At this writing, my mother is two months on the plus side of 102, and my father is 98. Two years ago, our extended family, including all 12 of my parents’ grandchildren, assembled in the small town of Bolton, Conn., to celebrate my mother’s centenary.

It is written in the Book of Proverbs (17:6) that the “crown of the aged is their children’s children” (at the happy event, my parents could also boast of 13 great-grandchildren). Mr. and Mrs. Americo DeMarco wore their crown with great pride on this festive occasion, and with no small dollop of humility, witnessing in the gathered throng the many incarnations of God’s love and lavish blessings.

Being the eldest of my parents’ three children, it fell to me to say a few words. “We all want to know the secret of their 68-year marital success. Let me tell you. Two nights a week they would go to a romantic spot and enjoy fine food, good friends, soft music and ballroom dancing. My mom went on Tuesdays, my dad, on Thursdays.”

Their real “secret” was not a very well-kept one. It popped to the surface about two years after my mother had passed the century mark in a conversation she had with a nurse’s aide.

The young lady who was attending my mother was going on about how difficult it was for her to maintain a relationship with a man. She confessed to having a series of separations and divorces, and having given birth to children who had different fathers. “What is your secret?” she asked, turning toward my mother and away from the bed she was making.

“We love each other,” was the laconic reply.

My mother came into the world in the year 1904.

At that time, only 14% of homes in the United States had a bathtub. There were but 8,000 cars in the country, and they traveled over no more than 144 miles of paved roads. Only 6% of all Americans had graduated from high school. More than 95% of all births took place in the home.

The century of change from 1904 to 2004 is truly mind-boggling. To say “times change” is a colossal understatement. How does a marriage remain intact in the midst of so many radical and sweeping changes? What is the one element that perdures while the surrounding kaleidoscope of life never stops creating new shapes, new patterns and new challenges?

Again, the simple answer is love, the still point in a moving world. When the stabilizing factor of love is eliminated from the equation, husband and wife are at the mercy of a cultural whirlwind.

Love, of course, is a choice.

Those who select some principle other than love to give their marriage direction, whether it is money, success, comfort or social status, find themselves complaining bitterly about how marriage is an antiquated institution that has worn out its usefulness. One such complaining mom had this to say about raising children: “I did stay at home with my children for several years and then clawed my way out of the home and the depression I experienced there. For many of us, full-time mothering was beyond endurance. … [I have had my day limited] to wiping Cheerios off the floor and [wiping my] children’s bottoms and tops, with nary an opportunity to talk in complete sentences.”

One gets the impression that this poor, bedraggled stay-at-home mom is lost in the details. She did not give the impression that she loves her children. Rather, she seems tossed about like a leaf in a hurricane. Love gives meaning to tasks that would otherwise be regarded as drudgery.

By contrast, F. Carolyn Graglia, in her book, Domestic Tranquility, states the following: “When I stopped practicing law and became a housewife, an unexpected benefit was that I felt even better loved than before. I began to experience a glow of contentment and self-satisfaction which derived in part from the realization that my husband cared for me enough to exert himself as mightily as he did to provide so well for me and our children.”

“Love makes obedience lighter than liberty,” said an insightful philosopher.

In the absence of love, household tasks become first a chore, then a nuisance and finally a source of misery. Love is a light that makes service a joy. At the close of his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), Pope Benedict XVI writes: “Love is the light — and in the end, the only light — that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practice it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter the world — this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present encyclical.”

Unfortunately, many who lack this light find themselves groveling in darkness, hoping for something other than love to free them from their predicament. Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, wrote about how the communists did everything they could think of to undermine the family. As a result, children were dumped into daycare centers, nursing schools or after-hours centers.

The large family became a thing of the past. Couples with more than two children were stigmatized as “unprogressive.” Walesa, however, who was a close friend of John Paul II, could see through the communist tactics.

“You can see why,” he wrote, “the communists pushed for small families, because it’s hard to brainwash parents of a large family with doctrinal absurdities.”

Children, who come into the world knowing nothing of doctrinal absurdities, draw their parents into realism. But it is a liberating realism. Adults may be beguiled and seduced by ephemera. But children require them to toe the line, to love them in an intensely realistic way. Children have an innate ability to rescue their parents from cultural illusions. At the same time, they have a decided humanizing effect on them.

Our present society continues to glamorize careers, while demeaning the practice of raising children. But, as G.K. Chesterton has wisely asked, “How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone?”

The family is crucial to civilization. To quote Chesterton once again, “This tangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.”

In his encyclical, Centesimus Annus (The Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum), John Paul II underscores the essential importance the family has as the fundamental building block of society.

“The first and fundamental structure for ‘human ecology’,” he wrote, “is the family, in which man receives his first formative ideas about truth and goodness, and learns what it means to love and to be loved, and thus what it means to be a person.”

There is no institution that is more important than the family, and no responsibility more critical than properly raising children. Not only is the health of the person at stake, but also the future of humanity. As John Paul reiterated many times, “the future of humanity passes through the family.”

John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter Familiaris Consortio (The Christian Family in the Modern World), inspired a great deal of reflection and innumerable commentaries. One collection of essays contains a most moving dedication that characterizes quite beautifully, as well as succinctly, the inestimable value that the family has for posterity:

“These essays on the family are dedicated to Maria Victoria Walesa, daughter of Danuta and Lech Walesa, to whose christening came seven thousand Poles, expressing the belief that the solidarity of the family remains the foundation of freedom.”

Postscript: On April 15, 2007, my father passed away, peacefully in his sleep with his wife of 70 years nearby. On my last visit to his assisted-living residence, I informed him that a forthcoming book of mine: How to Be Virtuous in a Not-so-Virtuous World, is dedicated to him. It is a small recompense for a man who had dedicated a good measure of his life to me.

Donald DeMarco is adjunct professor at
Holy Apostles College and Seminary

in Cromwell, Connecticut.