In no. 19, above, I noted that I once
assumed that a marriage ceremony which satisfied the dictates of Canon Law
conferred grace sufficient to carry spouses through any and every crisis. But the theology which grounded that
assumption presented the Sacrament as a timeless event, not a flawed beginning
of a process. Very soon, however, I
became convinced that, if the event in question was not a living encounter with
Jesus for both persons, the marriage was doomed.
When I am asked to witness an exchange of
vows, I agree if, and only if, the couple seem to understand the call voiced by
Jesus in John 15:12: "This is my
commandment: Love one another as I have
loved you." I then turn to Jesus'
assertion, "Without me, you can do nothing." To dramatize the relationship between the
two, I acknowledge that I do many things without Jesus. Most obviously, I can in no way make him
responsible for my breaks with intimacy.
But I also know that I cannot love anyone as Jesus loves that person
without reliving tangled interactions between us with Jesus in prayer. First and foremost, since my woundedness
often prevents me from letting Jesus love me, I cannot imagine how he loves
you. Secondly, I am unaware of wounds in
you that need the touch of love, but Jesus is.
I must therefore enter a dialogue with the indwelling Spirit if I am to
hope to understand my tangled depths and yours.
In this dialogue, I allow the movement of the Spirit to reveal to me
what I feel and think, real or imagined, and am willing to express my feelings
and thoughts in vulnerable self-revelations when I can do so without judgments
or agendas.
As I involved engaged couples in this
effort to understand the commitment they were about to make, my understanding
of the annulment process underwent a radical revision. Initially, I had welcomed the annulment
proceedings as a call to grieve over a failed marriage in a way that freed
wounded spouses to get on with their lives.
As I realized that no one could live a commitment to love another as
Jesus loves that person without a deepening involvement with Jesus on the part
of both, I became angry at the way that Canon Law reduced this inner journey to
a juridical process.
The anger increased when I had to submit
requests for annulments to a canon lawyer who regarded marriage as a natural
institution, not a sacramental commitment.
Acting on a canon which allowed him to sit as a single judge, he
rejected petitions without hearings. I
wish now that I had seen the issue clearly.
As it was, we simply appealed his judgment to Chicago.
Today, the issue surfaces in the dishonest
argument that same sex marriages would undermine the institution of
marriage. In this regard, I share the
wish that ecclesiastical authorities would expend as much energy on divorce as
on same-sex unions, since divorce is as prevalent among Catholics as among the
general population. To do so, however,
they would have to abandon efforts to ground Christian moral discourse in the
natural law framework forged by Aquinas and concentrate instead on ensuring
that priests preparing couples for marriage were able to make the marriage
ceremony the occasion for a living encounter with Jesus.
Polemically, I cannot understand how the
insistence that marriage is a natural institution ordained by God can be
reconciled with the legitimation of a Pauline and a Petrine Privilege in Canon
Law. According to the The Pastoral Companion, [ed. note: a
handbook formerly published by canon law professors in our Franciscan seminary
system] the Pauline Privilege assumes
that a marriage of two unbaptized people can be dissolved in favor of the faith
of the party who received baptism, provided the unbaptized party departs. The Petrine Privilege may be used in a
non-sacramental marriage contracted by one baptized and one unbaptized party,
even if the marriage is consummated. In
both sorts of cases, the marriage can be dissolved “in favor of the faith.” I have two comments. One, I object to a codified Law which endows
a Pope who claims to be the guardian of an inviolable moral law inscribed in a
natural order by the Creator with the authority to grant exceptions to it,
especially when the authority to grant the exception is reserved to him
alone. I suggest that, if any exception
is allowed, the law does not have universal import. Two, the assertion that marriages can be
dissolved in favor of the faith rests on a distinction between a natural order
and an order of faith. Why not a more
experiential distinction between a merely contractual marriage and a marriage
in which spouses commit themselves to a journey to deepening intimacy with
Jesus and with one another?
Consequently, I regard the animosity
directed at same-sex marriages as a rear-guard action designed to maintain the
authority of a natural law tradition whose philosophical foundations have been
deconstructed. The rejection of that
tradition is evident in the response of most Catholic couples to the
prohibition of contraception. That
prohibition rests on the supposition that the natural end of intercourse is the
procreation of children and that nothing must be done to interfere with that
end. But the prohibition is meaningful
if, and only if, one shares the Thomistic belief that God inscribed natural
ends in human nature as the expression of God's moral will. Quite obviously, that same supposition recurs
in tirades against same-sex marriages.
For all but defenders of Aquinas' baptism of Aristotelian naturalism,
however, both must be approached through the ethics of intimacy encoded in an
incarnational theology.
From a postmodernist perspective, the very idea
of a monogamous marriage awaited the interiorization of the detachment inherent
in literacy and the gradual triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation
of culture. Thus, in pre-literate
cultures, marital arrangements were determined by a prevailing power
structure. In some cultures, hospitality
required a man to invite strangers to have intercourse with his wife. In others, men were allowed many wives. In the Deuteronomic tradition, a man could
easily divorce a wife, but the wife had no such right. In sum, there is no historical evidence to
support the belief that monogamy is a natural state of affairs.
When the spread of literacy generated a
host of metaphors of individuality, the Hebrew tradition responded with two
diverging conceptions of the covenant between God and Israel. The early stories proclaimed that Israel's
God had voiced a categorical promise to be involved with Abraham and his
offspring on their perpetual journey into the unknown. But when the fulfillment of the promises of
this covenant were endlessly deferred, the Deuteronomic tradition reduced the
covenant to a conditional contract surrounded with promises of rewards for
observance of a mediating Law and threats of punishment for transgressions of
the Law.
In the biblical tradition which replaces
the promise of an intimate involvement on the part of God with promises defined
by a mediated Law, marriage was viewed as a contract, not a covenant. Quite obviously, a contract can be abrogated
if its conditions are not fulfilled.
Tragically, even Catholics who marry are formed by a culture which views
person-to-person interactions as transactions.
In sum, if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. So when they find themselves at
cross-purposes, they do not know how to let the Holy Spirit move in their
tangled depths or to encounter Jesus, the wounded Healer. And the insistence that marriage is a natural
institution cannot generate a language which enables them to listen to the Spirit's
word of love in feelings they seek to bury and to allow Jesus' love for them to
urge them on in their commitment to love one another as he loves each of them.
In conclusion, I can only voice a cry from
a dark valley that seems like the valley of death. As I pass through this valley in my old age,
I am frightened by a seminary system designed to exclude anyone who is not
motivated by a desire to be a Pope John Paul II priest. This system will saddle Catholics with
judgmental individuals unable to hear the cries of those who long for a
genuinely pastoral involvement. Even
worse, these individuals will be able to absolve themselves of responsibility
for the violence they inflict on the faithful by professions of commitment to a
juridically structured institution. I
can only trust that this institution is moving toward a bottom which will
reveal that its hierarchical structure breeds dysfunctional responses to its
dictates in a way that can no longer be denied.
And I am sometimes encouraged by signs that this moment is approaching.
No comments:
Post a Comment