AN ETHICAL APPRAISAL OF THE FAMILY AS AN AGENT OF PRIESTLY FORMATION IN AFRICA
The family is the first unit of human formation among the various units of formation in every age. It is a unit that is indispensable in the grooming of the child. The way a child was brought up within a particular family can go a long way to influence his general attitude towards life. If the child was exposed to a good and favorable formation within family, the child is bound to be positively disposed toward others, because the child would not only have passed through the system, the system would have passed through the child. If it is the other way round, then it will manifest in the child’s general attitude towards life as a whole. It has been discovered that with the disengagement of moral and religious education in schools, the moral fabric of societal life is progressively depreciating at an alarming rate. A lot of children and young people are now living without the basic and rudimentary knowledge of morals and religion. The only emphasis on education in many developed countries is intellectual knowledge, devoid of human formation. Most modern societies depend so much on the positive laws of the state to groom children and direct the affairs of their lives. This is having a toll on products of post primary schools, which are the raw materials for formation at the level of the Seminary. It is against this backdrop that this paper attempts an ethical appraisal of the role of the family in the formation of the candidates for the priesthood. This paper adopts the analytical and hermeneutical methods of analysis. It concludes that a proper attention to the role of the family, will produce better candidates for formation and reduce incidences of behavioural dysfunctions in priestly ministry within the society.
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