Michaela Freiova

Ladies and gentlemen,

It's an honour and pleasure for me to speak here, at the World Congress of Families, in front of the people, who see the family as a crossroads of our civilization. 

In course of public debate concerning marriage and family,  skeptical voices, casting doubt on the sense of family-law legislation and voicing arguments to the effect that the numbers of persons who prefer informal cohabitation without any legal framework as well as those of mothers without long-term attachment to males keep growing, are often audible. This is the source of attempts to adjust family-law norms to such facts, including a definition of marriage as free as possible, insertion of maximum of public control between parents and children, and the like. – I believe that the weakness of this position lies in its vision of society as a monolithic block within which the changes také place in one direction only.

While one direction of development of the decomposed social consensus leads to more and more pronounced atomization of society, isolation of individuals and their immersion within themselves, western societies display also development trends to the contrary, being a more or less deliberate reaction to spontaneous atomization  social trends. These are attempts to fortify the communal aspect of human life, first and foremost, the family. There appear movements aiming at systematic work on institutions which were considered simply eternal a few decades ago: marriage, parenthood, intergenerational links within extended families.

How can we, people from the countries formerly occupied by communist Soviet Union, influence these situation?

Some weeks ago, the European synod of bishops took its end. Speaking about its character, Cardinal Ratzinger said: „From post communist Europe encouraging experiences are coming. …The post communist Europe realised its new mission: to give us hope. The idea of an exchange of gifts between East and West is a reality.“

What Cardinal Ratzinger said about Christian faith, this can be said, too, about our experience with family. The question is, however, who in the Western Europe and in USA takes courage to listen to our experience,  who takes courage to use it as an inspiration, who takes the same courage as the second European  synod.

As a matter of fact, our Republic has entered the free world with some experiences that cast doubt on present liberal trends in the field of the family. 

Collective rearing of children, e.g., considered by liberal specialists and feminists as a succes of last several decades, is for us an old somber experience, the consequences of which we feel until the present age. The same is valid for equality of women, as far as it is conceived as moulding of female existence by male ways of self-realization, behaviour and life programmes.

It's a paradox: the self-realization of individuals, perceived as confrontation with their natural ties and contacts, brings fruit similar to that of the absolutization of the collective in communist ideology.

I see here two paralel dangers, how our experience, which has cost us so dear, can be debased.

The first one is the fact, that, in Europe, the administrative and political unification takes place at a time when the European culture and civilization suffer from a spiritual and value crisis and, for this reason, a danger that the unifying effort will be moulded rather by social-engineering ideas than by common traditions of nations and countries is imminent.

The second one is the fact, that the American conservativism has very strong isolationist features, whereas the leftist liberalism is a very powerful and rich exporter. It has long-term strategies and – step by step – is staffing institutions influencing politicians and medias. Our pro-family movement is standing against them with bare hands.

Our experience with family and its resistence against totalitarianism remains almost entirely hidden from even the conservative circles in traditionally democratic countries.

I will return to it today to our experience in a firm hope, that you will receipt our message not only as a warning, but, above all, as a sign of hope.  What I will speak about, is a history of a country occupied by nazi and communist regime, but also a history of my own family, and – last but not least – my own personal history.

Communist attack on the family took first and foremost the trajectory of erosion of relations between parents and children. Parent authority was first to suffer. Communist ideology casted doubt on the parental authority directly (public institutions were competent to give the correct orientation to children) and indirectly.

One of the indirect attacks at the parental authority was refusing the difference between male and female role. Since the beginning of communist rule in my country, the role of mother as a home-maker was suppressed. The Communist state applied heavy pressures to make the mothers leave the families and to rear the children in a collective fashion from their earliest years. It was not easy to resist this ideological pressure. The system of house-confidents“ and „street committees“ enabled a far-reaching invasion of the privacy of families. 

Communist ideology tried to push women into all professions, including the traditionally male ones. Some short time in fifties, young women started to work even as miners. This one extreme didn't last too long, but the basic idea, i.e. idea of woman being able and obliged to work, to behave, to think, to react and feel just like man, was retained as a basis of socialist life-style.

The role of father was debilitated in more aspects. For instance, the system of politically based student recruitment smashed the traditional idea according to which parents had a decisive word in choosing the type and degree of education their children were to received. It was no more the father, who provided education to ¨his children.  The entire system of communist „cadre“ policy, depriving especially those who were educated and efficient workers of social position, a system penalizing children for what their parents had achieved by honest work, even if it were but a tiny corner shop, jeopardized parent authority. 

The etatization of all property, all work and public activities  brought about a collapse of the entire wider context of traditional family life. It might have been this loss of the „joy of family life“, coupled with anguish from the unforeseeably repressive climate, which exercised a decisive influence on the cessation of the post-war population growth immediately after the Communist takeover.

In this gloomy picture, however,  some lights began to be seen quite soon. The second half of the sixties and the following normalization decades brought about a sort of a mute rebellion of the families who took refuge in their weekend sanctuaries. A whole culture of weekend-cottage life emerged, including a certain degree of economic independence. Individual families complemented their diet with self-grown fruit and vegetables, they built their own facilities for smoking meat and for storage of wine etc.

On one hand, this weekend-house culture brought about a cultural evacuation of towns, shrinking cultural life and lowering the possibility of minor reforms. On the other hand, this reversal of life style brought about the drawing together of families and the expansion of their economic functions. This little autonomy  enabled, however, only providing for the material needs of families and could not expand further to include, for instance, the control of education. 

In spite of this fact, functional families did a lot of work even in education, both by their own activities and by seeking out supplementary education such as art schools or language training.

Last but not least is necessary to remind the pre-political function of family. From the definition of the matter, a family with children is an open community: the rearing of children demands a certain degree of human  contacts and makes necessary taking of attitudes and defining of relations to public institutions. 

It is not overdone to say, it was the functional families to which we owe a debt of gratitude for the survival of a considerable part of cultural and, in general, civilizational values. Thanks to these pre-political activities, groups of young people to whom the education and purposeful work represent essential values, and who are capable of basic forms of pro-social behaviour, were here and ready for action immediately after the return of democracy into our country.

 These are some of the arguments, why our experience with communism ought to be listened to, even at the field of family life. There are some  ideas, pushed forward by neo-Marxists, liberals, feminists etc., under the label of a liberating novelty, which – for us – represent  gloomy  memories of the past.

 In political terms, our experience can be articulated as a contraposition of family and totalitarianism. It was said more times already, that the disintegration of family and of further natural institutions is the way to malignant growth of state and finaly to totalitarianism.

But our experience is the experience of hope: it is the resistence of natural families, their human trust and friendship, their will to self-sacrifice, their altruism, which is able to save us from growth  of political power and to lead us out of totalitarianism to  the freedom of Children of God.