“...the NAZARETH MEASURE of length and weight and worth is the Family – that terrestrial “Holy and Undivided Three”. Let no guile of social usefulness betray you into hurting the authority of the Father, the chastity of the Mother, the rights and therefore the property of the Child. Social and economic laws are more subtle but not less infallible than physical laws. No programme of good intentions will undo the mischief caused by an interference with family life. As well as try to arrest a thrown bomb by a plea of good intentions as try to prevent the final ruin of the State by the plea that our ruin of the family was well-intentioned”
Long after I had forgotten the specifics of much of what else I had read in that book (although some of its best known essays such as A Call to Contemplatives and Authority and Property made a great impression on me) the phrase THE NAZARETH MEASURE stayed with me. Working in Parliament, and thus possibly taking an above average interest in government policies and legislative debates, it became clearer and clearer to me with each passing day that, occasional words from politicians aside, the actions of those ruling our country showed no sign of comprehension of the Nazareth Measure.
Moreover, while Christians might be expected most strongly to fight to protect the family, given their understanding of its sanctification, canonisation if you will, through the eternal verity of the Holy Family, Christ Child, Our Blessed Lady, and her Blessed Spouse St Joseph, the family is also a subject of natural moral law. Even those with no Christian or professed religious beliefs might be expected to come to its defence.
Yet, those in power, professed Christian or not, seemed to regard all those attempting to defend the sacred family as “fanatick”, out-moded and misguided and were only too happy amidst the jubilation of the not yet sated debauchees of the new dispensation of license to raze the defences of the family, the sacred grove of the social forest, in order to accommodate the newfangled and the perverted artificial constructs of a post-Christian and immoral society.
This blog (that word again!) was dreamed up one evening's journey home, after a day of news stories, government initiatives and parliamentary debates, all of which seemed to cohere into a picture of the destruction already wrought and still being wreaked upon the family. The family helped to preserve the natural moral order, at least in part, before the Incarnation, and, since Christ's Birth, Life, Passion, Death and Resurrection, acted to preserve true civilisation and the Faith through the decadence of a disintegrating Roman Empire and the turbulence that followed its dismemberment. Monasteries are rightly credited with the salvation of true culture and society – but without Catholic families the monasteries would not just have been empty – they would not have existed at all.
Only the family, and particularly the Catholic family, can provide the necessary foundation for a re-birth of natural moral law and for the re-baptism of a society fit to have Christ as its King. The Nazareth Measure is vital to help build a country of saints, of holy fathers and holy mothers and children who wish to grow up to serve God in Truth and in Charity. When it is lost to sight or to understanding, the family will fail and true society and culture will fall. When it is kept at the forefront of mind and action it will restore the family to its primacy of honour in the servant State.
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