As the Postscript of the judgment reminds us, these were private proceedings where the parents had asked the Court to decide the issue as opposed to care proceedings where the State is intruding uninvited into the private
sphere of a particular family or community and where there is a preliminary threshold to be overcome before the State can intervene.
The overarching interpretive rubric within which to understand the
spheres of human life — and, for us here, in
particular the
family — is Augustine's statement, in Book I
of The City
of God, that the servants
of God «have no reason to regret even this life
of time, for in it they are schooled for eternity.»