Person:

Glendon, Mary Ann

Time and again, by word and example, John Paul II urged social scientists to reexamine some of their most fundamental presuppositions. He asked them to be mindful of the unity that underlies their fragmented disciplines, to question their assumptions about personhood, and to be not afraid in the quest for truth. The Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, the think tank created by the late Holy Father in 1994 as a sister academy to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, has made considerable progress in four main areas where the principles of Catholic social thought have to be applied to a host of new things: the world of work, the promise and perils of globalization, the dilemmas of democracy, and the relations among generations. The principle of subsidiarity along with sensitivity to the concept of human ecology, the social systems that undergird and support human flourishing, have provided some tentative but promising avenues for the future of the social sciences.

Starting in the mid-1960s, there was a demographic upheaval that radically changed family behavior and the meanings of sex and procreation, marriage, gender, parenthood, family relations and life itself. Family law became a testing ground for this new legal and social landscape. Law professor Mary Ann Glendon looks at recent trends in Western family law, including the new concept of marriage and the family, the declining regulation of marriage, the creation of relations of kinship (including the abolishment of illegitimacy and the new reproductive technologies), as well as the marginalization of children. She encourages readers to rethink family policy and suggests that giving special treatment to child-raising households – especially those in which the parents are married – might lead to a better family policy in the future.