All cultures have some kind of ceremonial bonding
to provide for the birth and nurture of children, since this is essential
for the survival of the community, but marriage is an institution
which takes different forms in different cultures. The various models, polygamy
in Africa, polyandry in Ladakh, arranged marriages and love
matches all succeed where caring,wisdom and integrity are involved;
all can be abusive. The Church has always held that all its teaching
on marriage comes directly from God, so after all the developments
in physiology, psychology and sociology of the last century, the
Catechism of 2000 ‘sits unperturbed among the certainties of
the pre-modern world’(1), and the area of sexual relationships
on which it has so much to say is that in which the faithful
most beg to differ.
A penny catechism from 1933 naively suggests that Christ instituted
the sacrament of marriage at Cana, but originally the church was
not involved in marriage at all, it was a matter for families. The
custom grew up of inviting a priest or bishop to give a blessing,
and from there the ceremony came to take place in a church; nowadays
an Orthodox priest marries the couple, but in the West it is the
bride and groom who administer the sacrament, which was declared
as such only at the council of Trent. In royal and aristocratic families
marriages were arranged for their mutual advancement; it was essential
that the inheritors of power and wealth should be legitimate offspring. But
poor people without property had no need to have their unions legally
recognised, and slaves in the American South could be coupled without
ceremony to provide a workforce for their masters.
Generations of Catholics were taught to see ‘impure thoughts’ as
sinful – everything to do with sex is considered grave matter
- hence the harmful miasma of Catholic guilt on the subject.
But Michael Hollings told a religious sister who mentioned this in
confession that it was a gift for which she should thank God! Judaism
considers it fitting for husband and wife to enjoy the blessing of
lovemaking on the Sabbath, while Christian couples felt it right
to abstain before communion. Until recently only celibates were first-class
Christians, marriage being considered a concession for the weak.
Augustine’s teaching that the sinfulness of sexual relations
was only diminished – not removed – by the sole intention
to procreate has slewed church thinking for centuries. The fact that
those in charge of the church are unmarried has been a major influence
on its thinking. Sex was something to repress instead of a blessing
to be used rightly. Intercourse was seen as giving-in to temptation
and self-indulgence, not as lovers giving themselves unreservedly
to each other. Vincent McLoughlin (2)was trained to see women not
as persons but as a threat to his vow of celibacy, and priests who
have abused children confessed to sins against their own purity not
sins of injustice against another. No wonder pope Benedict’s
encyclical rehabilitating eros as an essential component
with agape of God’s gift of love has made such
a stir! We can now acknowledge that in ‘becoming one flesh
with one another we may embody the love of Christ’(3),and read
the Song of Songs as a frankly erotic love poem and
not just as a parable of God’s love for his people.
Dr. Joyce Poole in her book The Harm We Do (1993) shows
how Rome’s insistence that every marital act should be open
to the creation of life has caused incalculable suffering. Methods
of ‘artificial’ contraception are seen as sinful instead
of as a gift from medical science for the good of couples and societies.
But no-one suggests that triple heart bypasses frustrate the ‘will
of God’ that a person’s life should end. Of course, like
any gift – alcohol for example – contraceptive devices
can be used for ill as well as for good. Some couples
are fortunate enough to be able to rear an unlimited number of children,
or are happy with the acceptable rhythm method of spacing births,
but for others this is divisive and damaging. There was huge disappointment
when Paul VI could not go against the teaching of his predecessors
for fear of undermining papal authority, but in fact Humanae
Vitae had precisely this effect, as people saw that the pope
could be mistaken. A church which forbids the use of artificial contraception
has no right to say anything about abortion. Believers and non-believers
alike deplore its casual and frivolous use, but some Roman Catholics,
comparatively unmoved by poverty and injustice, take up the pro-life
cause with a hysteria which takes little account of women’s
difficult circumstances; Archbishop Rembert Weakland’s willingness
actually to listen to what women had to say on the subject was a
rare exception to the clerical norm.
In its efforts to promote the undeniable goods of
permanence and fidelity the Church has taught that a consummated
union freely contracted immediately
becomes an unbreakable bond, (even, shockingly, if intercourse
took place by force on an unconscious woman). However, common sense
shows that such a bond can be created only over time through the
loving commitment of the couple. In this impossible situation Rome
cannot allow that a marriage has broken down but only that it never
existed in the first place. In its efforts to help unhappy couples
the marriage tribunals will establish such legal impediments as immaturity –people
incapable of making the necessary commitment, and so declare their
marriage annulled. In fact there has been the scandal that rich and
powerful people could always have grounds discovered to produce this
outcome. The pope has the power of annulling an unconsummated union
for one or both of the pair to enter religious life. It is also possible
for members of different churches and faiths to separate with the
church’s blessing; in fact only marriages between baptised
Catholics are indissoluble. People who have obtained a civil divorce
are still married in the eyes of the church and considered full members
(though formerly this was not believed to be the case). St Paul asserts
that God wants us to live in peace, and Rosemary Haughton has pointed
out that when someone leaves an abusive relationship this is not
a failure but a moment of metanoia.(4) However, if
a Catholic remarries or weds a divorced person, he or she can
no longer receive communion (unless the couple undertake to live
as brother and sister!). The reason given for this is that
they are thereby ‘objectively contradicting that union between
Christ and his Church’. But symbols cannot be used to prove
an argument, and this one is overloaded; in human marriage
we consider the partners equal, and, as St Paul says, it may the
Christian wife who saves her husband. Three Rhineland bishops,
while accepting this ruling, declared that they would apply it ‘pastorally’ – this
was not deemed acceptable in Rome, but in fact this is what happens
without publicity in some parishes. The singling out of second marriage
as the most heinous of sins, apparently worse than murder, extortion,
oppression and warmongering, makes it appear that it is the church,
not modern society which is obsessed with sex. If the hierarchy could
read the signs of the times it would see that second marriages can
be models of Christian life
Roman Catholic bishops are currently deploring the introduction of
civil partnerships for same-sex couples, with the weird reasoning
that this concession will somehow subvert marriage, as if heterosexuals
planning to wed could be made to change their mind or their orientation.
The hierarchy would do better to praise lesbian and gay couples for
the example they are setting to promiscuous straight people by their
commitment to permanent fidelity. Bishops, accustomed to exercise
control over the lives of married couples, seem nonplussed by this
new situation. There are plenty of proof texts to support the Vatican’s
condemnation of homosexuality, but the example of Lot, refusing to
deliver his guests to the Sodomites but offering his virgin daughters
instead, is hardly an edifying one. Homosexual genital sex was said
to be a perversion of a man’s nature and also demeaning because
it treated another man as a woman, that is as an inferior. But we
now understand that there is an inborn homosexual orientation, by
which a gay man who married a woman would actually be ‘perverted’,
false to his true self. The recent directive about homosexuals in
the priesthood appears to be an effort to deflect the blame onto
them for the scandal of clerical sexual abuse, and most unjustly
discriminates against them by demanding affective maturity from homosexual
but not from heterosexual applicants to seminaries. No satisfactory
explanation has been found for the existence of a homosexual orientation.
The most feasible seems to be that society benefits from having a
percentage of non-procreative people who share, and therefore seek
to foster, the genes of their siblings’ children.
If, as the letter to Timothy advised, bishops were to be appointed
from good family men, the hierarchy would have a far greater because
more intimate understanding of the reality of married life. A
recent NCR article points out the harm it does to bishops to have
no one either to encourage them or to cut them down to size – it
is really not good for man (or woman) to be alone. In spite of this
disadvantage, the church’s attitude to marriage has been transformed
from that of a legal contract to that of a covenant of love. The
unitive function of sexual intercourse is now valued equally with
that of procreation because of its positive effect on marital harmony
and thus the good of the whole family. In contrast to the uncompromising
legalism of official church pronouncements, compassionate and empathetic
priests have everywhere supported married people in the vicissitudes
of their married lives.
Josephine Way
- Adrian Thatcher in Sex These Days 1997
- A Priestless People 1998
- Linda Woodhead in Sex These Days
- Quoted by Kevin T. Kelly in New Directions
in Moral Theology, 1992
