Jacob M. Kohlhaas & Mary M. Doyle Roche: Modern Catholic Family Teaching

Modern Catholic Family Teaching by Jacob M. Kohlhaas and Mary M. Doyle Roche engages with Catholic Family Teaching (CFT) as a parallel to Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and shows the development of CFT as responsive to a changing world. Read on for a Q&A with the author about how this book offers new perspectives on CFT and how the authors address a diversity of family experiences.

What about our current social and political moment makes this book particularly important?

Recently, the banning of books in school libraries and transgender rights have become politically polarized issues. They are the most recent chapter in a history of politicized speech that leverages perceived threats to families for political advantage. This book helps show that this type of rhetoric is not new, and often not very convincing in retrospect, but remains highly effective generation after generation both in and outside of the Catholic Church. We hope this book’s historical perspective can help inform more thoughtful Catholic conversations about current social and political questions that connect to the topic of the family.

What distinguishes this volume from other academic books on theology of marriage and the family?

This project looks at the history of Catholic teaching on the family in a new way. First, we identify “Catholic Family Teaching” as a tradition of modern Catholic teaching similar to “Catholic Social Teaching.” Second, our contributors explore this tradition like Catholic Social Teaching is often engaged, by presuming the documents are responsive to a changing world. The result reveals more development in Catholic Family Teaching over the last 130 years than the documents themselves seem to admit.

Your introduction discusses revising the traditional story told about Catholic family teaching. In what ways does your book accomplish this?

When it comes to issues like marriage and sexuality, some within the Catholic Church still prefer a “the Church has always taught” approach that expounds a long list of supposedly irreformable doctrines. And yet, it doesn’t take very much historical digging to see that the Church’s teachings on these subjects have often been responsive, and at time reactionary, to wider social and political events. This book attempts to break that dissonance by offering a critical yet appreciative approach that acknowledges the significance of development while also valuing the tradition.

Can you speak to the documents that were consulted and analyzed in the creation of this volume?

One important question the book itself raises is how to define this tradition. The book collects commentaries and interpretations of more than 20 documents written by popes, the Second Vatican Council, and Vatican offices since 1880. These are meant to be representative but not exhaustive and we hope others will carry this task further.

How did you go about choosing contributors for your volume?

The book gathers contributors from a variety of backgrounds and locations who are also significant academic voices in their respective fields. Most of the contributors are living in the U.S., but there are also contributors from Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. The Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church network was invaluable in helping us make some of these connections.

How does your book reckon with complicated histories of the Catholic Church and the harm perpetuated against certain families? And how does your book address a diversity of family experiences?

This is one of the central questions that the book raises for its readers. Starting with Leo XIII’s foundational document in 1880, we see a pope deeply concerned about the health and wellbeing of Christian families but who also ignores the impacts of slavery and colonization on an untold number of families. From there, the story remains complicated as Church leaders attempt to address real challenges in the world while frequently failing to recognize their own biases and the Church’s complicity. The book aims to look squarely at these harms without apologetics. We hope this critical historical perspective will serve as a new starting for seeking the goals of inclusivity and understanding across differences.