THE FAMILY AND HUMAN ECOLOGY: HAVING REGARD FOR THE NATURE OF FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS

The idea of a “human ecology” is gaining ever more significance in the human sciences, where it indicates an interdisciplinary approach to the relation between human beings and their environment. It is important, however, to remember that the expression “human ecology” also has a significant history in the documents of the Catholic Church, beginning with Pope Paul VI. It was Pope John Paul II who identified the family as the first and fundamental structure of a human ecology. It is therefore important to protect family relationships, since the person’s genealogy is inscribed in them. The present essay argues that to guard family relationships, one has to guard human sexuality as the power by which human beings are conceived and inserted into the familial network. For persons, the lines of origin and descent have a tremendous significance and any practice that renders these lines ambiguous is unecological from a human perspective. Ultimately it is a question of rediscovering indissoluble marriage as the context that alone is capable of providing the proper human environment for the conception, birth and education of new human beings, because here alone there is clarity about who is whose.