family life, since the stability afforded by marriage under religious sanction once lost, paternal authority over children and the duties of children to parents are necessarily and most harmfully slackened. Contrariwise, marriage, honorable to all,[1] which from the beginning of the world God Himself instituted for the propagation and preservation of the human race, and decreed to be indissoluble, the Church holds to have become more stable and holy through Christ, who conferred on it the dignity of a sacrament, and willed to make it an image of His own union with the Church. Wherefore, as the Apostle admonishes: As Christ is the head of the Church, so is the husband the head of the wife;[2] and just as the Church is subject to Christ, who cherishes it with most chaste and lasting love, so is it becoming that women also should be subject to their husbands, and by them in turn be loved with faithful and constant affection.
In like manner the Church regulates the authority of the father and the master in such mode as to keep children and servants within their duty, without, however, allowing authority to be overstepped. For, according to Catholic teaching, the authority of the heavenly Father and Lord flows forth upon parents and masters, and on that account receives not only its origin and power from God, but also its very nature and character. Hence does the Apostle exhort children to obey their parents in the Lord, and to honor their father and their mother, which is the first commandment with a promise.[3] And you, fathers, provoke not your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and correction of the Lord.[4] And again by the same divine apostolic injunction it is urged on servants and masters that the former should obey their masters according to the flesh . . . as to Christ . . . with a good will serving as to the Lord, . . .[5] but the latter should
