Transitus Oblates are to establish their marriages and families in the order instituted by God, while recalling Our Lord's warning, “If any one comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple,” and “a prophet is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house.” Oblates must be convinced that the first vocation of the Christian is to follow Jesus.
Husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her, that He might sanctify her and she be holy and without blemish. Wives are to be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church, His Body, and is Himself its Savior. For man was not created for woman, but woman for man. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.
This outward expression of love in the home demands not only mutual help in life but must go further; having as its primary purpose that they help each other day by day in forming and perfecting themselves in the interior life, so that through their partnership in life they may advance ever more and more in virtue, and above all that they may grow in true love toward God and their neighbor, on which indeed depends the whole Law and the Prophets. For all men of every condition, in whatever honorable walk of life they may be, can and ought to imitate that most perfect example of holiness placed before man by God, namely Christ Our Lord, and by God's grace to arrive at the summit of perfection, as is proved by the example set us of many saints. This mutual molding of husband and wife, this determined effort to perfect each other, can in a very real sense, as the Roman Catechism teaches, be said to be the chief reason and purpose of matrimony, provided matrimony be looked at not in the restricted sense as instituted for the proper conception and education of the child, but more widely as the blending of life as a whole and the mutual interchange and sharing thereof.
Nevertheless, husbands and wives are to keep in mind the primary end of marriage is the procreation of children and, as first heralds of the Gospel, their education in the Christian Faith. Therefore no obstacle should be put between each other or themselves and God. Children are a gift from God, a reward, and they are to honor and obey their parents in the Lord. Parents should be careful to be humble and pious examples to their children with fidelity to the Christian Faith and to the Church with charity to God and neighbor.
Oblates should joyfully accompany their children on their human and spiritual journey by providing a simple and open Christian education and being attentive to the vocation of each child, forming their children to be properly prepared for the duties, discipline, and heroic virtue necessary for their future station in life whether it be the Ministerial Priesthood, Consecrated Religious Life, or Holy Matrimony. In doing so, Oblates not only serve the Church of today, but the Church of tomorrow. For the first school of priests and monks is not the seminary or the monastery, but the home.
Oblates are encouraged to choose truly Catholic schools for their children and contribute to their establishment, maintenance, and growth--a Christian education that will contribute to forming their whole being to the supernatural life, so that he or she may be submitted to the reign of Jesus Christ in the spiritual, moral, intellectual and physical spheres. Through home schooling parents provides an education for their own children, but through Catholic schools parents provides a Christian education for the whole world (Catholics and non-Catholics). However, it is sometimes beneficial or necessary for families to home school. Members are encouraged to aid their fellow Oblates and Christians with the costs of education, and they are to seek alms if necessary.
The Christian family models in a special way the “domestic church” (Ecclesia domestica) of the home, and reveals the central mystery of the Christian faith and life––the Most Holy Trinity––the communion of persons bonded through love. Husbands and wives in particular bear witness in the world to the love of Christ for His Church and the Church’s love for Christ, and their love as an indissoluble union.
By living the grace of holy matrimony, domestic life not only serves as an ordinary means of sanctifying grace for its members, but functions as an organized campaign to restore Christ to the family and the family to Christ; it rebuilds the Church––the household of faith and the family of God––by being the Church; and it forges a holy crusade to establish the Social Kingship of Christ in the world through the family, the social cell. Thus we can reform society into a Christian one by repairing the foundation of society itself––the family––making it Christian again.
