In the last 3 decades, the concept of ‘Children’s Rights’ has emerged to define their interests in international law. Although the intention is, theoretically, to be praised, ‘Children’s Rights’ is an abstract, meaningless notion, in a world separate from God.

Without God, each of the institutions that practically interpret this notion becomes, in fact, the ‘god’ of the children and the parents involved – in a more or less arbitrary way deciding the future of their relationship based on the narrow vision of an institution without any personal connection with the family it manipulates and therefore lacks any love for them.

Let us not forget that God has given a great and natural gift to people: the love between parents and children as a binder of society. If we destroy this, we actually destroy our society.

The solution is not to impose blind laws on the basis of negative exceptions but rather to promote the right way of being. At this point, we must mention that the right way of being is not ‘to have’ because if we start on the path of greed, we will never have enough. It also does not consist in ‘to know’ (intellectual information) because thus we will never know enough, being darkened in the pride of a high opinion of ourselves.

The right way to be is ‘to love’ – to be a person, to be human, even if we will never be able to love enough.

Parents, let us be careful to teach our children to love through our personal example because in the absolute world of God these are the rights of the children: to love and to be loved.

If we do not care about the rights of the children, that is to love them, the spiritual law will intervene and the children will depart from us whether we want this or not.

The images are from the new and old libraries of the Monastery of Vatopaidi, Mount Athos. The book represents volume two of Saint Dionysios the Areopagite’s Works, with commentary by St. Maximos the Confessor, printed in 1634 in Antwerp.

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