PRINCIPLE 3: THE PRINCIPLES OF AUTHORITY ON THE ONE HAND, AND OF OBEDIENCE ON THE OTHER, ARE NATURAL, NECESSARY, AND FUNDAMENTAL, BUT –
Oh, how I love this principle, with its "but–"
For half a sentence, it says a remarkable amount, completely. It puts to bed, at a stroke, any notion that Charlotte Mason believed in
*child-led education
*doormat parenting
*egalitarianism
*Rousseauian romanticism
or any number of other things people sometimes ascribe to her, which make them mistrust her from a Catholic standpoint. If they were right about any of these things, frankly, they'd be right to mistrust her.
Essentially, as Catholics, we're fine with hierarchy. Does that even need to be said? Look at the structure of the Church. Look at the nine choirs of angels. Look at our greatest architecture. Are we into order? We are, indeed. Are we into vertical order? Why, in fact, the answer is yes.
It should make intuitive sense to us that the family is ordered in much the same way as the Church. When we invoke the term domestic church, we don't mean that we have a prayer table and change the colors with the liturgical seasons, or that we have our own May crownings, or that we dress up as saints to go trick-or-treating, or whatever. We might do any, all, or none of those things, in the context of our domestic church. But I think that what that term really speaks to is something that is true on a deeper level, and not necessarily dependent on things we do. Just as the Church has shepherds and a flock, a family, too, has shepherds and a flock. It has parents, and it has children. And that metaphor expresses, just as it does for the Church, what those orders in the hierarchy mean and do.
The flock needs its shepherds to guide it, nurture it, nourish it, and protect it. Those things are the shepherds' job. It is the job of the flock, meanwhile, to be shepherded. If the sheep are going to survive and thrive, then yes, authority on the one hand, and obedience on the other, are natural, necessary, and fundamental. This is just the way things work, in the family as in the Church.
Incidentally, I am NOT making any kind of argument for male headship in the family. I'm not arguing against it, either, but I would point out that in the Church, in terms of authority the Pope is really just another bishop with an extra layer of responsibility. He is the "servant of the servants of God."
The shepherd-flock metaphor for the family does break down in several ways, of course. Sheep don't ever grow up to be anything but sheep. In the Church, meanwhile, most of the laity won't grow up to be shepherds, though certainly some will become priests or religious superiors. In the family, on the other hand, our default expectation is that our children will one day have children of their own: that the flock will, in fact, one day have its own flocks to shepherd.
So in one sense, the principle of authority is "natural, necessary, and fundamental," not only in the sense of shepherding the flock we have before us right now, but also in the sense that we are teaching that flock how to be shepherds themselves one day. In other words, how we use our authority in dealing with our children is something we will see again, as it affects our grandchildren. It's not only, or even principally, about our children as children, in the sense of their right-now obedience. It is about our children as the adults they will become, and how they will understand the authority they have grown into and assumed as grown people in the world, with children themselves.
This is really how, and why, this sense of order in the family is "natural, necessary, and fundamental." It is an order that is larger than we are. As parents, in authority over our children, what we're really charged with is not training them to do whatever we say when we say it, and we mean now. As with everything in the Christian order which Charlotte Mason is envisioning, our authority, and our children's obedience, is oriented toward their ultimate formation as the born persons they are.
And of course, as a friend has noted, we ourselves are under authority: God's authority, as manifest in the authority of the Church. We're not tin-pot despots, running our own version of reality. We're not a totalitarian government. We are, like the centurion of the Gospel, men under authority. Our authority over our children isn't a matter of our whim or convenience. We are not the authors of any fiat. Ours is an authority with another Author, according to a larger Rule: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two hang all the law and the prophets.
I suspect I am plunging ahead into Principle 4, which will obviously provide the end of the sentence which Principle 3 leaves hanging.