Order and organization are essential in having anything work well. In running a home schooling conference, for example, one has to have a designated place for each vendor, or one has chaos. There has to be an order among the speakers at the conference, so that they won’t be fighting to get to the podium at the same time.  Further, if two speakers are going to talk about related topics, but one is giving an overview of the topic and the other is talking about a specific item, the overview speaker should go first, because an overview provides context for more specific information.

This need for order is important in every area of life. I home schooled my family for many years, and I have been talking three or more times yearly, one family at a time, to the many families for whom I am the consultant in Mother of Divine Grace School. Further, I am the director for Mother of Divine Grace School, and we currently have over 6300 students enrolled in our program. In all of these aspects of my life I have seen more and more clearly the importance of order. As human beings, as family members, as citizens and as home schooling teachers there is a need for order and a need for an awareness of the right order, if we want our lives to be peaceful, holy, and happy. So I would like to talk about order today.

There are, philosophically speaking, four types of order. There is, first, an order among parts of a whole, as the order among the members of a family; there is, secondly, an order of parts to a whole, as in the orientation of each member of the family to the common good of the family; third, there is an order of a whole to another whole, as in the order of the family to the civil society of which it is a part; and last, there is the order of all the wholes to an extrinsic principle, as in the order of all the members of the human race to God, their creator.

I’d like to start with this last order first. The order of the creature to his Creator is the fundamental order. We are ordered to God, He is not ordered to us. He is in authority over us, and we are to obey Him. This is for our good, not for His. This right order was upset at the beginning when Adam disobeyed God. Disaster was the immediate result. First, Adam’s sin changed the nature of our friendship with God. We no longer walked and talked with Him in the garden. In fact, we had to leave the garden. Further, we lost our original justice.

Justice is obtained when each has its due. Original justice is the term by which we designate the right ordering of creature to the Creator. When that was lost, the internal order among the parts of our nature was damaged. Before, each part of the person had what it was supposed to have in terms of control. There was a proper subordination among the parts of our nature. Before the Fall, the concupiscible and irascible appetites, namely the appetites in us that are moved to desire, love, hope, fear and anger, and the will, whereby we choose, were subordinate to the intellect. When the intellect presented something as a good, the will and appetites would move to it, and when the intellect presented something as bad, the will and appetites would move away from it. As a result of the Fall, we have lost that order, and sin is the consequence. Now we have to work to regain that ordering; we have to work on the virtue of self-control.

Notice that I spoke of “Adam’s sin.”  Adam had a gift that he could give to his children, if he kept it intact. That was the gift of original justice. He didn’t do that. (As an interesting side note, Adam’s sin was an intellectual sin. He knew what he was doing. He can’t claim, as so many of us can, that he was moved by appetites that were inclined to an object against his will and knowledge. He wasn’t.) This prerogative of Adam’s, to pass on original justice, belonged to him, and not to Eve, for Adam was the head of his family, the whole human race.

Adam’s headship is reflected in every family. The father of the family is the head of his family. This does not mean that the mother is not an authority in her family, for the mother and father together make up one principle of authority, which I will talk about a little more later on. But the father is the head of his family and he exercises his authority over the members of his household.

In any community there has to be one final source of judgment, one person who makes the decision in the hard cases, one person who by nature, or inclination, or office is able to bear the burden of decision. In the family, that person is the father.

Now, my husband said that a man who doesn’t listen to his wife is a fool, because women are better by nature at deliberation. It is in this way that together husband and wife make up one principle of authority. The wife is good at putting the two sides of an issue before her husband, and, usually, together they come to a decision. But where there is a difference of opinion, there has to be a deciding opinion, and in the family that opinion is the husband’s. Men are better at making judgments, in large measure because they are willing to bear the burden of judgment, and take the consequences of the decision.

(This may be an aside, but I do think it has a bearing on the issue under discussion: I have always been pleased with St. Paul’s admonition to wives, “Wives, obey your husbands.” It seems to me the easy end of the deal. If I obey my husband, I know I am doing what God wants me to do. The husband has to “love his wife”, which means, I think, to be responsible for her true happiness. That’s much harder. This teaching of the Church doesn’t mean that the father of a family is the master, and the other members of the family are slaves. On the contrary, it means that the father of a family is called to serve the family and he has the primary responsibility for the common good of the family. In practice, a husband should treat his wife as an equal under authority, something like the relationship between the owner of a company and the CEO.)

The children in the family must be obedient to the parents, and the parents have to work for the good of the children. All of this right ordering among the parts of the family is an example of the first kind of order I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, the order among parts.

But in the family we also have an example of the order of parts to a whole. The father, as I mentioned, must be a servant. He is the prime mover in this order, but his movement is not for his sake, but for the sake of the family as a whole. The husband loves his wife as Christ loves the Church, that is, he loves her for her sake. Further, the father rules the children for their sake, not for his. His decisions are made in the light of what is best for them, and in being obedient to him they are doing what is best for them. By obedience they participate in the prudence of their father, and they all work together so that the whole can work well. Clearly, all of the members of the family have to be unselfish, they have to be working for the good of the whole. A friend of mine said “Obedience is no good unless you have their heart.” I think she is right, and, further, that authority is no good unless it is exercised with love. All the members of the family have to be acting for the good of the other members of the family.

So we have seen three of the four kinds of orders I mentioned at the beginning. The relationship of the creature to the Creator is an example of the order of a whole to an extrinsic principle. The order of the members of the family illustrates two types of order, the order of part to part, and of part to whole. There is one more kind of order, the order of one whole to another whole.

This can be seen in the order of the family to society. The Church has always taught that the family is the fundamental building block of society, and we all know that as families go, so goes the nation. One sees this ordering in the fact that a father of a family can be called to serve in the army. He is asked to leave his family to protect the country, of which his family is a part. Also, we see that Catholic families have an obligation to serve, in the way they can, at least by example, the society in which they live. We have to be willing to share the great good of the truth that we have been given.

As faithful Catholics, then, we see that to have better families, we need to understand the order among the members of the family, and the order of each to the common good of the family. Most fundamentally, we need to understand the right order between the creature and the Creator. The goal of my life, and the goal of yours, I know, is to meet Jesus, and hear Him say, “Welcome, my good and faithful servant.” Understanding the right order in the family, and working toward it will help make that goal a reality.