.

I think an important point is that each of us have responsibilities in our families: children and parents. (Catechism, 2214-2233)

Those responsibilities didn’t stop when I became an adult, or when our children became adults. We’ve still got responsibilities. One of them is not trying to tell my kids how to run their lives. (Catechism, 2232-2233)

For me and my wife, we’ve been blessed with ‘good kids’.

I suspect it helped that we know what we believe, why we believe it, and at least try acting as if what we believe matters.

The kids not making really daft decisions is certainly a factor, too. We’ve all got free will, and that’s another topic.

Not expecting or demanding that this be a ‘perfect family’ — that arguably helped, too.

I’ve talked about, or at least mentioned, this sort of thing before:

• “So? Let Her!” (November 8, 2025)
• “Holding Infants, Raising People” (November 1, 2025)
  • Vocations
    • People, Duties, and Doing Our Job
• “‘No Such Thing as a Perfect Family’” (March 4, 2025)
  

¹ In the week’s news:

• Wikipedia
  • 2025 Bondi Beach shooting
  • 2025 Brown University shooting
  • Rob Reiner (played Meathead in “All in the Family”, directed “The Princess Bride”)