What importance does the Catholic Church place on the family?

The family is the building block of society, and it is through the family that children should learn about God and the faith. Likewise, the parents learn from their children. St. Zelie Martin, the mother of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, said,

When we had our children, our ideas changed somewhat. We lived only for them. They were all our happiness and we never found any except in them. In short, nothing was too difficult and the world was no longer a burden for us. For me, our children were a great compensation, so I wanted to have a lot of them in order to raise them for Heaven.

Her husband, St. Louis Martin, said, “It’s this beauty [family] that brings us closer to Him.” This is another aspect of family life—through the love of our family, we can better understand the love of the Trinity.

Finally, the family unit is important to the Church and to the whole world. In fact, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of family life in relation to the Church and her mission. In Familiaris Consortio, Pope St. John Paul II taught,

Christian marriage and the Christian family build up the Church: for in the family the human person is not only brought into being and progressively introduced by means of education into the human community, but by means of the rebirth of baptism and education in the faith the child is also introduced into God's family, which is the Church.