DOCTOR AND SPECIALIST

ON FAMILY PROBLEMS

by

Rev. Henri Hoser

 

(SUMMARY)

 

The family, the most efficient means for humanizing and personalizing society, of which it is a vital cell, the “icon of the Trinity” on earth, presents itself also as an extremely vulnerable in its members, exposed to all kinds of external conditioning. It is easier to destroy the family than to build it.

The tensions between State and family are practically unavoidable. The state tends to influence the family through triple conditioning: Economic, biological and psychological‑ spiritual.

The economic conditioning relates especially to poor families, in their elementary needs of a habitat, food, and means of subsistence. The material precariousness touches the majority of African countries. This derives from the poverty of the state as well, constrained by the “structural adjustments” imposed by world financial authorities, to reduce the spending for social assistance, education an health.

The corporal integrity of the family is menaced indirectly by the disintegration of the health system. Even medicine can become an instrument of pressure and service of the power. There is also a bio‑technological conditioning of the human organism through demographic programs, the means to fight AIDS, centred upon the physiology of procreation.

In this contraceptive propaganda, the child is presented as an “aggressor” and at first victim of poverty tie becomes its main reason.

Another type of influence by the State on the family is the control of the educational system, the means of social communication, the ensemble of cultural politics, which chooses the values to be presented.

The African State, due to its economic weakness and dependence abroad, evolves towards degenerate forms of public power and often is the hostage of financiers and foreign experts.

The family is left to itself, in its extreme poverty, to fight for its life.

The apostolate of the family or better the evangelization of the family is an immense and little cultivated missionary field.

It is important that in the political structures there be an active and qualified presence of true believers and that the Church make heard its prophetic voice on a public opinion often victim of corrupt media and linked to the laws of profit. The projects for development must be centred on the family. Finally, one must search the signs of the times because it is better to prevent than to cure.

 

 

Original language: French