The former papal nuncio cited Pius XI in warning that the state cannot violate the parents’ right to educate their children after a court removed three minors from their rural home.n
(LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has expressed his support for an Italian family whose children were seized after authorities discovered the children were homeschooled at their property in the woods.
“In expressing my full support for the ‘family of the forest,’ I recall the immortal words of Pius XI, which should ring out as a condemnation for all those who have made themselves responsible for the gravest violations of the most elementary principles of civilization and humanity,” the former papal representative to the United States under Pope Benedict XVI wrote on X.
Citing Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Divini illius Magistri, Viganò wrote, “The family […] holds directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable because inseparably joined to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the state, and therefore inviolable on the part of any power on earth.”
As LifeSiteNews reported, on November 20 last year, three minors who lived with their parents in a farmhouse in the middle of a forest in Abruzzo, Italy, were removed from their parents by order of the Juvenile Court of L’Aquila, following checks conducted after a suspected mushroom poisoning incident. These checks revealed a dwelling without water, electricity, or heating, as well as the absence of vaccinations for the children and school enrollment.
The court order, filed with detailed reasoning, identified among the main reasons for intervention the children’s condition of isolation, deemed harmful to their fundamental right to social life and psychosocial development. Institutional reaction erupted when members of the Meloni government criticized the decision, raising doubts that led to a sharp confrontation with the juvenile judiciary.
Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called the judges’ decision a “shame,” claiming that the state’s intervention had overstepped “into the realm of private education.”
The family, of Anglo-Australian origin and composed of spouses Nathan Trevallion and Catherine Birmingham and their three children aged between 6 and 8, lived in a farmhouse immersed in the Abruzzo forest.
Last week, the case took yet another dramatic turn when the Juvenile Court of L’Aquila ordered Birmingham to be separated from her children after she had been living with them in a state facility for several weeks. The children were ordered to be kept at a different facility. Controversially, this decision was made in the middle of the psychological assessment of the three children, which is intended to determine whether they may remain with their family long term.
“There is a court order from a tribunal with such high sensitivity that, right in the middle of the psychiatric assessment, it decided to remove the children and separate the mother,” Marco Femminella, the family’s lawyer, said.
“Probably this assessment, as Andreotti would have said, was not going well as it was going, so they interrupted it,” he mused, indicating he believes the authorities wanted to inflict more psychological stress on the children by taking them away from their mother.
The central question now is whether the judicial intervention was directed against the family’s lifestyle choice or against a concretely dangerous environment, since the outcome of this case will influence how the state addresses non-state directed forms of education in the future, already subject in Italy to stringent controls and a particularly restrictive regulatory framework.