The stability of the family is a major problem in today's society, within the context of an

excessively placed emphasis on reason, when at the same time the problem of spiritual perfection is no
longer posed, and the moral life enters a state of hibernation, if not, in the worst case, degenerates,
confusing good with evil and vice versa. The informational explosion has relativized all existence and
man's mind no longer comprehends man's actions, God's presence and work in creation, so that man
has ended up living in his own universe conceived like a matrix without a horizon, like a domain
delimited by one's individual passions.
The ontological foundations of family life are shaken through the intermediary of education
realized in terms of materialism dressed up in the guise of democracy, as it is also thanks to the current
vortex of changes, leading to the detriment of the development of spiritual morality; with the egotistical
and urgent purpose of heavenly paradise on Earth, without God and without laws. Democracy has
ended up, from the form of a political way of organizing society, to a principal of libertinism, with
society drawing up its proper code of laws so as to manage its vices.
But could it have always been the same? What biblical fundamentals do we have to preach the
foundation of an enduring family? What is the perspective of the Saintly Fathers about family? What
are the theological fundamentals which offer eternal value for cohabitation in the families'
environment?
According to the book of Genesis, the history of marriage and of family begins at the same time as
man's history, for this one was created from the beginning as man and woman. Marriage is the
primordial mystery, instituted from the beginning and connected with the mystery of creation, the
moment when God indicated the primary roles of the family, seeing through it the individual as much
as the general good: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and have dominion over it....
God has created the family as an essential coordinate of humanity, with a fundamental role in as
much for the individual as for society. In the family, the individual fulfils in a plenary manner their
vocation for communion, characteristic of man and which accords with the image of God in man, being
a reflection on the human level of the intratrinitarian communion. On the other hand, human society
cannot be imagined without the family (Vasile Mihoc, Marriage and the family in light of Holy
Scripture...). The family constitutes a fundamental cell of society, a role demonstrated by the fact that it
gives birth to, raises, and educates the future members of society, gauranteeing the perpetuation of the
human nation, or after how Blessed Augustin says, it being like a city's nursury.
This is why society's preoccupation for the family's orientation is necessary, in terms of the optimal
fulfilment of its purpose, while the mission of the Church is to guide the faithful, under the Godly
teachings, to pursue the fulfilment of the Christian family's vocation which must represent on a small
scale the image of the Church of Christ, as the centre of communion and complete love between God
and people and between people amongst themselves.
We should search among a few words to come to know what obstacles which we meet in the
pastoral field in the direction of guidance for familial life and the so-called modern concepts viewing
the family in general and marriage especially.
a. Causes for the spread of sins tied to sexuality and the new ideas about marriage
Depravity, cohabitation as the prior phase to marriage, adultery, violence, divorce, conjugal
libertinism existing in the family, abortion, sexual perversion, lesbianity and homosexuality,

masturbation, pornography and prostitution are the enemies which look to destroy the foundations of
human being.
All of these have won enormous ground at once with the spread of the protestant reformation
which has brought on its own the opening of Pandora's box, full of all vices: crime, suicide, robberies,
libertinism, divorce, abortion, rapings, casting aside and abandoning children, etc. The western
theologian J. Dllinger describes in one of his works, through statistical data, the progress of corruption
in early protestant times as a result of the decrease in fear toward sin: in 1569, in Nrnberg there were
registered within three weeks a total of 14 suicides; at Breslau within a period of fifty years there were
registered 187 crimes, assassinations and suicides; at Stralsund, within the first 33 years since the
Reformation 167 homicides took place. A protestant pastor from Wittenberg in the year 1560 said that
bastards and found children were the most common things in Protestentatism, while another one said
that there haven't been seen so many divorces and separations since the time of the birth of Christ, as
have been for the 15 years since Luther took leadership. The word of false prophets...fills the nation
with adultery, paganism and unbelievers.
Yet more important protestant figures see the reason for the increase in corruption within the new
Lutheran teaching about forgiveness and about salvation without works, sola fide. The vast majority
reach the point of desperation and madness, being unable to stem the evil. (Antonie Plamadeala,
Ardeal Metropolitan, Tradition and liberty in Orthodox Spirituality.)
The protestant reformation and the rebirth of the western medieval culture has thrown the world
into a bizarre oscillation between rationalism and sensualism. The one who has foretold the appearance
of such phenomenon in the western culture is the philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. He shows in his first
essay, The birth of tragedy (1871), the conflict between the Apollonian (celestial) and Dionysian
(terrestrial) elements from the Greek culture which he puts as an analogy in the context of the modern
world. The modern world started to satiate itself of the thirst for the Socratic understanding. As
righteous consequence, the Dionysian spirit awakens little by little and breaks out in shouts of joy;
when the sceptre of Dionysus touches our tired civilization, everything is transformed as through
magic; a vortex leads with it everything that appeared dry and emaciated; it ended the era of Socratic
man and likewise there starts the era of pagan vitalism (sensualism) (W.A. Visser't Hooft, Le
mouvement oecumenique a-t-il un avenir?...)
The cause of the appearance of this vitalist religion, qualified also by the term of neopaganism,
owes itself to the oscillation of the western culture found between puritanism and sensualism. The
western medieval Christian has occupied himself only with the salvation of the soul and the
individual, and has not taken into consideration the interior life in the pscyho-physical integratity, for
he has departed from the idea that God does not act directly over the body and over man's
subconscience. It is embarrassing to see that whatever action directed against eroticism and
pornography is considered as an attack on the address of the <<liberty>> and <<happiness>> of life.
These are the slogans which have contributed to the collapse of empires. (W.A. Visser't Hooft, Le
mouvement oecumenique a-t-il un avenir?...)
b. The means of propagating neo-pagansim in current society
Today, the era of neo-pagansim is propagated by the works of certain so-called elite people, as
Walt Whitman and D.H. Lawrence which write their love novels, revealing ideas such as these: our
civilization and society has repressed the natural aspects of life, it has cut its wings and has placed it
outside of the laws. We need to return to the primitive world, to discover the old worship of fertility...

After centuries of repression we need to learn to accept life as a goal in itself, to assume it without
culpability and to reject all of morality, all structure, all religion and all philosophers who have
impeded Eros's liberal expression...This is the message of the new vitalist religion, states the author. I
haven't taken it seriously, just like I proceeded with Nazism. With all these things, the new religion has
taken strong roots in our society, because it responds to many of the needs of modern man. Whether we
will it, whether we don't will it, we need to take it seriously (W.A. Visser't Hooft, Le mouvement
oecumenique a-t-il un avenir?...).
It is neither necessary to minimalize the role of the protestant and neoprotestant worship in the
direction of corrupting the Christian families, for many of them consider that liberty means vandalism
and libertinism, meaning in a word irrationality. They have found a place in today's society for ever
more dangerous sects, which adore Satan in diverse ways: through metal music (heavy metal rock) with
hidden messages, subversive and immoral, through simple morality that is simple and accessible,
conceived from a simple concept: do what you will, through sacred orgies, albums of pornographic
art and erotic literature.
On the market there are found diverse books which give advice with view towards the formation of
the Christian families, more in the spirit of paganism. We present in this sense a book along the
neoprotestant Christian moral, entitled The intimate life in Christian marriage and we try to clarify
the imagination over it, giving you the titles of certain chapters from the table of contents: The
technique of sexual relations and sexual fulfilment in Christian marriage- Illustrated; Discovering
God's plan; Only love, only pleasure, only feasting; Our marriage- a small private kingdom.
c. Modern concepts and the sins that attack the family institute
In today's society sexual relations before marriage are conceived by ones as necessary for a pair to
understand each other if its members love each other, if there can exist an enduring relationship
between them, if there still remains a sentiment of affection after the threshold of alienation and
chastity between the two individuals has been traversed. The holy sentiment of love is reduced to a
function of reasoning, for there is missing the virtue of patience and there is wished the attainment of
an immediate answer on the part of the heart. There does not exist anything harder to obtain than a
definitive response on the part of the heart's shy voice, a fact ignored by those that don't understand that
the sentiment of love is attached more to the will than the reason. The heart has its own reasoning
which the mind cannot comprehend. Love is not influenced by the brain.
True love means a renunciation of your will for the other's and this not in the short term, but on an
unlimited term. After at least twenty, thirty years, when a pair has conquered innumerable stumbling
blocks that have appeared along the path of their life and marriage, while the love and understanding
between them has not decreased, but has grown in intensity, unsuspected for a long time compared to
what was at the beginning, then it can be said that two persons were made one for the other, for they
fulfill each other reciprocally.
Love is not seen with the eyes, but with the mind descended into the heart; this is why cupid was
depicted as being blind. True love is then when you are vulnerable, when you discover yourself as you
are and are loved. It does not need to become a habit. It does not have to do with the worthiness of one
of the persons, but with how capable is the other person of loving.
Family life needs to be an unending honeymoon, because happiness doesn't need to depend on
money, on family, on health, on profession, on acquaintances, but it is a duty, after the saying of wise

Socrates. We have a duty to be happy, for happiness doesn't come if you have a mine of excess, neither
if your peers serve you, but it is the Kingdom of God within our heart.
So called modern families have a conventional existence, within which each individual, parent or
child, does everything they wish and do not respect each other nor impose a moral as a rule for
behaviour. Sexual relation is considered a biological function necessary for balanced hormones, or an
enjoyment which even children should not be kept from. In such families there is practised libertinism,
sexual perversions, erotic fantasies, exhibiting physical qualities through extravagant articles of
clothing, pornography for reaching paroxysms of pleasure by using psychological audio-visual aids and
prostitution for the goal of attaining diverse material advantages necessary for cohabitation in luxury
and opulence. Divorce is a minor problem for such families.
A concern for politicians and certain sects currently is the propagation of Malthusianism and
neomalthusianism which occupies itself with the regulation of birth for preventing the overpopulation
of the planet, in the idea that it would be considered incapable of offering everyone food. Unbelievers
replace God who bears concern towards humanity's existence and arrogate to themselves the right to
determine life. They accept the use of whatever contraceptive aids, for offering greater happiness to the
family, sacrificing, instead, fertility and the birth of babes.
Such voices are in the service of the western states' political plans which look to the
encouragement of whatever aid in satisfying the body's cravings and halting the demographic explosion
and they form a part of a vast program which has the goal of finally destroying Christian civilization,
especially the family, encompassing among other things, the fight for promulgating divorce, abortion,
open sex, prostitution, homosexuality, euthanasia, etc.
In exchange for the legalization and financing their missions in underdeveloped countries, sects
leave themselves trained in politics, encouraging the use of contraceptive aids. The large number and
variety of sects are used by the developed states as aids of permeating the wrong ideas from the west
into undeveloped nations. Developing the receptivity for the richness of pleasures offered by the west,
the goal for which sectarian groups exist is to become instruments of manipulation in the interests of
powerful states. These plans are motivated by the wish of the rich nations, threatened by
disappearance due to very low birth rates, to hold demographic control over the planet, considering that
the poor populations in permanent increase constitute a threat and danger for their wealth, as also of
the great financial interests: immense sums of money which multinationals win fabricating and
commercializing mechanical products or chemical contraceptives. How these are used more and more
in rich countries, proving themselves to be harmful to one's health, new markets are searched after,
invading especially the African countries and those of the former communist bloc (Cludiu Dumea,
Planificarea familiala dupa Morala catolica,...).
Family planning and abortion have reached the point of being withdrawn from the list of sins, by
women, being considered personal problems which the Church does not need to be preoccupied with.
Modern mothers consider it too low and dangerous to have multiple children. True mothers begin to
be a rare thing, while children are not offered the right of coming into existence. It is lost from sight
that a child is the symbol of Christ, that the love which is manifested by man towards children are signs
of honouring Christ who was born in the world and slept in the manger. Through giving birth to babes
the womb of mothers will become a cathedral, while through planning and through abortion it will
become a cemetery in which Platos, Beethovens, Michelangelos, Einsteins, priests and potential saints
from their families will sleep their eternal sleep.

A delicate chapter of today's society is the legalization of homosexual relations. It has occurred at a
religious symposium, that the Orthodox were accused of too great a canonic rigidity and bondaging the
possible diverse manifestations of interhuman sexual love. Those of other religions have sustained that
lesbianism and homosexuality are genetically motivated and per se divine, in the end reaching the point
of presenting Scriptural arguments how even Christ and the Mother of God have had similar
manifestations, indeed even in the Old Testament we can find as much confessions. For example: Isaac
appreciated the hunting manliness and arm hair of his son Isav, which would mean that between them
there would have also existed other kinds of relations besides those tied to paternity.
In reality, homosexuality is not programmed by genes, but of the future plans of democracy and the
European community, as aids of weakening and subjugating potential adversaries.
The Orthodox Curch has remained firm in its position, condemning homosexuality alongside
bestiality; to this last specification the western diplomats were surprised at the idea that anyone could
have relations of such a nature, thinking probably to the upcoming perspectives in the discussions of
the world.
There have appeared innumerable films in which homosexuality appears, claiming that it is a
genetic inclination and that, actually, God was supposed to have made them the opposite sex. They
vehiculate the perversions in a dramatic clothing to make them accessible and accepted without
reservation. The artistic film Philadelphia Oscar prize winning in 1994, looks to assure a place in
society for those mastered by this passion, revealing the strength of their character when they are
contaminated with the HIV virus. The principal personage does not resign themselves with the thought
that becoming diseased is a divine punishment, but they manage their vice and find an aim in the fight
for societal integration of homosexuals, using the pretext of sickness, as incurable as the passion, they
consider.
There are people of science that confess that sexual deviations have a genetic influence, yet more,
they sustain that even heterosexual infidelity is transmitted genetically, generally speaking that any sin
of the parents is inscribed in the genetic code of the children and creates for them a predisposition. At
the same time, others say that homosexuality cannot even be considered a personality disturbance in the
true sense of the word, because it does not correlate, usually, with an evident disharmony of the
character's structure (Mircea Lazarescu, Psihopatologie clinica,...).
Everything is reduced to personal liberty, while theology shows that these things can also influence
natural liberty, they can pervert and contaminate human nature up to its genetic foundations. Natural
liberty has inscribed in it a logical and ontologic tendency towards its own proper transcendent
Essence (Frithjof Schuon, About the transcendental unity of religions,...), a tendency which can be
obstructed by personal liberty in the incipient state- arbitrary liberty.
This demonstrates the lack of a definitive method from current science which ignores, from the so
called desire of objectivity, any help on the part of religious knowledge. The experimental methods
applied to mater cannot be used in the same measure in the soulful plane or spiritually in which exists
an infinity of determining factors. More so, quantum physics demonstrates that neither in the physical
plain, things are not simple. An individual can become homosexual if he gives free reign to his
impulses towards sin in certain occasions. To this there is added the determinism given by the genetic
code received from the parents, if these or their ancestors have had likewise inclinations. It is easy to
give fault to something that cannot be verified with ease. The results of analysis over an individual's
genes can be generalized within a certain measure for the descendents of the individual consulted. But

his ancestors cannot be suspected of possessing such genes.

All the dispositions towards sin are transmitted genetically, but it is not admissible to commit them
based on this motive. In a civilized society their stagnation is required through the intermediate of
educating the will. The best treatment for the genetic conditioning of the passions is planted by God in
personal will, the same which, as I've said, can distance us from the natural tendency of the existential
will towards learning the virtues. Due to it, there were realized by man the greatest masterpieces; it is
the only modality accepted in the most sincere way by God, from the modalities offered by the
adventurous game of human liberty, because it can be the only confession of sincere desire of the
human person for the communion of being loved with the Heavenly Father and heirs of the unseen
goods. Whilst at the same time, through the power of prayer, the nervous system can be acted upon and
even over the genetic code for protecting from the soulful sicknesses.
Through the fall of Adam, human being in its entirety was darkened and subjected to death.
Science has discovered that death also has a specific gene, while the logical conclusion drawn by it
would be that, just how there can be certain inward certain illnesses and even malformations through
genetic interventions, so in this way through death's gene it could be treated and subjected to tests. But
these utopias are accusatory elements of science which look under the impulses lacking man's scruples,
to realize the impossible, at a time that they ignore with nonchalance the possible and necessary
spiritual, material, and social immediate: the eradication of homosexuality and other vices and
sicknesses from the genetic program, the only perspective which could lead to the realized tests of the
inward genetics of death, but only through the power of God.
Homosexuality therefore is not a personality disturbance. Those possessed of such a passion are
perfectly normal. Maybe this is why the passion is considered normal. But there are many cases in
which it has been demonstrated that it is possible to escape this vice and these are not few priests which
have helped such persons to become right. However the West believes in general in the theory of
predestination and therefore also accept homosexuality as something predestined.
Anyhow, the subversion of the western demagogues was exposed, because the law of Malthus fell
in desuetude. Recent statistic given by the F.A.O. show precisely the contrary: the annual population
growth is 1.60% at the same time that the annual increase of agricultural produce is 4%. It is true that in
the last centuries the global population has known an extraordinary increase. It is attributed to the
progress of medicine which has reduced the infant mortality and has prolonged the average age of life.
As much concerns the possibility of the provisions the planet holds, it can feed 8 billion people
according to Penck, 12 according to Hollstein, 22 according to Ballod and 100 billion after Clarck.
Then it is necessary to take account of that 70% of the world's surface is occupied by water. This
can become an inexhaustible source for provisioning the Earth's population, and there also needs to be
taken account that of the dry surface only 30% is cultivated. If a large part of humanity suffers of
hunger this is not attributable to the fact that the Earth does not have the resources, but the ignorance,
egotism, hateful, unfair sharing of the goods. No one would suffer of hunger if there would be invested
in agriculture only a small part of the sums which are invested for the destruction of human life: for
weapons, contraceptions, techniques for sterilization and abortion, etc.
For Christians there is posed another question: will humans survive on the face of the Earth
forever? The Faith doesn't speak of an end of times? And does the providence of God really not have
care to assure those things necessary for the life of man until the last moment of his existence?. The
overpopulation of China is not an abnormal act, but conforming to the order of Genesis: multiply and

fill the Earth!. Abnormal is the death from starvation in Ethiopia, dependent on politicians which
occupy certain functions for honours, not for serving charitably.
All the nations which promote Malthusianism will be doomed to perish, as long as they don't want
to restore the life giving power of the true morality and will believe that the family has lived its
existence. The family is the only miracle through which the safeguarding of nations will be possible,
as also spiritual survival in the midst of the congestion and vulgar modernity. Families are the future
nuclei of eternity.
Everyone knows that, the finer the spiritual development of a man is, in as much is it harder for
him to live in the midst of a vulgar multitude. Another time, chosen people would enclose themselves
in the midst of a society just as chosen, as themselves. With the transition of time, in the measure of the
general democratization of life, the human majority have become more and more powerful, with all
of its inevitable attributes and dislike of the varied multitude. The barriers have been destroyed, the
closed circles of society have disappeared and the multitude, always brutal in its essence, invades
everywhere, and behold that the best elements of society all of the most chosen spiritually and more
delicate, saving themselves from the multitude, from the rude tastes and habits, enclose themselves in
the shell of their personal lives. The family- the circle of people akin after blood and close after spiritis their only salvation, their only refuge. Look around. While all that is rude and simple and dashes
towards life and partying along the most congested streets of the city, even in the centre of the
multitude, - everything that is especially chosen, on the contrary, tends to run from the multitude ever
farther, arranging itself in places of peace, on the outside of the city, in villa style houses, raising the
fence from the street and lives only in the environment of the family- far from the boring noise of the
human mass.
Even only this permanent tendency and perseverance of the best people of running from the
multitude and enclosing themselves in a circle of their own- ensures in a lasting manner the existence
of the family and of the family's entire ordinance.
Maybe under the influence of permanent propaganda persistent against the family and especially
due to sexual lust, which increases spontaneously in the whole world, marriage in our days will
become an all the more rare phenomenon, it, marriage, will remain an attribute of the most good among
people...
Therefore, we shall make cream with the strength like our family, this form, the most complete of
human love, just as has existed, it will endure forever. And, in the end, it will be necessary to accept the
fundamental thesis, that the greatest joy of man on Earth is the love in marriage (N.E. Niewiadomsky,
Chastity and marriage. A book for youth,...).
d. General considerations from the Christian perspective
These are the anomalies tied to family in which the spiritual crisis of the west has been
crystallized, proceeding from the consideration that the human body and sub conscience don't have a
spiritual foundation. There exists the tendency of training the eastern world in the drama of the western.
Lacking the liberty in spirit through which the energies given by God fulfill their vocation of becoming
material for virtues, people search for diverse liberties to satisfy the energies perverted in passions.
Under the impulse of Einstein's theory of relativity, the youth of today considers that everything is
relative while the absolute does not exist; if the absolute were to exist, then it is not able to be touched

or offended, while the world could be judged. But everything is considered relative, then anything is
permitted. The world needs help to discover the non-perishing values of the eternal life and to distance
itself from the tendency of developing atheism in practice, financially, of capitalism and the delusions
of man with dry surrogates, in the place of true happiness.
The financial state of the west offers man the possibility of buying anything. The world has been
transformed into a society of consumption, a society of heavenly happiness on earth, full of material
goods, but foreign to heavenly goods, spiritual. Because of this, today, Orthodoxy has much success in
the western world, because it satisfies the spiritual thirst of man impoverished by secularization.
Man has transformed nature into an object, while reducing himself to the simple economical
functionality, leading, eventually, to the appearance of social classes, as a function of the wealth
accumulated, and the appearance of the differentiation between developed and undeveloped states. The
fascination with the mirage of science and technology, the economists, politicians, and sociologists
from the 50s have presupposed that, the economic growth could continue forever and that abundance
and technology would be able to resolve all problems. From the 70s, it became clear that they had
reached the limits of growth, that technology produces effects with disastrous attributes and that many
serious problems...seem to not have quick and easy solutions (Arlene Skolnik, The Intimate
Environment, Exploring Marriage and the Family, ...).
For a state to have good people, it is necessary to have good mothers, good families, while a
national Church needs to have a stable structure, well organized and to plant in the hearts of its sons an
attraction for the truth, good and beautiful. The destruction of families provokes a catastrophe, because
it brings suffering and the tearing of the spouses souls for the entire course of life, destroys the
children's lives, deprives society of people that are healthy, educated, moral, capable of civility and
progress and throws into hell forever those souls that are inattentive and deceived by carnal cravings
(Note from Sf. Ioan Gura de Aur, Despre iubire si casatorie fericita, ....).
We should search with complete spiritual strength to beware of assimilation with the multitudes, in
those things evil. Sin brings guilt and suffering, while restraint brings soulful thankfullness. Blessed
Augustine says that he found more charm in chastity than in satisfying cravings. Serious medical books
recommend that we come to know the essences and laws of sexuality for this to become a blessing and
not a curse for us, and compare sexuality with fire or electrical energy which can be particularly useful
when it is used while respecting the specific laws.
Priests have a great duty in their confessional seat and, from the pulpit, of guiding the family life
on safe land through substantiating the relationship between its members and God, the river of all gifts.
Spousal understanding brings peace to the children through the assurance of their needs spiritually,
educationally, medically and materially. Children are the grandest realization of parents, while their
happiness is the greatest satisfaction for the family. Children and their salvation bring by itself the
guarantee of eternal life which has its beginning during the time of the earthly life. The family was
loved and protected with all the spiritual resource of spouses who have fulfilled their vocation of
bringing together creators and providence with God.