Catholics should ponder this questionnaire carefully and offer their responses, writes David Quinn
A head of next October’s Extraordinary Synod on the Family in Rome the Vatican has issued a questionnaire aimed at ascertaining the opinions of Catholics across a whole range of issues that have to do with the family.
The questionnaire is to be distributed via the various bishops’ conferences. Any Catholic can take part, including lay Catholics. The English and Welsh bishops have already begun the process of gathering opinions. No doubt our bishops will follow suit soon. (It’s at a time like this that the need for a full-time family commission attached to the bishops’ conference rears its head again).
The questionnaire is detailed and demands considered answers, but presumably respondents don’t have to answer every question, just those ones they feel they have most knowledge of.
Knowledge
The very first question, for example, requires a great deal of knowledge indeed. It asks respondents to “Describe how the Catholic Church’s teachings on the value of the family contained in the Bible, Gaudium et Spes, Familiaris Consortio and other documents of the post-conciliar Magisterium is understood by people today?”
This is one for the specialists. But I would say very little of what is contained in any of these documents is understood by people today, even by practising Catholics.
It is not so much that Catholics need have read these documents (other than the Bible), it is that the teachings contained in them simply haven’t been disseminated properly. The result of this is that modern individualism has been able to sweep its way through many Catholic families almost as badly as it has through the rest of society. (US figures show that Catholic marriages are somewhat more likely to stay intact than most other marriages).
Individualism
The single biggest value dominating people’s lives today is the notion that we must all be free to live our lives in any way we please. This does enormous damage to an ethic of commitment and self-sacrifice and permanence. The Church is failing miserably to critique the ethic of individualism in a constructive and meaningful way. Nothing is doing more damage to family life with the Catholic Church.
Another question asks, “How widespread is the Church’s teaching in pastoral programmes at the national, diocesan and parish levels? What catechesis is done on the family?”
The answer to that in most cases has to be, not very widespread at all.
The questionnaire then widens out its scope and asks a very important question: “What place does the idea of the natural law have in the cultural areas of society: in institutions, education, academic circles and among the people at large? What anthropological ideas underlie the discussion on the natural basis of the family?”
This gets right to the heart of the debate about the family in Western societies today, including Ireland. Most of all, it is the question at the heart of the debate about same-sex marriage, an issue Irish people are to vote on soon enough.
Human nature
Anthropology deals with human nature. The natural law view (which is not shared by Catholics alone but which goes all the way back to ancient Greece), is that human nature is real.
It may seem strange to have to even say that. But there is a very strong school of thought which says that human nature isn’t real and that the things we do, how we feel, our ‘instincts’ and so on do not arise from ‘human nature’ at all but arise instead from the way we have been conditioned by society.
Therefore, says this school of thought, the differences between men and women, apart from the obvious physical ones, aren’t real, they aren’t innate. With a different upbringing and education, men would behave like women, or women like men, or both sexes would behave exactly the same.
If the sexes aren’t really different at all, then mothers and fathers aren’t different from one another either and therefore children can have two fathers or two mothers instead.
Nor do the natural ties matter. Therefore the ties between children and their biological parents can be broken without consequence.
This is all total hogwash of course, but thinking like this lies behind the demand to radically redefine marriage. If we permit same-sex marriage we will be complicit in the pretence that there are no real differences between men and women, and mothers and fathers, and that children don’t deserve the love of their own mothers and fathers.
People, including many Catholics, ask themselves, ‘what harm will it do if two people of the same sex can marry?’ The answer is that it attacks the natural rights of children, and above all their right to be raised by their own mother and father where that is possible.
Major campaign
The Church is going to have to engage in a major campaign to educate people about what is at stake in the marriage debate.
The questionnaire casts its net wider still. Predictably it asks respondents to address the issue of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics. Tellingly, it speaks of the “impossibility” of them receiving Communion.
However, perhaps taking its cue from the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Gerhard Muller, it opens the possibility that it will be made easier for Catholics to obtain an annulment.
In an article recently, Archbishop Muller said that many Catholics enter sacramental marriage without any real knowledge of what they are entering into, and without that knowledge there is a doubt as to whether a marriage took place at all.
Annulments
Cynics call annulments ‘divorce, Catholic-style’, but if a marriage never existed, it never existed.
The questionnaire also asks about a matter we almost never hear about at parish level, namely the Church’s teaching on contraception. It asks what local Churches are doing to promote natural methods of family planning. The answer as we know is, almost nothing.
So the document is very wide-ranging. It does not invite respondents to ask that the teachings on the family be changed. Instead it asks them how well those teachings are understood, how they can be better promulgated, and how the Church can better respond to the pastoral difficulties these teaching can cause.
Any Catholic with a strong interest in the family ought to read and ponder this questionnaire carefully and then offer their responses.
