Category Archives: marriage

Catholic Divorce?

marriage

In the life of the Church, we live in unique times.  Never before has so much sensationalism surrounded papal pronouncements.  Unfortunately this type of sensationalism is almost always based on misconceptions and misreporting and becomes a breeding ground for confusion among the Faithful.  The release of two documents by the Holy Father this week related to the canonical procedure for declaring the nullity of a marriage is a case in point.  What makes these documents particularly prone to this type of sensationalism is the fact that very few people understand what it is the Church teaches regarding declarations of nullity.  Therefore, the documents themselves and what was actually reformed has very little chance to be understood.  With this in mind, what exactly does the Church teach regarding what are commonly referred to as annulments?

By far the most common misconception is that the process of declaring a marriage null is simply a Catholic loophole around Our Lord’s prohibition of divorce.  The Church however is quite emphatic that marriage is indissoluble, teaching that “[I]n his preaching Jesus unequivocally taught the original meaning of the union of man and woman as the Creator willed it from the beginning permission given by Moses to divorce one’s wife was a concession to the hardness of hearts.  The matrimonial union of man and woman is indissoluble: God himself has determined it ‘what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder’” (CCC 1614).  By indissoluble the Church means that a valid, consummated marriage can never be dissolved with a right to remarry.  This means that marriage is both intrinsically indissoluble (cannot be dissolved by contracting partners) and extrinsically indissoluble (no earthly authority can annul it). Only death can separate man and woman in marriage.

The Church’s teaching that marriage is indissoluble is not and cannot be changed by Pope Francis, despite widely disseminated media reports to the contrary.  The changes that the Holy Father is implementing represent no change in Canon law either, only procedural changes that hopefully make access to Marriage tribunals easier.

One can see from the Catechism that the indissolubility of marriage hinges on two things, namely, validity and consummation.    Validity is something that is determined at the time the marriage takes place.  This is an important distinction between divorces and declarations of nullity that cannot be overlooked.  Divorce essentially says “I shouldn’t have married this person” while a declaration of nullity says “I didn’t marry this person.”

annulment

The Church says that a valid marriage hinges on three principles.  The first is that there are no canonical impediments to marriage.  What this means is that they are capable of marriage. Some obvious impediments would be that they are already married (even if they are divorced), too closely related (consanguinity), too young, or unable to consummate the marriage (impotence).  Some impediments such as disparity of cult (a Catholic who wants to marry a non-baptized person) can be removed by special dispensation.  It is worth mentioning as well that when someone’s first marriage is to a divorced person that marriage is not valid due to impediment of a valid prior marriage bond.

The second condition of validity is that the each spouse freely exchanges his or her consent.  This means that something like a shotgun wedding would not be considered valid.  Along the same lines the couple must understand what marriage is and what they are actually consenting to.  This means they have the intention to marry for life, to be faithful to one another and be open to children.  Given the success of the cultural attack on marriage, these things are no longer a given for anyone who enters into marriage.  While they may be grounds for declarations of nullity in the future, the Church ought to take very seriously her role in forming society in what marriage really is to avoid much heartbreak now.  This is where telling the truth in and of itself is always an act of charity.

Finally, the third condition is that their consent is given in the presence of two witnesses and before a properly authorized Church minister.

Marriage between baptized persons is always intrinsically indissoluble and is extrinsically so once it has been consummated.  A valid marriage that has not been consummated may be declared null by the Pope if one of the parties so wishes or through the profession of religious vows.  Consummation is so important simply because it becomes a visible sign that the two have in fact become one flesh in marriage and serves in some ways as a completion of the act of becoming married.

Cardinal Burke when he was Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the Church’s highest court, lobbied against the use of the term “annulment” because it adds to the confusion.  In most people’s minds the term is constitutive and suggests a cancellation of a reality (like returning a shirt you bought but did not fit).  What a declaration of nullity truly is though is a declaration that a marriage never actually existed.

What also adds to the confusion is the role of the Tribunal specifically.  Their role is not merely administrative, but juridical in that they are trying to uncover the truth as to the validity of the marriage.  This will always take time because it is in almost all cases difficult to discover the mindset and circumstances of the couple at the time they exchanged vows.  They are seeking an objective judgment that requires careful examination.  Certainly this process should be as streamlined as possible, but because the vocation to marriage is so intimately tied to the salvation of both parties it can only be so efficient while maintaining justice.

It is also worth mentioning that declaration of nullity is concerned only with the question of whether a marriage is valid, not whether it is sacramental.  In an address to the Roman Rota in 2001, St. John Paul cautioned about trying to make an unnecessary distinction between natural marriage and marriage as a sacrament.  He said that

“[W]hen the Church teaches that marriage is a natural reality, she is proposing a truth evinced by reason for the good of the couple and of society, and confirmed by the revelation of Our Lord, who closely and explicitly relates the marital union to the “beginning” (Mt 19: 4-8) spoken of in the Book of Genesis:  “male and female he created them” (Gn 1: 27), and “the two shall become one flesh” (Gn 2: 24).  The fact, however, that the natural datum is authoritatively confirmed and raised by Our Lord to a sacrament in no way justifies the tendency, unfortunately widespread today, to ideologize the idea of marriage – nature, essential properties and ends – by claiming a different valid conception for a believer or a non-believer, for a Catholic or a non-Catholic, as though the sacrament were a subsequent and extrinsic reality to the natural datum and not the natural datum itself evinced by reason, taken up and raised by Christ to a sign and means of salvation.”

When two Christians marry (i.e. those who have been validly baptized) the natural reality that is marriage is raised to a Sacrament.  Note that it need not be two Catholics, but only two validly baptized Christians that bestow the Sacrament of Matrimony upon each other.  This is often a source of confusion for many people as to what constitutes a sacramental marriage and what doesn’t.  All valid marriages between Catholics are sacramental because you can’t be Catholic without being baptized. However, a valid marriage between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic is sacramental, while a valid marriage between a Catholic and a non-baptized person is not.

It is also worth mentioning that non-Catholics are not generally under the authority of canon law concerning marriage, so marriages between non-Catholics are generally recognized to be valid unless proven otherwise. Some of these marriages are sacramental (when both parties are baptized) and some are not (when one or both are not baptized).

Regarding the documents in general, the major news organizations labeled Francis’ reforms as “radical” suggesting there were fundamental changes to the whole process.  What they failed to mention was that all of these changes were procedural and none of them represented changes to the grounds for a declaration of nullity nor a lowering of standards.  The reason why clarity on this issue is so important is because the Church truly is the last voice left for a sane view of marriage.  When the world mistakenly sees annulments as “Catholic divorce” she loses much credibility.  The world will not listen to what the Church has to say when it is not reflected in the way its members live and so a proper understanding is vital to the Church’s evangelism.

Through the Looking Glass

Contraception, marriage

In his highly prophetic classic Brave New World, Aldous Huxley tells of a world in which all women are forced to turn their eggs over to the state. The eggs are then placed into a manufactured environment which serves as a mother’s womb. Selected sperm is withdrawn from a sperm bank to fertilize the eggs and a new life is grown under supervision. This new process is called “decanting,” rather than birth.  While most people in the 1930s would have thought this impossible, today this possibility looms ever closer.  Much of what he described has become commonplace in our world today through the use of reproductive technologies such as IVF and artificial insemination.  It is so common that one of Time Magazine’s “100 Hundred Questions for the New Century” was whether we will still need sex to procreate.  One would think that because the Church is “pro-child” and opposes such things as artificial contraception that she too would be promoting these reproductive technologies.  This is because they aid in bringing about the great good of human life.  However, because the Church is concerned with “the dignity of the human person and his integral vocation,” she teaches that many of these techniques are morally wrong (Donum Vitae (DV), Introduction, 1).

There are a variety of these techniques available today.  The Church opposes the use of some of these means and not others.  The basic principle at play in the use of these reproductive technologies is whether a given technique assists or substitutes for the conjugal act.  If it assists the conjugal act then it is morally licit and if it replaces the conjugal act it is illicit (DV, Section II, 6).  In general the Church refers to the latter as “artificial fertilization” procedures.  Among the most common of these procedures are in vitro (literally means “in a glass”) fertilization and artificial insemination.

With this distinction made, it is instructive to look at the foundation the Church uses for making her moral judgment.  In 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation—called Donum Vitae in Latin—that formally addressed the moral issues associated with these new reproductive technologies.  In it, the CDF put forth three reasons to support the Church’s position.  They are the dignity of the child, the inseparable link between the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act, and the “language of the body” (DV, II, B 4-5).

IVF Dish

All persons from the moment of conception have equal dignity because they are made by God in His own image.  This means that every relationship is one of equality between persons.  However with the use of artificial fertilization, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product.  In essence this is “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology” (DV, II, B 4c).

Furthermore, once the child is viewed as a product rather than a person, the temptation to subject him to quality control measures becomes great.  In practice it also leads to other evils that are associated with the production of “excess” human lives that are either subject to abortion (referred to benignly as “selective reduction”), frozen for later use or made subject to medical experimentation.  One study estimated that on average only 1 out of 30 children conceived outside the womb actually survive.

The personalistic norm of then Karol Cardinal Wojtyla illuminates what is at the heart of the push for reproductive technologies.  The norm in its negative form states that a person is “a kind of good which does not admit use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end.”  The foundation of the acceptance of these reproductive technologies then is a utilitarian ethic.  This can also play out in that many couples who struggle with infertility (or even single women and same sex couples) think that a child will make them happy and they therefore should have one at all costs.

The second reason that is put forward by the Church is the inseparability of the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act.  To see why this is the case, we must look at the nature of marriage itself.  Part of the nature of marriage is that there are four fundamental goods: fidelity, permanence, openness to children and friendship between the spouses (c.f. CCC 1643-1654).  For any act then to be marital, it must be perfective of these goods in some way.  Therefore in order for the conjugal act to be truly marital there must not be a “break between the unitive significance and the procreative significance” of the marital embrace (Humanae Vitae, 10).

If the marital embrace is a participation in the goods of marriage then procreation “cannot be likened to those existing in lower forms of life” (DV, Introduction 3). What this means is that there is a fundamental difference between procreation and reproduction.  Procreation is a personal act.  “Pro-create” literally means to create for.  This means that the spouses create for God in that it is God who gives life while the spouses transmit it.   Practically speaking this means that we may not create human life in the same manner (such as in test tubes) that we manipulate animals.

The difference between procreation and reproduction is one that is very often missed because of the failure to see children as a gift and not a right (DV, II, B, 8).  Although one of the sacred duties of marriage is to “accept children lovingly from God,” this does not mean that the spouses have a right to have children by any means necessary.  They must have “respect for the fundamental criteria of the moral law” (DV, Intro).  It truly means that the spouses have a willingness to accept children should God bestow that gift on them.  Janet Smith has a great analogy that she uses to explain this.  She says that infertile couples are like soldiers who go through years of training and never actually fight in a war.  They do not have the right to start a war to fulfill their assignment.  The assignment is not so much to fight as a willingness to fight.

The final reason that the Church offers is that these reproductive technologies violate the “language of the body.”  As we will see, this notion is closely linked to the inseparability principle that was discussed above. This is a notion that is central to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  It is essential for developing what he called an “adequate anthropology.”

Man, made in the image of God (Gn 1:26), is a body person.  This means that the body is not just something accidental or a mere house for the soul.  The body is not just part of the person but instead is the person as expressed in the physical world.  If the body is the way a person expresses himself, then in some way man must image God, who is a communion of persons pouring themselves out in an eternal exchange of self-giving love, in his body.

John Paul II puts it,

“(T)he body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it” (John Paul II, General Audience, Feb 20,1980).

In revealing something of the mystery of God, the body in its sexual complentarity has a spousal meaning.  The spousal meaning of the body is the body’s “capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift” (John Paul II, General Audience, Jan 16,1980).  The spousal meaning of the body is expressed most especially in the conjugal union of spouses.  In order for this union to be an authentic sign of the Trinity it must be a true communion of persons (unitive) and lead to the possibility of a third person (procreative).  The child’s origin then must be directly based upon an act of bodily self-giving by the spouses and not as the result of a laboratory procedure.

Aldous Huxley may have been prophetic in seeing many of the reproductive technologies that have come about, but it was perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest prophet who saw the ethical consequences.  We would all be well advised to heed the warning of John Paul II when he said that once “the human body, considered apart from spirit and thought, comes to be used as raw material in the same way that the bodies of animals are used…we will inevitably arrive at a dreadful ethical defeat” (Letter to Families, 19).

 

United on Marriage

marriage

As the Church prepares for the fallout from the Obergefell decision, it is vitally important that she presents a united front.  But it seems that rather than a willingness to fight for marriage, many have greeted the decision with either indifference saying, “how does what they do affect my marriage?” or with scapegoating, usually blaming the “culture,” “Cafeteria Catholics” or “liberal bishops.” I would like to address both groups because I think they make the same fundamental error, even if they end up in different places.

The Indifferent

One of the clarion calls of the gay marriage movement has been that gay marriage is between two consenting adults, doing no harm to anyone else and should be legal.  Therefore we should remain indifferent to the laws surrounding it as long as they do not discriminate.  The assumption is that marriage is a private affair and should have no outside interference.  This, of course, ignores the fact that the law is a great moral teacher.  As St. John Paul II reminds us, laws “play a very important and sometimes decisive role in influencing patterns of thought and behavior.” (Evangelium Vitae, 90).  Succeeding generations will grow up assuming that homosexuality is morally acceptable.  Beliefs shape behavior.

It is this interest in the succeeding generations that forms the basis for the State’s interest in marriage.  The State is only interested in marriage because it is where the next generation is raised.  They should show concern that the rights of children are protected and children have a natural right to being raised by both parents.  Even the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child have recognized this right.

This is a natural right because “[M]arriage is the fundamental pattern for male-female relationships. It contributes to society because it models the way in which women and men live interdependently and commit, for the whole of life, to seek the good of each other.  The marital union also provides the best conditions for raising children: namely, the stable, loving relationship of a mother and father present only in marriage” (USCCB, Marriage and Same-sex Unions, 4).

Now that same-sex marriage is legalized, there will be a significant change in our society, the fruit of which we will not necessarily see in our generation. We have codified the assumption that the primary purpose of marriage is to validate and protect a sexually intimate relationship. All else is secondary including the rights of the other members of the family.

The Scapegoaters

On the other hand there are those who normally label themselves as “conservative” Catholics who are on the lookout for someone to blame.  It is always those people who aren’t Catholic enough—bishops, priests, laity—who are to blame for the current plight in the world.  They usually measure the Catholicity of those around them by counting the number of kids they have.  We have all met them—they define themselves by how many kids they have and they speak of other people in the same terms.  They hold those with two kids in contempt.  They are also marked by a joylessness that usually stems from the demands of having four kids within six years of each other.  It never crosses their minds that the couples with two kids may be looking at them not because of how many kids they have but with how unhappy they seem.

Now let me be absolutely clear what I am saying here.  Large families are a beautiful gift and there are many of them who live with a great joy and make it look so appealing.  They are living out their vocation in the manner God has called them.  But not everyone is called to have a large family.  There are grave reasons why having more children temporarily or permanently is imprudent or even impossible.  Certainly it matters morally how we accomplish this.  That is not what this is about.   It is about those couples who show no discernment and assume marriage is simply about baby making.  Because they are operating out of the same set of assumptions as those who are indifferent and bear just as much responsibility as them in creating this atmosphere.

To understand the assumption that is being made, it is first necessary to clarify the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental goods.  An intrinsic good is one that is good for its own sake and is an end in itself.  An instrumental good is one that is a means to some intrinsic good.  If we classify marriage as a good, is it intrinsic or instrumental?

St. Augustine was the first to hold that marriage is an instrumental good.  He said “we must see that God gives us some goods which are to be sought for their own sake, such as wisdom, health, friendship; others, which are necessary for something else, such as learning, food, drink, sleep, marriage, sexual intercourse.” (St. Augustine, De bono coniugali, 9.9).  This notion of marriage as merely an instrumental good is still in vogue today.  However, marriage is an intrinsic good.  As John Paul II pointed out in Veritatis Splendor, the communion of persons in marriage is a fundamental human good upon which all human goods are built.

If we define marriage as “a union between a man and a woman who, by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons” (CDF, Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, 2) then we see that only in light of marriage as an intrinsic good do the ideas of permanence and exclusivity make sense.  If marriage is not an end in itself then there is no reason to abide by these ideals in the face of the nearly inevitable trials that come with every marriage. If marriage is an intrinsic good, then it is written into the very nature of man.  This means that it is fixed and not open to redefinition.  However, when it is treated as an instrumental good, many begin to see it merely as a social construct.  This means that it may be defined in any manner that a given society sees fit in order to meet the needs of the members.

It is because of the instrumentalist view that the push for same-sex marriage gained traction so quickly.  This is because few people, unfortunately, noticed the radical change in the definition of marriage that began nearly fifty years ago.  Thanks to the “sexual revolution”, sex became separated from procreation.  Once that intrinsic connection was lost, sex within marriage became an instrumental good.  The rest of married life followed suit; marriage became a means of personal fulfilment instead of mutual fulfilment, and when one of the spouses no longer felt “personally fulfilled”, he or she felt free to terminate the contractual agreement.  That this occurred seems self-evident, but it may not be so obvious that the occurrence represented a vast change from the traditional understanding of marriage.

Catholic Rabbits

Out of this rose the reactionary group that sees marriage merely as a means instrumental to the founding of a family.   This temptation is something that the future Pope John Paul II recognized.  He taught that “the inner and essential raison d’etre of marriage is not simply eventual transformation into a family but above all the creation of a lasting personal union between a man and a woman based on love” (Love and Responsibility, p.228).  In other words, the family is a fruit of marriage that is founded on the communion of the spouses, but it is not the purpose of marriage itself.   The fact that society feeds on that fruit should not obscure this either.

images

I think this what at the heart of what Pope Francis was saying when he cautioned against becoming Catholic rabbits.  The point is that the vocation of marriage is a calling to healthy family life which may or may mean a large family.  Many Catholics today would have scoffed at Mary and Joseph for having one kid (and some of their Jewish neighbors probably did).  And yet they serve as the model for all of family life because of the three signs of a healthy marriage—(1) mutual sanctity of the members (2) greater concern for the perfection of their spouse than their own (3) joy.

The point is that large families are not the solution to the marriage crisis as some seem to think.  The solution is holier families.  This means a commitment to the sanctification of each of the members individually.  Large families can turn the eyes of the world for two reasons—the first is that they appear to be a freak show or second because of the great joy of their members.  Only in the second case does the freak show aspect fade and the beauty of marriage well lived shine forth.  The world looks at the joyless family and sees the mom as nothing more than a baby-making machine and in some respects they are right.  Marriage has to be so much more than that.

We have no one to blame for the marriage crisis but ourselves.  If Marriage is an intrinsic good then it is written in all of our hearts to live out God’s plan for it in our lives.  In other words, the witness of a beautiful marriage speaks volumes to the hearts of those in the world.  This cannot be stamped out because we are made for it.  When the law says marriage is something that it is not, then one of the weapons to fight it is to live more clearly what it is.  The problem has been that we have not lived it out well enough to show this.  If you want to change the culture, start in your own house.  The culture war will be won one family at a time.  We have to always remember this and not be surprised or discouraged when things like this happen.  As the Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia told Cardinal Carlo Caffara,

“the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. And then she concluded: however, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”

 

Idols and the Supreme Court

Contraception, Culture of Life, marriage, Scripture

In the minds of many people, the SCOTUS decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was inevitable. What comes next in many Christians’ minds is the four horseman of the apocalypse as God pours His chastisement upon our country.  But what if the decision itself is the chastisement?  While this may sound strange initially, anyone who reads the first chapter of St. Paul’s letter to Romans will find that God often chastises mankind for their sins by turning them over to them.

Here is what St. Paul says specifically,

“The wrath of God is indeed being revealed from heaven against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them.  Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning, and their senseless minds were darkened. While claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes. Therefore, God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Therefore, God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper. They are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know the just decree of God that all who practice such things deserve death, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” (Romans 1:18-32)

If we follow what St. Paul is saying, we can trace four steps in the degradation of man.

Step One: Idolatry

He says that it all begins with idolatry—“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator.” The turn is away from God to material reality in some way.

Pope Francis has spoken often about the danger of idolatry in today’s world and has challenged all of us to examine ourselves regularly to see the idols in our lives.  Anything that we put in the place of God is an idol.  However, I think there is an idolatry that is unique to Americans of which we are now reaping the fruit—equality.

When Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America he found that for Americans, “equality is their idol.” While this drive for equality “excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored” and “tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great” there is always a danger lurking, namely that “there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom” (Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter 3).

But isn’t equality a good thing?  How can Tocqueville call it an idol?  Aren’t we all equal in the eyes of God?  Certainly we are all equal in dignity, but the fact of the matter is that equality is a man-made legal fiction.  God, for His part, has made everything with varying degrees of perfection.  We are not all equal in God’s eyes.  He has made each of us to be perfect in one particular way, but not in all ways, much less for us to be equally perfect in all things.  We bring glory to God by achieving this perfection.  Whether we achieve this perfection or not does not change our value in God’s eyes—we are all still individually worth dying for.  But to try and change this important aspect of reality is to set ourselves up as God.  In other words, the fixation to create equality where there isn’t one is an attempt on man’s part to usurp God.  The gross manner in which it has been enforced from above in our country in particular has forged it into an idol.  Tocqueville identified it almost 200 years ago and it is no less true today.

CS Lewis encapsulates the idolatrous nature of equality in his book That Hideous Strength in a dialogue between Jane and the Director.

Jane: “I thought love meant equality.”

Director: “Ah, equality! Yes; we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

Jane: “I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”

Director: “You were mistaken; that is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes- that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”

Think of all the ways in which we attempt to create equality where there isn’t.  We try to make men and women identical.  We award trophies to everyone.  We attempt to make the rich poorer and the poor richer by governmental fiat.  Now we have said all loves are equal—“love is love”—and has been recognized as such by the highest court in the Land.

rainbow_court

Step Two: Sexual Immorality

What follows from idolatry according to St. Paul?  It is sexual immorality, namely “God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies.”

The move from God to material reality as its god leads a God-sized void in man’s heart. He turns to the closest thing that offers what he longs for with God (interpersonal communion), namely sex. It starts as the “old fashioned” kind, namely fornication. But for Americans it is pays homage to the idol of equality. Based on the false notion of equality of men and women, we have attempted to make women into men through the wholesale promotion of contraception.

Men could always, for the most part, have sex without consequences. If men and women are equal then women should be able to do that as well. To make this possible, chemical contraception came on the scene. Now men and women could engage freely in all the sexual activity they wanted. To make this even more possible, we should have our government provide the means to securing these pills. But there is a hidden assumption in the promotion of chemical contraception.  The assumption is this.  Women are inferior to men and so in order to be seen as equal they must either have a surgery or take a pill.  Now I personally don’t believe this for one minute, but I grieve for the millions of women who have never questioned this assumption that they are making.

Step Three: Sexual Perversion

In step three in the descent of man, God hands them over to even “more degraded passions.”  Not satisfied with unlimited sex, we must turn up the volume and get more disordered and depraved.  Thus homosexuality becomes more widespread.  In the name of equality, society must “give approval to those who practice them” through its laws. After all if a heterosexual couple can engage in an act they have deliberately rendered unfruitful, why can’t two people engage in an act that is by nature unfruitful? They are equal, especially when they love each other.

Step Four: Societal Chaos

Once it has been given the governmental seal of approval, God’s final punishment is to “hand them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper.” What follows is societal chaos, “[T]hey are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” God may not have forced Americans to drink this chalice to the dregs, but we can see signs of it all around.

The purpose of writing all this however is not to be a prophet of gloom, but to suggest a path out of this. If one listens to the arguments surrounding Gay marriage you find that they are irrational. This is only more obvious when one reads the Obergefell v. Hodges majority opinion. This is because one of the punishments is that “their minds are darkened”, as in not able to reason clearly. Sin makes us all stupid. To continue to engage in argument as the main point of attack is fruitless, especially if we view all of this as God handing us over to the idol of equality.

If we want to be free from the punishments of the sin of idolatry we must repent of that sin. What I am proposing is for Christians across the United States to fast on July 4th as an act of Penance for the sin of idolatry. Only by repenting of that sin can we break the cycle of chastisement. Just as Our Master did, we as the Body of Christ, have the role to perform acts of Reparation to God for the sins of mankind. We can voluntarily fast now, or we can offer reparation later when the effects of the legalization of Gay marriage are felt keenly by all Christians. It might require both

Will you join me? If so, I would like you each to invite five other people to offer a fast of some sort this Saturday. Imagine the effect on our culture we could have by offering our “bodies as a spiritual sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), especially on Independence Day and First Saturday. Our Lady, Queen of the Americas, pray for us.

John Paul II and Chick Flicks

marriage, Theology of the Body

The man who would become  Pope St. John Paul II, Fr. Karol Wojtyla, devoted much of his pastoral work as a priest to the study of love between man and woman.  His reflections grew to full maturity during the series of Wednesday Audiences that would become the Theology of the Body.  Although, as George Weigel describes it, Theology of the Body remains “a theological time bomb set to go off some time in the twenty-first century,” it is one of his earlier works, Love and Responsibility, which is most culturally relevant.  It offers a remedy to the wounding effects of the portrayal of love between the sexes in movies and television shows.  Fr. Wojtyla devoted a significant portion of his discussion examining the anatomy of attraction.  If we perform a “Psychological Analysis of Love” with the future John Paul II, we will understand how Hollywood exploits this attraction and better defend ourselves from its soul crushing effects.

When one speaks of being attracted to someone, it primarily means that attraction is a response to the perception of some value in the other person.  This attraction initially involves the senses, emotions and desires (or collectively, the passions), but in order to be integrated into an authentic human response it must involve the mind and the will as well.  Only when this happens can the emotion that we refer to as love be drawn up into a truly human love in which one wills the good of another.

The natural attraction that men and women have toward each other is governed by what Fr. Wojtyla refers to as the “sexual urge.”  This tendency to seek out the opposite sex is experienced specifically as a bodily and emotional attraction to a person of the other sex.  While the other person is the object by which these attractions are stirred, they are also a subject.  If they remain on the level of object then the risk of using the other person as a “something” rather than a “somebody” is ever looming.  For Fr. Wojtyla the opposite of human love is not hate, but use.  In order to avoid falling into the trap of using other people he posited that all human interaction, especially between the sexes, ought to be governed by the principle that “a person is a kind of good which does not admit use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end.”  In its positive form, the “Personalistic Norm,” is stated as a “person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love”

Fr. Wojtyla used the terms sensuality and sentimentality to refer to each of the physical and emotional attractions respectively.  Because these attractions are on the material level, they do not occur in the abstract but are always directed towards a particular human person.  Because the object of these attractions is also a subject to whom the only “proper and adequate attitude is love,” these responses only serve as the raw material for love and are intended to be integrated into a love that involves a total gift of self to the other that is unique to married love.  The manner in which the media operates makes the road to this integration treacherous at best.  The producers in Hollywood seek to stir these responses in viewers and manipulate the viewers into thinking them authentic experiences.  By examining each of the two attractions and the manner in which they are manipulated this essay attempts to serve as a roadmap to point out the pitfalls that the media consistently places in the path of true love.

Sensuality is the attraction to the body of the person of the opposite sex.  Sensuality is stirred when we encounter a person of the opposite sex and find value in their body as an object of personal enjoyment. Because this is a passive response on our part, it must be drawn up into the intellect and the will.  At that point we can choose to continue to see that person only as an object of sexual value or choose to raise the value to the personal level.  The habit of raising the emotional response to the personal level is the virtue of chastity.

popmovie

Nearly every prime time television show and movie have as one of their goals to stir sensuality.  Through the use of gratuitous “love scenes” the actors deliberately allow themselves to be viewed as objects with the intent of stirring up sensuality in the viewers.  On the other hand, when sensuality is stirred in the viewer it is impossible to integrate the emotion into a truly human love.  There is only the object and no subject present.  Obviously this happens most perniciously in pornography, but even so-called “soft-porn” that now can be found regularly in prime-time television does this.  With repeated exposure we become conditioned to love the feelings that are stirred within by sensuality.  Even if we encounter real flesh and blood persons of the opposite sex a “consumer orientation” leaves us with only the ability to see them as an object to stir sensuality.  We become blind to the truth of the other person as a subject to be loved.  Well aware that chastity arms the viewer against the abuse of sensuality, Hollywood mocks those who show it.  How many “coming of age” dramas are produced each year with exactly this intent?

Sentimentality is the emotional attraction to the sexual value residing in the whole person in the form of their masculinity and femininity.  It seems at first that this is a much “safer” emotion than sensuality because it attaches value to the whole person.  Because of the intensity of the feelings attached to sentimentality there is a tendency to avoid the truth about the other person by idealizing the person “out of all proportion” to whom he or she is in reality.  Love then becomes directed at the idealized values imputed to the others and the other is used for the emotional pleasure derived from idealizing him.

Nearly every “chick-flick” (and there is no shortage of them) is accurately marketed as the “feel-good romantic comedy of the year” because they are meant to stir sentimentality.  The movies rarely deviate from the same theme—a lonely girl meets a masculine guy who is a real jerk, she finds herself surprisingly attracted to him (because she has idealized him), he reveals the truth about himself and they split up, they get back together because he shows traces of the reason she idealized him in the first place and they live happily ever after.

As promised, the viewers “feel good” during the movie, but they often leave the theater more empty and disillusioned than before.  They begin to think that the ideals they value will never be found and instead think that they should settle for someone with whom there is “chemistry” like the girl in the movie.

Fr. Wojtyla suggests that men are often more sensual than women and women more sentimental than men.  Although the prevailing culture insists there are no differences between men and women, when it comes to Hollywood they are quick to exploit this fact.  According to a 2010 study released by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, women in the movies are 7 times more likely to be seen in sexy clothing and 3.5 times more likely to be partially naked than men.  Likewise as the name suggests, “Chick-flicks” are marketed specifically to women because of their sentimental tendencies.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen once commented that “if the human heart does not have enough love in it, it seeks out those who are in love.”  For many people the place they turn first is to the movies and TV.  Because of the manner in which Hollywood manipulates both sensuality and sentimentality, it leads to a culture that has forgotten how to find true love between the sexes.  Only with a proper understanding of these two emotions based on the teachings of John Paul II in Love and Responsibility can we begin to hope to heal the wounds the culture has inflicted on the relationship between men and women.

Catholics Saying Yes to Birth Control?

Contraception, marriage

As the debate continues to rage on regarding the HHS mandate requiring religious institutions provide access to contraception as part of their health coverage, there has been renewed discussion regarding the Church’s teaching on birth control. Since there has been no single issue that has been more controversial and caused more widespread dissent and confusion than the Church’s teaching on artificial birth control, it is instructive to look at the reasons why she teaches as she does.

To begin, it is necessary to define precisely what we mean when we speak of artificial birth control.  In Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI defines it as “every action which, either in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible” (HV 14).

Because there is much confusion on the issue, it is equally important that the Church be precise in her language.  The Church is not opposed to birth control per se, but instead she is opposed to artificial birth control.  This is an important distinction and one that is often not understood.    The Church does not call married couples to “breed like Catholic Rabbits.”  Instead she calls upon spouses to exercise “responsible parenthood” by prudently and generously deciding to have more children or for serious reasons, deciding not to have additional children for either a certain or an indefinite period of time.     It is important then to establish that there is nothing necessarily wrong with the intention of spouses not to have a child when engaging in the marital act.  The Church is merely proposing to spouses that they respect the nature of the sexual act itself.

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This brings us to a second important distinction and that is what the Church means when she uses the terms “nature” and “natural.”  For many people what is natural is what is normal and nature refers to what happens in the world of nature.  Some might refer to certain drugs and devices such as a chart of one’s fertility cycle as unnatural. But the Church uses these terms in a more philosophically precise way.  Nature refers to the essence of a thing and that which is in accord with nature is said to be natural.  Drugs and devices are said to be natural if they work in accord with nature or restore something to its natural condition.

In examining human nature, one finds that man has a natural inclination to the good.  As I have mentioned before,  there are four intrinsic goods in which man is naturally inclined.  First, all men have an inclination to conserve their being.  From this inclination every man naturally does those things which preserve and enhance his life and avoid those things which would be harmful to it.  Secondly, man possesses the natural inclination to marriage and procreation (including the raising and education of children).  Thirdly, because man is a rational creature he has a natural inclination to know the truth, especially about God and finally to live in society.  Whatever pertains to each of these inclinations belongs to the natural law.  In other words, whatever promotes these goods leads to true human thriving and ought to be promoted and whatever is contrary to one of these goods is wrong and ought to be avoided.  It is also important to note that something is wrong not simply because God said so, but because ultimately because it is harmful to us.  That is why Aquinas insisted that we offend God only by acting contrary to our own good.

Notice further that in the list of intrinsic goods, marriage and procreation appear as a single good.  That is because they are linked and anything that harms either of the two aspects harms both.  Contraception is intrinsically wrong because it harms the good of marriage and procreation.

Many question how these two aspects constitute a single, inseparable good.  If we understand marriage in the traditional sense to mean the one-flesh, communion of persons in which the spouses unite on all levels of their personhood (body and soul) and we examine the conjugal act on a biological level we can illuminate the inseparability principle (i.e must be both unitive and procreative).  Professor Germain Grisez articulates this well when he carefully explains this based on the following principle:

“Though a male and female are complete individuals with respect to other functions — for example, nutrition, sensation, and locomotion — with respect to reproduction they are only potential parts of a mated pair, which is the complete organism capable of reproducing sexually. Even if the mated pair is sterile, intercourse, provided it is the reproductive behavior characteristic of the species, makes the copulating male and female one organism.”

Professor Grisez’s point is that destroying the reproductive function of the act, also destroys its ability to unite the spouses.  The couple is only one “organism” when they engage in natural intercourse.  His argument also shows that it is not a bunch of celibate men in Rome who came up with the Church’s teaching against contraception, but human reason.

While I said above that the laws of nature are not the same as the Natural Law, these laws can serve as a reliable guide in discovering the good.  Because nature is intelligible, to act in accord with nature is to act in accord with reason and therefore to act morally.   Conversely we can say that which is not natural is not in accord with reason and therefore is immoral.  One can readily see based on this principle why there is an insistence against “artificial” methods of birth control and something like Natural Family Planning is in accord with the Natural Law.  It is not because they are artificial per se but because they are unnatural.  They do not restore the reproductive facilities to their natural state but instead render them defective.

There are many who question why contraception is morally wrong and practices such as Natural Family planning are deemed morally licit.  They reason that because both the contracepting and the NFP couples have the same intention—to avoid pregnancy—that they are simply using different means to make this happen.  But as we have seen it is not the intention that necessarily makes birth control morally illicit, it is the means by which this is done that can be problematic.

This also betrays a certain misunderstanding of what is actually being done (or in this case not done) when couples practice NFP.  By abstaining from the marital act during periods of fertility, the couple is not falsifying the act in the way a contracepting couple does.

A straightforward way of seeing why NFP is morally permissible is through a simple three step argument.  If there is nothing wrong with spouses’ choosing to avoid pregnancy for just reasons and there is nothing necessarily wrong with a couple choosing not to engage in the marital embrace then there can be nothing wrong with not having sexual intercourse with the intent of not getting pregnant.

Who’s the Boss?

marriage, Sacraments

If I was to pick one absolutely unique American principle, it would be a disdain for authority.  It seems almost to be at the heart of the American founding.  While this has led to some of the things that made our country great, when taken to an extreme can lead to its downfall.  It seems this anti-authoritarian attitude permeates nearly every aspect of society.  There is perhaps no other area where it has done more damage than in the family.  In ceremoniously rejecting anything traditional as outdated, we may unwittingly be causing the downfall of society as a whole.  If we are to stop this downward spiral we must restore a proper understanding of authority in marriage.

In order to see this as anything more than a sentimental longing for a patrimony long obsolete, we must be convinced that authority within marriage is necessary.  To see its necessity we should recognize the family (of which marriage is the foundation) as the primordial society.  It is the society that all further societies presuppose.  All societies have as their aim the good of their members (or common good).   In order to achieve any particular good, all the members must be acting towards it (or at least not against it).  This only happens in two ways.  Either “everyone is on the same page” as to what is good or there must be an authority figure whose judgment is final.    There is no other way if anything is ever to get done because the judgment about a particular good has two aspects—whether the thing itself is good and what good things to use to bring it about.  In other words it is not enough to merely agree on whether the end is good, you must also agree on the means you will use to get there.  Short of agreement on every aspect of a particular action, any society needs authority (even if it is somehow exercised democratically).

The family is no different.  There must be an authority structure for the sake of the common good.  Parents must have authority over children and the husband must have authority over the wife.  An example will help to clarify.  Suppose both a husband and a wife agree on the good of education for their child.  Suppose further that after much discussion they are locked in disagreement as to which school to send the child to.  Both have good and valid reasons for their choices that the other does not agree with.  How can they proceed?  If this was an isolated incident then certainly they could come up with a compromise or even draw straws.  But the fact of the matter is that in marriage there are a lot of ties to be broken.  No matter how good and holy two people are, they cannot always agree as to how to accomplish something good.  That is the nature of good things—there usually is more than one way to achieve them, one of which may be better than another.  They have to have a principle by which they can “break the tie.  One person having the authority breaks the tie always.

Why does it have to be the husband that “wears the pants”?  To see why the husband has authority we have to be willing to submit to the authority of Sacred Scripture.  This means we have to stop running away from the difficult section of Ephesians 5 and confront it head on.  Specifically, “[W]ives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.   For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church…” (Eph 5:22-23).  No matter how we attempt to twist these by substituting different translations for the word “subordinate” we are still stuck with the command that the husband is head of the wife.  This means that just as Christ has authority over the Church so too the husband over the wife.  This is the divinely ordered nature of the family—the husband is head of the wife.

It is also important that we understand what is not being put forth here.  This is not meant to say that men have a natural authority over women in general.  There is nothing in the Church’s teaching that says that.  This model of authority is only for the sake of the family and does not apply to other societies.  They have their own authority structures that allow women authority over men and vice versa.  Although this has been used as justification in the past for men to lord over women in general, that was never the intent.  And even if it was ab-used doesn’t mean we throw out its proper use in marriage.

marriage certificate

But it has also been abused within marriage as well.  This is why marriage is a Sacrament, even for those who do not believe it is a Sacrament  (as an aside two people who are baptized and exchange valid consent become ministers of the Sacrament of Matrimony) because fallen man has a tendency to “lord it over his wife” (Gn 3:16).  Christ came to undo all the effects of the Fall and through the Sacrament of Marriage He infuses the grace needed to live out this otherwise impossible situation.  In other words the husband is given a grace of office as husband to exercise his authority in the same way that Christ does.  In the same way one of the graces of the office of wife is obedience to her husband.  This is no mere blind obedience due to her “urge for her husband” (Gn 3:16) but because she knows he is truly exercising his authority under the inspiration of grace.

The abuse of authority I think only gets worse in a culture of divorce.  Most obviously there are many people who are not validly married, even if they live as though they are.  They miss these necessary graces to live out Matrimony according to Christ’s model.  But the ease of divorce also causes us to not discern the call to marriage well.  If it is easy to get out of a mistake, then we are more likely to make the mistake.  But when it is difficult, we discern better.  Specifically women will better ask themselves whether the man they are about to marry is the type of man she would want to obey because she knows he is always going to have her best interest at heart.  Likewise men will ask the question that I was advised to ask by the priest who did our Pre-Cana, “is this the women that you can spend the rest of your life making a gift of yourself to?”

The most important thing to consider is what this authority actually looks like.  When St. Paul speaks of the husband and wife subordinating themselves to each other, he means they should view each other as equals.  This means first and foremost that the husband’s authority is not paternal.  He does not treat her as one of his children or discipline her the way a father does a child.  His authority should be exercise mainly through service (again remember Christ is the model).  He should lead by being the first to serve even to the point of exhaustion.

It should not be arbitrary and should be exercised with great reverence for the wife.  It also needs to be used prudentially and with great caution.  It should never be played like a trump card that in essence says “we can talk about this all you want, but ultimately it is my decision and I have already made it.”  It should truly only be exercised when it is the last means to “breaking a tie.”   To micro-manage your wife’s behavior under the pretense of authority is an abuse of it.  The wife for her part should expect this from her husband and she must respect the times when he does exercise it necessarily.  She needs to be faithful to her own vows to obey her husband.  Although this is less common today, the wife also needs to act like a full partner and not look to her husband to make every decision for her.

Perhaps after all this, one might say, “I see the point, but what we do works for us.”  I contend that one of the reasons why family life has suffered so greatly in recent decades is because we have ceased to live out the divinely planned ordering for the family that includes the authority of the husband and father.  It may appear to “work for us” but appearances can be deceiving especially because authority has a spiritual component to it as well.  The husband must also be the spiritual head of the household.  When he does this through charity, prayer and suffering for his wife and family, he merits great graces for them.  Also, by accepting the God-given order of the family, he opens the flow of grace for the whole family.  Likewise the wife when she is willing to obey merits great graces for the family because she accepts God’s plan.  The children too in obeying both of their parents equally do the same.

When this natural ordering of the family is upset, this makes room for the demonic to enter.  This is because demons are very legalistic and where they find a vacuum in God-given authority they have room to operate.  Husbands and wives, either individually or both, who fail to submit themselves to Christ’s plan open the family up to the demonic.  The wife has a right to spiritual protection from her husband and when either fails in authority/obedience (rightly) that protection is lost.  The husband is not just the physical protector of the family but also meant to be the spiritual protector as well—in fact more so.  The number of exorcisms that are being performed on wives and children is on the rise and so, at least empirically, the rejection of this model is doing great spiritual harm.  The only solution is the “traditional” one—“As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.  Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her.”  Ultimately, there is no other way.