It’s Family Week

Family Week started last Monday and this year’s theme is: Family: The Source of the Nation’s Integrity. Pope John XXIII defined family as the first and essential cell of humanity. In short, the first we of me. During my time, the two foremost influences on every individual’s life were his family and his schooling. Now, sad to say, that is no longer true of the present generation. Whether we like it or not, the biggest influence on our children is media, meaning television, radio and the newspapers. But even these depend on today’s families. Many supervise what their children watch and only allow their children to watch on their own when they are already mature enough to do so. So we can say with William Thayer that well-ordered, "families are the springs from which go forth the streams of national greatness and prosperity – of civil order and public happiness."

Earlier we quoted Pope John XXIII. Now we quote Pope Leo XIII: "Inasmuch as the domestic household in antecedent as well as in idea as in fact, to the gathering of men into community, the family must necessarily have rights and duties which are prior to those of the community and founded in nature." Yes, because the family is the very first and most important institution in the world. That is why we feel so much for street children. They should not only be cared for. They should be adopted so that they can be part of our time. They should be part of the program in every Family Week celebration.

In many advanced countries, once a person gets married, his new family takes the place of his old. That is not true in the Philippines. The Filipino who gets married just multiplies his family for he not only initiates a new family but becomes part of his spouse’s family. It is to our family system that we can attribute to the billions of dollars that regularly come from Filipino overseas workers. They may live abroad, but they never lose touch with their families and never cease to extend their help.

What we feel really bad about is that Filipino families are not celebrating Family Week. The great majority are not even aware that we have an annual Family Week celebration. This in itself makes the celebration senseless. What is needed is for the authorities to initiate a standard program or just how Filipinos should observe Family Week. It should be something that has something to do with an old custom. Here we have the custom of what we call Mano po. That should be one of the integral parts of the celebration. We also have the word Kapamilya. It is a word that refers not only to all members of the family but the friends that have always been considered as part of the family. We are all Kapamilya. The nation is just an extension of our families. Better still all our families joined together.

Next year, we should try to make Family Week a truly family celebration. How can it be a national celebration if even families do not commemorate it? The best place to start is not mass media. It should be in every barangay. In closing, let me state two penetrating observations about families. The first says that he who flies from his own family has very far to travel. The second compares the two types of families – the happy and the sad. It says that all happy families resemble each other while all sad families are sad in individual ways.