Charter of the Rights of the Family

The Charter of the Rights of the Family is a document the Holy See issued on October 22, 1983, setting out the Catholic Church's formal position on the family as a foundational social institution and on its own account of the rights that follow from that status. Its preamble rests on four linked principles: that individual human rights carry a fundamental social dimension finding its most vital expression within the family; that the family is founded on marriage understood as a freely contracted bond open to the possibility of children; that marriage itself is a natural institution entrusted with the task of reproduction; and that the family exists prior to the state or any other community, making it, in the Charter's own terms, a natural society with rights of its own that no state grants and none may simply take away. Issued during the papacy of John Paul II, the Charter has since served as a reference point in Catholic teaching and in wider debates over family policy, positioning the family as a rights-bearing unit whose standing precedes, rather than derives from, the authority of any government.