Within the family, a joy shared is a joy doubled, a trouble shared is a trouble halved

Rafael Pich, Spain

March 31, 2008

Tags: Joy, Generosity, Children, Marriage, Virtues, Upbringing, family Rafael Pich*, father of 16 children, engineer and entrepreneur, is a founding member of the Fondation Internationale de la Famille and vice-chairman of the International Federation for Family Development (IFFD), an NGO with consultative status at the UN.
* He died a month after this interview was published

Interviewer: When and where did you first come to know St Josemaria?
Rafael Pich: My first contact with the founder of Opus Dei was in 1947, through The Way. After that I met him in several different gatherings.

Int: Did meeting him leave some kind of mark on your life?
RP: Ever since 1957 I’ve studied and meditated on some of his writings. When you read what he wrote and go to Christian formational activities in Opus Dei centers, it would be difficult not to be deeply moved. Around that time I also started working in civic projects to promote the family.

Int: Your wife died a few years ago. When you met and decided to marry, did you think of having such a big family?
RP: I’m one of five children and so was she. We always had great fun as kids. We sometimes said, “If it’s up to us, we’ll have at least six!” When you’ve got six and the seventh one comes along, it’s like 15%. When the tenth arrived, it was like 10% – you barely noticed the difference. The children come as God grants them. We have so many friends who want to have children and can’t…

Int: Could you say you have had a happy life?
RP: We have had a very happy life. Real family life, it’s something incomparably happy, especially if you take a positive view of things from the start.

Int: Some people might call you crazy, irresponsible, or even, if you’ll forgive me saying so, ignorant.
RP: Some couples calculate that one child is a burden, two children double the burden, three children three times the burden, and so on. If they aren’t brought up properly that could be true. But if you start teaching them when they’re small that we are in this world to work, and teach them to help their parents – the table, the bed, their dirty clothes… then they really discover the meaning of work as something great, and then one child is a help, two children are double the help, and three children are triple the help, etc.

Int: What helped you at difficult times – because there must have been some? It must often have demanded sacrifice; was it worth it?
RP: I don’t remember any particularly difficult times, because we always relied on God’s grace and especially the strength that comes from the sacraments. We had a spiritually intense family life, we all went to Sunday Mass together and said the rosary together. Lots of people don’t realize that within a family, a joy shared is a joy doubled and a trouble shared is a trouble halved.

Int: Why did you begin running parenting classes? Do people have to learn how to be parents?
RP: Up to the first half of the twentieth century you usually had three generations of a family living in the one house. Breakfast, lunch and supper, everyone sat down at table together. People swapped opinions, shared decisions. Grandma would say, “Joe, we don’t do that.” Granddad said, “Johnnie, that’s great! Well done!” But when that interchange among three generations began to disappear, you had to make up for the lack of it. Being a father or a mother is more important, and also more complicated these days. That’s why we set up family enrichment courses. Parenting is a job, a profession, that has to be learned like any other.

Int: Didn’t all these activities mean spending less time on your own children?
RP: Parents never normally have enough time. But it’s also true that you make time for what you really want to do. When kids are responsible they help their parents in their work. You have to learn how to do two things at the same time, and when you can manage that, you take on a third thing.

Int: You travel all around the world, promoting an institution that has confidence in the permanence of the family. Does that make sense to young couples in Europe, and in countries with completely different cultures?
RP: Families who really love their children know that they need to make an effort to achieve genuine family life. And that is truer than ever today. In Japan, Hong Kong, wherever, babies wake up and cry in the middle of the night, just as they do in Europe. Bad upbringing exists anywhere in the world, and people have a growing concern to improve the way they function as a family. You only have to watch a film, you see how overprotected kids are becoming…, but there are wonderful families in every country, families that are keen to improve.
Young couples fit quickly into the First Steps course, which is aimed at parents with children between 0 and 4 years old. They realize all they can learn, and they are keen to take a “professional” approach to parenting, so to speak.

Int: In his Message for the 2008 World Day of Peace, Pope Benedict called the family “the first and indispensable teacher of peace”. From your experience, can you give any examples of this?
RP: Pope John Paul II also said that “the re-Christianization of the world passes through the family”. I’d be even more specific and say that it passes through true family life, which implies, among other things, reasonable timetables, a well thought out plan of events, punctuality, family gatherings, real-time commitment, and doing things together.

Int: Would you like to add anything to this interview for the St Josemaria website?
RP: In the family enrichment courses run by the IFFD, there is a series of six courses, like a modular degree course. It starts with “First Steps”, for parents of children up to 4. They apply what they’ve learned, and come back a couple of years later for “First Letters”, aimed at parents of children between 4 and 8. And so it goes on, until the final course, “Young Grandparents”. There’s an additional course on “Matrimonial Love” at the opportune time.