The Siege of Verona
on the Spectacle at the Thirteenth World Congress of Families
Thirty years ago I was one of the two co-founders of the World Congress of Families project. My partner in this was Anatoly Antonov, professor of sociology at Moscow State University. Our initial purpose was to compare and contrast the family crisis found in the post-Communist lands of Eastern Europe with the parallel crisis found among the nations of the West: in both cases, failing marriage systems, sexual disorder, and tumbling fertility. How much of the East’s troubles derived from decades under Marxism-Leninism? How much came from corrosive social and political pressures shared by the East and the West? And what might be done to renew the stability, autonomy, and fecundity of the natural family?
By the time we were able to convene our first congress in 1997, with 700 participants gathering in Prague, open hostility to family life had emerged at the United Nations and within the incipient European Union. Our second congress, meeting two years later in Geneva, Switzerland, and with 1,200 attending, focused on this emerging global culture war. Other major congresses followed, with the fifteenth meeting held last year in Guadalajara, Mexico, with attendance reaching 8,000.
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Allan C. Carlson is the author of numerous books, including Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis and The American Way: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity. He attends St. Paul Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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