Two Co-pilots Not Logical
A family with no true authority vested in one person will be rudderless in the stormy sea of life as it exists on this earth. It will not be able to survive crises that inevitably develop, when choice is deadlocked. The example may be given of an airplane. It needs a pilot and a co-pilot. To have two copilots with equal choice in moments of need and crisis will end in disaster. The same can be said of a ship or of an automobile. The ship needs a captain. The auto needs a driver. Two people cannot steer a car through a maze of traffic, if both have equal choice in steering. Sooner or later, a situation will come up where one will brake while the other steps on the gas. One will veer to the left and the other to the right. The copilot in a plane may be more skilled than the pilot, the driver of a car less skilled than a passenger, but when the plane is in motion and the car moves along the road, the pilot and the driver have to be in command.
Why The Husband?
The reason for saying that the husband rather than the wife is the head of the family goes deeper than culture and custom. It is based on the plan of God as known from logical thinking about the nature of the two sexes. It is also based on strong indications in revelation.
Logically as based on her nature, a woman has a need to be submissive. She wants to be led and guided. She becomes more womanly and more lovable when she follows this bent of nature given her by the creator. As she becomes more lovable, the influence over her husband in leading him to make the right choices increases. He wants more to please her. He tries harder to make the correct choices. The husband, as given to him by the creator, has more need to command, to lead. It is not that he is pig-headed. This is a need of nature, implanted by the creator who made that nature. What is said here has general application, but more so in the particular context of the husband-wife relationship.
Modernist, woman embraced radical thinking cannot, will not any longer to define a woman sitting in a woman’s body. The ability to define herself, she has lost herself. This gives everyone a reality to have no confidence in her. Confidence is in something that ‘is’. NCAA Woman of the Year wearing a swimsuit. Never see women in men’s competition. Logical element of biology. Faustian bargain, pity the family if a 5’1” woman cannot get the children out of a burning house.
Man thinks he can master nature. God calls us into a stewardship to it, not mastery.
People of goodwill ultimate goodness and purpose created in a dual nature by God’s free choice. Our sorrow or joy is how one lives according to this dual purpose.
Mother, A Model
Logically, too, children, if they are to learn the meaning of authority, have to have a model to follow. They find this model in their mother who obeys their father and recognizes in him a real authority backed up by God. Unless a child has this model, the child cannot develop a true concept of the meaning of authority, and its need in human affairs.
Crisis of fatherhood crisis of authority. Some want authority only for power. Some have power and do not use it to protect the family. Bishops are in this second category in some instances.
The mother’s submission, however, must not be unthinking, fearful or cringing. It must be submission reflecting her dignity as a rational creature who recognizes the need for order in the family, an order which implies having a head of the family.
A 50 – 50 arrangement, where the husband and wife act as co-managers, will lack the example of authority which the children need. They will be deficient in recognizing authority in other situations in life, in school, in the state, in the Church.
The breakdown in respect for law and for figures of authority such as teachers and law officials, such as police and leaders of states, all point back to a lack of authority in the family. The lack may well stem from not having a true head of the family, from a wife who shows no example of submission and of recognition of authority which children can follow as a model.
Tragically prophetic note 20 yrs later. How corrosive the society has become.