A Modern Christian Family

June 18, 2011 marks the Birth Centennial of my grandfather, the late Dr Paulino E Albano Sr. In his memory I am reprinting a speech he made in 1967 which was given to me by his wife and my grandmother, Dr Pilar Valdes-Albano. Its message, for me, is still as relevant and timely as when it was first delivered 44 years ago.

I go for things modern, there is no doubt about that. I enjoy driving the smoothly sailing car of the 1970s vintage. I thrill to the sound of the stereophonic music, and I feel wonderfully rested under the cool air of a quiet air conditioner. I find pleasure in watching young boys and girls away on the floor to the rhythm of the hit tunes of the day and when challenged, I can keep in step with any modern dance as if I were an expert. As a physician, needless to say, I can subscribe to the latest medical procedures, and use the most recently discovered medicines, and use the most up to date instruments in my practice.

But if you ask me what my concept of a good family happens to be, I certainly refuse to be modern there. I am stubbornly traditional in my notion of what parents and good children ought to be. I don’t go for family planning; I never dictate how many kids I should have and how long an interval the deliveries should be paced. Whatever His magnanimity God has in store for my wife, Mrs Albano, and myself, I accept with a sense of humility and gratitude. Even after producing eleven children of our own, we continue to be receiving more from unwed mothers who abandon their babies in our hospital and who, in the name of Christian Charity, became our very own.

Incidentally, I never received a special citation for my modernism but in precisely the matter over which I have had the distinction of getting two awards: in 1964, the brood I head was declared the Model Catholic Family of Tondo and only last year, the Family Week Committee conferred upon mine the honor of being the Model Family of Manila 1966.

What then is a Model Family? What gives the family its Moral and Spiritual health? Where in is the source of its strength, the basis of its Happiness and the Hope of its future?

My old fashioned belief is that a morally strong and spiritually refreshed family is one where the father seeks to follow the footsteps of St Joseph; the mother imitate the ways of Our Lady; and the children aim to pattern their lives after the Christ Child. My conservatism at once poses a serious problem. What are the chances of our modern world of the average family imitating the ideal Holy Family that lived in Nazareth over nineteen hundred years ago?

Is our Atomic Modern Age for instance, conducive to fathers modelling their lives after that of St Joseph? Very little is said about St Joseph in the Gospels except that he was a carpenter, was poor, and was just. And what is so special about a carpenter? For one thing, he is a person who builds – houses or furniture or the like. Now how many of us are dedicated to or even interested in the task of building and not destroying? It is significant that those who make headlines in our day are destroyers not builders. Our most popular writers are not those who have constructive ideas, but those who can annihilate – with a withering phrase or a worthy remark – the high and the mighty. The very presence in our midst of yellow journals which project from calumny and slander is a sign of the times. Take the attitude of the average modern youth towards the fair sex. Is he interested in “raising a mortal to the skies or in dragging an angel down”?

But St Joseph did not only build houses. He also built a home – the model home. A house shields us from the rain without, a home surrounds us with love from within. But even more than a home St Joseph built to perfection the edifice of his own soul. So perfectly that he has come down in history with the title of “being a just man”.

Quite unfortunately, the title of ‘Just’ would be the last to be attributed to the Modern Man. For ours is a materialistic age. The self-made man is always pictured as one who has risen from poverty to riches, for success today is measured in terms of dollars and pesos. Indeed what is Modern Man is most afraid of is not being unjust but being poor. Poverty is thought of as the greatest evil, the elimination of which would usher in a brave new world. What would St Joseph think of your attempts to solve our problems; whether those of the family, of the nation or of mankind – in terms of economics rather than ethics? St Joseph was not ashamed of his poverty. Knowing fully well that we cannot serve God and Mamon at the same time.

And if we take ‘just’ to mean law-abiding, the more Modern Man fails to measure up to the foster-father of Jesus. How lawless Modern Man is in the core of his living can be seen in license. Whenever he talks of freedom from the law and not freedom within the law. Liberty and law are thought of as contradictory and not complementary. St Joseph who looked upon the state authorities as God’s representatives on earth, did not think so. Even though it meant inconvenience to his family, for Mary was with child, he followed the edict that required him to go to Bethlehem for the census. How different he was from Modern Man who looks upon opposition to authority as almost a virtue. So many pride themselves in being against the government.

Husbands have to imitate St Joseph in his industry, in his sincerity, in his poverty, in his piety, in his love of poverty, and in his love for justice. Alone all husbands should emulate St Joseph’s approach to the problems of life, for true to his vocation as a carpenter, he always sought to build and never destroy.

And what can the Modern Woman learn from Our Lady? In this age when birth control and abortion are so widespread, what has Our Blessed Mother to teach her? At Nazareth, Mary did not refuse to become the Mother of Christ once it was made known to her that it was the will of God. At Calvary she did not refuse to become the Mother of mankind. Although sinful humanity is a very poor substitute for her first born, and the Sinless One.

What is woman’s function as distinct to that of man? Genesis makes it clear that man has the duty to till the soil, to work, and woman to bear children. So a woman does not become fully a woman till she becomes a mother. As Fulton Sheen puts it: “Man cooperates with nature; woman cooperates with God.” Man was called to rule the earth, woman to be the bearer of life that comes from God. That is the reason why a woman is unhappy when she cannot become a mother – either physically or spiritually – for her vocation is to generate life either in the flesh or in the spirit.

Because Modern Woman is blind to the sublimity of motherhood, she is slowly drifting from domesticity. She prefers the office to the home. She would rather be a career woman than to be a wife and mother. She wants to prove that she is the equal of man by invading fields of endeavor proper to man. But it might be objected, why should she not desire to be equal to man? For the very simple reason for centuries woman has always been placed upon a pedestal by man. If woman’s vocation is to be a mother, her mission is to give Love and Life. We see the perfect fulfilment of this mission in the Mother of God. So great was Mary’s love for God that her body followed her soul. She was assumed to heaven. So great is her love for sinful humanity that she has returned several times to earth – at La Sallette, at Lourdes, at Fatima to warn, to counsel, to guide her erring children. And the result of Mary’s love for God and Man has always been life – the Eternal Life, that was Christ and the immortal lives that are the saints.

Both Love and Life, however have difficulty getting a foothold in our contemporary world. More than one third of the world is under Communism – a system dedicated to hate. Even in places where love has not given way to hate, it has given way to sex. Today woman uses her physical attraction to make man sink deeper into the mire of lust. And because the Modern Woman has forgotten her modesty, the Modern Man has forgotten his reverence. A return of Mary is imperative if we are to recover Love and Life, without which a family cannot be happy, without which it does not have any meaning at all.

The third member of the Holy Family of course, the Child Jesus. Christ’s hidden life in Nazareth is summed up in one word: Obedience. As Fulton Sheen points out: “Our Lord spent three hours in Redeeming, three years in Teaching, and Thirty years in Obeying in order that a rebellious, proud, and diabolically independent world might learn the value of Obedience.” Indeed the only recoded acts of Our Blessed Lord’s childhood are acts of obedience – to God, the heavenly Father, and to Mary and Joseph. He shows the special duty of childhood and of youth to obey parents as the vicegerents of God.

With this difficulty can the Modern Youth follow the footsteps of the young Jesus? For the modern atmosphere is one permeated by the foul air of disobedience. Today it is almost considered a virtue by the teenagers to go against the wishes of those whom they contemptuously called as ‘the old man’ and ‘the old lady’.

And this spirit of disobedience has transcended the family circle and is infecting the community as a whole. The modern world is one where opposition to authority automatically puts one in the ‘right’. Everyone has rights except those in authority. In this modern age, the subjects act like rulers and rulers act like subjects.

The result of obedience is growth: of obedience to the laws of the intellect is mental growth; to the laws of nature is physical growth and to the natural moral law is spiritual growth. The result of Christ’s obedience to the laws of God and of His parents was that “He grew in wisdom and age and grace.”, that is, He became intellectually, physically, and spiritually mature.

Growth is silent. That is why the period ‘when Christ grew’ is often referred to as the Hidden Life of Our Lord. To be hidden is to remain unknown - so that the modern youth find hardest to bear. Our young dream of being popular at all costs. Girls would even dress immodestly just to attract attention: one magazine interviewed more than one thousand teenagers to find out the probable cause of juvenile delinquency. The result of the poll indicated that the main preoccupation of modern youth was that to be popular, one must never say ‘no’ to his companions. In short, as one of those interviewed admitted: “To be a good guy one must be a bad boy.”

Growth is silent – but modern youth is growing amidst surroundings full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Silence and solitude have no longer any meaning for our modern youth. How much we have these conditions of real growth is reflected in the attitude of people towards the Contemplative orders. They consider Contemplatives as wasting their time while the world is in torment. How they forget that it is the men of ideas and not men of action who have really changed the world and have renewed the face of the earth.

Our modern youth must follow the example of the Young Jesus if they are to remain the Hope of the future. They must recover the virtue of Obedience and must realize that this world has as much need of good followers as of good leaders. They must remember that leadership is not built in a day – that Our Lord spent thirty years in silence and solitude before He emerged into public life. But when He did go out to teach the multitude so thorough was His preparation that He spoke as one having authority and the people, amazed at His qualities, exclaimed “Never had there been a man like unto this man.”

Never had there been a family like unto the Holy Family - never a father like St Joseph, the embodiment of justice; never a mother like Mary, the incarnation of love; never a child like Jesus, example of obedience. Obedience, Justice, and Love. These are the three cornerstones of a Holy Family and therefore of a Happy Family. The average modern family will have difficulty being Christian in a world much given to injustice, to hate, and to disobedience. But with the grace of God to whom nothing is impossible, a Christian home, a Christian family can be an actuality even in this Modern Atomic Age.

Thank you.