Parents and Priests: Conflicting Rights?

Whenever I see the word “right”, the first thing I think of is the corresponding responsibility.  We as humans do in fact have certain inalienable rights which have been bestowed upon us by God: the right to life, the right to happiness, the right to love, and the right to community, among some of the few.  Each one of these corresponds to a responsibility within the human person: the responsibility to seek God, who is happiness, whom we must love, and be in communion with.  How each individual performs these tasks is a matter of freedom, which at its core is not the ability to choose between right and wrong but is the innate ability to choose between conflicting goods.  Since God at the level of our conscience beckons each of us to Himself through our subjective experience of reality, we will necessarily seek Him in different ways.  Hence, the right to seek God, through the specific things that truly make me happy, to show love (which is itself an encounter with God no matter to whom that love is shown) in the way that I show love, and with whom I live in community with is of paramount importance: without the observed and protected right towards these things I would not be able to perform these tasks and would therefore be prohibited at the level of personhood.  The quote from Familiaris Consortio “pastors of souls… must never forget that parents have the inviolable right to entrust their children to the ecclesial community (FC, paragraph 40)” is at once a recognition of both the responsibilities of parents and again of the pastors of souls themselves.  

On the one hand, the pastors of souls have their responsibility in their name: they are pastors not on an administerial level but are pastors, shepherds of souls and therefore people themselves.  Hence, these pastors are responsible for the wellbeing of souls and for leading people into happiness with God.  They have a vested interest and responsibility to assure that children are a vibrant part of the ecclesial community.

On the other side, the family is the base level of society, the foundational unit.  As such, the parents are the governing body within the community based on love which is the family.  They have the first and proximate care of forming the identities of their children, and therefore have the inalienable right to entrust their children to the ecclesial community, in the place, manner, and amount that they see fit, while following the dictates of the moral norm.

These two rights are not contradictory to each other, since they stem from the same source: care and love for the children from those of authority.  The rights however are different because the authority over the child and therefore the responsibility each exerts towards the child is different.  Parents have the inviolable right to the education of their children, since those children make up some of the very identity within the marriage.  Pastors of souls have the right to educate their flock, which include the children, though it is not specific to those children.  Pastors must respect parents' rights over their children, but must never cease to proclaim the Gospel and the objective moral order under which all live.