Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

The Holy See, as a permanent observer state at the United Nations, ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child in spite of reservations about particular rights included in the document. The Vatican had previously issued its own Charter on the Rights of the Family in 1983 in which children’s well-being is fully embedded in the responsibilities and the autonomy of their families. The Church has been reluctant to adopt a conflictual model of rights for children, preferring instead to consider children’s interests in harmony with the interests of parents and families. The charter, to the extent that it reflects the commitment of Catholic social teaching, highlights the rights of families to autonomy, especially in decisions regarding the reproduction and education of children, and to all of the many social supports necessary to carry out those responsibilities. Unfortunately, the Church’s posture toward many real families and children throughout its history calls into question the authenticity of these commitments and the integrity of the Church’s witness to the gospel.

Childhood is in many ways a socially constructed reality. While it corresponds to developmental stages in human biology which are recognizable across time and place, notions of when childhood begins and ends have changed over time and from culture to culture. The perception of what makes for a “good” or a “happy” childhood likewise depends on many cultural, socioeconomic, and religious factors and is influenced by racism and white supremacy, sexism and misogyny, and the commodifying impulses of capitalism. Romanticized views of childhood, centering primarily the experience of affluent white children, undercut children’s growing agency and fail to respect the complex moral choices that children and young people make for their survival and the survival of their families. Moreover, it gives credence to attitudes and the resulting policies that treat some children as if they were not children at all (as adults or as less than human). Finally, in spite of calls for young people to work for a better world, as we see in documents like Pope Francis’ Christus Vivit, the adages about children’s obedience hold sway in the treatment of activists like Greta Thunberg (on the environment) and X Gonzalez (on gun control in the United States).

The Church’s vision of the family remains highly gendered and patriarchal in ways that undermine the intrinsic dignity of particular family members, including children. In practice, this narrow view has kept the Church from recognizing and honoring the dignity of many families whose members do not conform to the “ideal.” It also prevents the Church from engaging a serious examination of its trenchant racism and sexism. Among the most devastating implications of this lapse has been the Church’s repeated role as an agent of child removal and family separation. Examples are numerous: children taken from incarcerated and enslaved unwed mothers and offered for adoption by more respectable married couples; the forced removal of Native American children to residential schools aimed at the destruction of entire cultures; families sundered through chattel slavery, Jim Crow legislation, and mass incarceration; promoting homophobia and transphobia that provides cover for families who disown LGBTQIA+ young people and stands in the way of placing children with loving foster and adoptive families. The Church’s more prophetic stance on migration, the care for unaccompanied minors, and the disgrace of children caged at the southern border of the United States, is rendered mute as the U.S. bishops continue to advocate for political platforms that espouse a distorted view of family values.

A critical assessment of these realities prompts us to ask whether particular members of the Church fail to live out and live up to the Church’s theological vision of families and children, or whether that theological vision is itself deeply flawed and is merely working as designed. It has long been the case that feminist scholars have challenged Catholic theological anthropology for its neglect of experiences outside of a male, heterosexual, cisgendered norm. Such a truncated anthropology undermines the dignity of women and all gender-nonconforming persons and compromises the dignity of all children.

A theological anthropology that accounts for diverse constructions of childhood and is good news for real children will bear these hallmarks:

Commitment to the intrinsic dignity of all people, who are at once absolutely unique and radically interdependent, and whose becoming is always ongoing. This commitment decenters the view that children are merely potential adults in waiting. It also avoids an overly romantic view of childhood that paradoxically makes children more vulnerable by undercutting their complex agency. This kind of theological anthropology opens a space for children’s full participation in the common good as children.

Attention to multiple dimensions of human life: mind, spirit, and body. Such attention resists the binary thinking that values masculine over feminine, reason over emotion, spirit over flesh. It takes seriously both the embodied and spiritual experiences of children.

Cultivation of the virtues of self-care, fidelity, and justice among all people no matter their age, gender, or social location. This requires consulting the prudential wisdom of communities to direct those virtues in concrete lived experience appropriate to stages across the lifespan. Obedience to authority is not the primary moral task of children and young people.

Commitment to the protection and participation of the vulnerable in the context of the common good. The protection of children from harm is a vital task that requires communal discernment about the precise nature of actual harms that is informed by the most accurate information we have about children’s development and lived experiences. Protection always serves participation in the common good. Children are not merely pawns in civic or ecclesial politics, their vulnerabilities used for cynical rhetorical purposes that impede their formation of conscience, cultivation of virtue, and full participation in common life appropriate to their stages of development.

Theologies of childhood can tend toward abstraction. The danger is that they reflect culturally constrained visions of ideas about childhood rather than reflect the lived experiences of actual children. The ideals, which are often not ideal at all, get in the way of encountering real children and young people, responding to their needs, incorporating their contributions, acknowledging their righteous moral outrage, and embracing their desire for a hopeful future.

Mary M. Doyle Roche is associate professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She teaches courses in Christian ethics and Catholic moral theology.