The Primordial Rights of Parents and the Divine Origin of Authority
The recent legislative push in Connecticut — requiring homeschooling families to register with the state Department of Education, submit to child abuse registry checks, and effectively seek governmental permission before educating their own children — represents yet another manifestation of the modernist heresy that the state is sovereign over the family. As Pope Leo XIII unequivocally taught in Immortale Dei (1885): “The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human, each fixed limits, each confined to its own sphere of action, defined by the special nature of its object.” The state has no competence to determine whether a parent may educate his child — this authority flows from the natural law and the divine constitution of the family, not from legislative fiat.
Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut and a father of seven, correctly identified the philosophical rot at the heart of this legislation: “So what this law says is that the state government believes that children are safer in a public school or a private school than they are with their own family. It’s substituting the government for the family, and it’s saying that children belong to the state instead of to their own family.” This is not mere policy disagreement — it is a direct assault on the divine order. The family is a societas naturalis (natural society) anterior to the state, instituted by God Himself in the Garden of Eden. The state does not create parental rights; it merely recognizes what God has already established. To claim otherwise is to repeat the error condemned by Pope Pius XI in Quas Primas (1925), where he lamented that “the foundations of authority were destroyed, because the main reason why some have the right to command and others have the duty to obey was removed.”
The Connecticut legislation’s defenders invoke three horrific cases of child abuse — an 11-year-old girl starved and abused, a 12-year-old sexually abused by her stepfather, and a man locked in a room for 20 years — as justification for imposing universal oversight on all homeschooling families. Yet as Wolfgang and Lori Murphy of Adoro Te pointed out, these children were already known to the Department of Children and Families (DCF). They were already under the state’s supposed protection. “DCF dropped the ball,” Wolfgang stated. “So what does our state government do? The opposite of what makes sense. They want to put all homeschoolers under the thumb now of DCF, the same group that failed to protect these children that were already their responsibility.”
This is the perennial logic of the bureaucratic state: when it fails, it demands more power. The remedy for the state’s incompetence is never less state — it is always more. This is the spirit of the French Revolution, not the American founding, as Wolfgang rightly observed. The Declaration of Independence recognizes that rights come from God, not from government. The Connecticut legislature operates from the opposite premise — that rights are granted by the state and may be revoked at its pleasure.
The Catholic Doctrine of Parental Authority in Education
The Catholic Church has always taught that parents are the primary educators of their children — not the state, not the Church, but parents. Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (1929), stated with absolute clarity:
“The family therefore holds directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth.”
This is not a negotiable opinion. It is the constant teaching of the Church. The right to educate one’s children is inalienable — it cannot be surrendered, transferred, or regulated away by any earthly power. The state has a subsidiary role: it may require that children receive an adequate education, but it cannot claim the right to determine the means, the content, or the manner of that education so long as the minimum standard is met. The Connecticut bill goes far beyond this — it effectively requires parents to obtain state permission to educate their own children, transforming a God-granted right into a state-granted privilege.
Gayle Shanley, a homeschooling mother of five, captured the theological gravity of this shift: “When you put in place the idea that the state grants this permission or doesn’t grant this permission to homeschool, you have put in place the idea that it’s a privilege that is granted or not granted instead of a right. Once in place, you can build on this legislation and add more restrictions.” This is precisely how the totalitarian state advances — incrementally, under the guise of protecting children, until the family is entirely subordinated to governmental authority.
Shanley’s observation that Catholic parents are “answerable to God for how we raise our children” and not to the state reflects the perennial Catholic teaching on the subordination of temporal authority to the divine law. As Pope Leo XIII taught in Libertas Praestantissimum (1888), “the State is not the supreme rule of law and practice; it is something far higher — the eternal, natural law, which is the will of God.” When the state contradicts the natural law — as Connecticut does by claiming authority over parental education — it acts ultra vires (beyond its legitimate power) and its laws are, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “no law at all, but a corruption of law” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 95, a. 2).
The Targeting of Religious Conscience
What the article reveals — and what the legislators deliberately obscure — is that this legislation disproportionately targets families who homeschool for religious reasons. As Shanley stated, “The reason they’re homeschooling is they don’t want that ability to pass on their faith to be undermined by the public schools.” Wolfgang went further, identifying the ideological motive: “This legislation restricting the right to homeschool in Connecticut has nothing to do with homeschooling. Instead, it sees the push as an intent to target families in general who do not conform to the new state religion: Catholics and other people of traditional values who maybe don’t want to have the pride flag in their classrooms, maybe don’t want their children taught that a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, and don’t want graphic pornographic books in the school libraries.”
This is the new secular religion that Pope Pius XI warned against in Quas Primas — the laicism that “began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations” and progressively sought to exclude God from public life. The Connecticut legislature does not merely disagree with Catholic education — it seeks to bring it under state supervision, to ensure that the formation of children in the faith is subject to governmental approval. This is the very essence of the error condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), where Pope Pius IX condemned the proposition that “the civil power has authority to rescind, declare and render null, solemn conventions… regarding the use of rights appertaining to ecclesiastical immunity” (Proposition 43) and that “the best theory of civil society requires that popular schools… should be freed from all ecclesiastical authority, control and interference” (Proposition 47).
The article’s observation that the bill does not apply to families who send their children to Catholic or other private schools is revealing. It demonstrates that the legislation is not genuinely about child welfare — it is about controlling families who operate outside any institutional framework the state can monitor. Catholic schools, however imperfect, at least have a physical infrastructure and administrative apparatus that the state can regulate. Homeschooling families, particularly those who are deeply religious, represent a form of education that is most resistant to state ideological penetration — and therefore most threatening to the secular project.
The Failure of State Institutions and the Scapegoating of the Faithful
The tragedies cited by the bill’s defenders deserve the most serious attention — but not the attention the legislators are giving them. An 11-year-old girl starved to death. A 12-year-old girl sexually abused and killed. A man imprisoned in his own home for two decades. These are horrors that demand accountability — but the accountability lies with the state agencies that were already involved. The DCF knew about these children. The public schools should have noticed their absence. The failure was not in the lack of oversight — it was in the execution of the oversight that already existed.
Pope Pius IX, in Qui Pluribus (1846), warned against those who “under the guise of more serious criticism and in the name of historical method” seek to undermine the foundations of faith and order. The Connecticut legislators operate under a similar guise — invoking child protection to expand state power over families who pose no threat. This is the classic tactic of the authoritarian: identify a genuine problem, fail to solve it through existing mechanisms, and then use the unsolved problem as justification for new powers that will inevitably be turned against the innocent.
Murphy’s observation that “these children fell through the cracks of the DCF, and the public schools did not pay attention to what was going on with those children” is not a defense of abuse — it is an indictment of the state’s failure to fulfill its existing obligations. The proper response to DCF failure is to reform DCF, not to impose universal surveillance on families who have done nothing wrong. The state’s demand to bring all homeschoolers “under the thumb” of the very agency that failed these children is not merely illogical — it is a confession that the state does not trust its own institutions and seeks to compensate by controlling everyone.
The Broader War on the Family and the Faith
This legislation must be understood within the broader context of the war against the family that has been waged by secular governments for over a century. Pope Leo XIII, in Arcanum Divinae Sapientiae (1880), warned that “the family is the cradle of civil society, and it is within the family that the virtues necessary for social life are first cultivated.” The state that attacks the family attacks the very foundation of social order. The Connecticut bill does not merely regulate education — it asserts the state’s claim to be the ultimate arbiter of children’s welfare, superseding the God-given authority of parents.
Wolfgang’s invocation of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) is apt. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that “the child is not the mere creature of the state.” But that decision was itself a product of the natural law tradition that informed American jurisprudence — a tradition that has been progressively dismantled by the same secularizing forces now driving the Connecticut legislation. The Pierce decision rested on the premise that parents have a constitutional right to direct their children’s education. The Connecticut legislature now seeks to hollow out that right by imposing conditions so burdensome that they effectively nullify it.
The article’s description of the bill’s supporters referring to children as “our kids” — as if they belong to the state — is perhaps the most chilling detail. This is not merely a rhetorical slip. It is an ideological confession. It reveals the underlying philosophy of the legislation: that children are, in some sense, the property of the state, and that parental authority is delegated from governmental power rather than from God. This is the error that Pope Pius XI condemned in Quas Primas — the removal of Christ and His law from public life, and the consequent elevation of the state to the position that belongs only to God.
Murphy’s disappointment that legislators do not see homeschooling families as an asset to Connecticut reflects a deeper truth: the modern state does not want families who are self-sufficient, religiously formed, and ideologically independent. It wants citizens who are dependent on state institutions, formed by state-approved curricula, and ideologically conformist. Homeschooling families — particularly Catholic homeschooling families — represent a living refutation of the state’s claim to be the primary educator. Their very existence is a challenge to the secular order, and the state responds as it always does: with coercion.
Conclusion: The Duty of Resistance
The Connecticut homeschool legislation is not an isolated policy dispute. It is a manifestation of the same spirit that animates every totalitarian impulse: the belief that the state is sovereign over every aspect of human life, including the formation of children in the faith. As Pope Leo XIII taught in Immortale Dei, “to take from man the natural and divine right of marriage, to circumscribe and limit the power of parents over their children… is a power belonging to God and not to the State.”
Catholic families in Connecticut — and everywhere — must understand that this is not merely a political battle. It is a spiritual one. The state that claims the right to educate children claims a right that belongs to God alone. To submit to such a claim is not prudence — it is capitulation. As the article’s subjects recognized, the proper response is resistance: contacting the governor, demanding a veto, and preparing for legal challenge if necessary.
But legal and political action, while necessary, is not sufficient. The ultimate defense of the family is supernatural. Catholic families must pray, frequent the sacraments available through the true Church, and form their children in the unchanging faith — not as a supplement to their education, but as its very foundation. The state may claim authority over the body, but it has no power over the soul. As Our Lord Himself taught: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).
The Connecticut legislation is a test — not only of Catholic resolve, but of the American republic’s founding principles. As Wolfgang observed, “That’s the French Revolution. That’s not the American Revolution.” The spirit of 1776 — the recognition that rights come from God, not from government — is under assault. Whether it prevails will depend not on legislators or courts, but on the courage of families who refuse to surrender what God has given them.
Source:
Connecticut Homeschoolers Push Back Against New Restrictions (ncregister.com)
Date: 15.05.2026