Breda O'Brien
We ‘have been bombarded by the cultural norms, which no longer include lifelong fidelity’, writes Breda O’Brien
There is no doubt that the Synod on the Family will generate many headlines and just as much spin. There are people in the media poised either to declare great changes or to lament the lack of great changes.
The so-called hot button topics will dominate, helped by the fact that Msgr Krzysztof Charamsa, a Polish theologian who had worked at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, chose the eve of the synod to declare that he was gay and in a relationship.
However, there is a serious underlying issue that will receive a great deal of attention out of the glare of media scrutiny, that is, how many Catholics understand and practice the Church’s teaching on marriage?
Marriage has a unique place in Catholicism. It is administered by the couple themselves in the presence of the priest. It is at the heart of the Christian vision. “Male and female he created them” was part of God’s plan from the beginning, as we read in Genesis.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in an inspiring speech given at the Humanum colloquium on complementarity held in Rome in November 2014, says this:
“What made the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education and induction into an identity and a history. Seldom has any institution woven together so many different drives and desires, roles and responsibilities. It made sense of the world and gave it a human face, the face of love.”
Compassion
He goes on to talk about Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician and code-breaker, who was arrested and chemically castrated because he was gay. Rabbi Sacks says that we should never return to such a world, with its cruel abuse of those whose sexual orientation is towards people of the same sex.
However, he has an important caveat: “But our compassion for those who choose to live differently should not inhibit us from being advocates for the single most humanising institution in history. The family, man, woman, and child, is not one lifestyle choice among many. … For any society, the family is the crucible of its future, and for the sake of our children’s future, we must be its defenders.”
How many Catholics, even when embarking on their own marriages, have a vision of matrimony this wide and deep? Very few, I suspect. There is a cultural narrative about finding ‘the one’ in which marriage is the icing on the romantic cake, while the cake consists of the intensely romantic feelings engendered by falling in love.
The Christian understanding of marriage is almost exactly the opposite. The glowing feelings are the icing, but the cake is the mutual, self-sacrificing love that allows both people to grow closer to God, and very often, to participate in co-creation by bringing children into the world.
Jonathan Swift wrote in 1711 that “we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another”.
The modern version might be “we have just enough religion to make us indifferent”. Pascal Emmanuel Gobry, borrowing a metaphor from Tim Keller, a Presbyterian minister in New York, talks about being inoculated against Christianity.
In other words, we have only received enough religion to make us immune to it. The current understanding of marriage in our culture often centres on expensive weddings (the ‘bridezilla’ phenomenon) and an ethic of personal fulfilment that can jeopardise the possibility of long-term, successful marriages.
As Pope Francis said at the beginning of the synod: “People are less and less serious about building a solid and fruitful relationship of love: in sickness and in health, for better and for worse, in good times and in bad. Love which is lasting, faithful, conscientious, stable and fruitful is increasingly looked down upon, viewed as a quaint relic of the past.”
Arguments
There may be arguments about penitential paths for those whose marriages have irretrievably broken down, or if and when people can be re-admitted to the Eucharist, but there is another, more fundamental task ahead – to try and educate Catholics about Christian marriage.
Francis also says: “A Christianity which ‘does’ little in practice, while incessantly ‘explaining’ its teachings, is dangerously unbalanced.”
The reality is that most people have never heard the teachings of the Church on marriage, but have been bombarded by the cultural norms, which no longer include lifelong fidelity.
It is vital that the Church remains counter-cultural, but that also it is a place of mercy and forgiveness. These weeks of the synod will be watched attentively by anyone who cares about the future of the Church, for the health of the family is inseparable from the health of the Church.
