The Church on Marriage and Family: Joining Battle

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 20, 2014

I confess that I was surprised by the response of Manila’s Cardinal Tagle to the preparatory work for the Synod on the Family. For Cardinal Tagle said he was “shocked” by the results of the worldwide pre-Synodal questionnaire, which revealed that in most places Catholics do not understand “the teaching of the Church regarding family life.”

I do not dispute the facts on the ground. It is, after all, highly doubtful that the majority of those who bear the Catholic name anywhere understand the teachings of the Church regarding family life. I presume most Catholics know that the Church regards marriage as a life-long commitment with an openness to children. But even in as Catholic a place as the Philippines, where the Church is an extraordinarily influential institution, there are two important reasons why people are unlikely to actually understand the “teachings” behind this commitment.

The first reason is that there is no place on earth in which the predominant media, not to mention the glitterati who dominate the media, are not overridingly secular. In the broadest sources of information to which Catholics are habitually exposed everywhere, the deep meanings of things are not explored; still less is there any effort to take God seriously or to trace the logic of reality implicit in His holy will. Not even nature is treated as if it bears meanings which have been designed into it by a Creator.

Unless conscious counter-cultural steps are taken, the Catholic vision of life will not enter the mind or heart by osmosis. Instead, osmosis presents an unending trickle of more or less deliberate obscurantism.

This leads to the second reason. Catholic thought on marriage and family is no longer easily understood. Even most of my readers do not fully understand the special nature of the human person, the nuptial meaning of the body, the ends of marriage, the moral difference between contraception and natural family planning, the responsibilities for material sustenance and Christian education and their bearing on family size, the distinction between annulment and divorce, what it means to be two in one flesh—or, for that matter, the relationship between the natural institution of marriage and the sacrament of matrimony, or the nature and effects of the sacrament of matrimony itself.

Then there is the immensely rich mystery of marriage as a living paradigm of the relationship between Jesus Christ and His Church.

But here I must admit that I digress. It is not necessary to be knowledgeable about all of these things to “understand” the Church’s teachings on marriage and family life. But it is necessary to be free of significant attitudes, values, desires and blind spots which undermine or contradict the Church’s understanding—which set our habitual thoughts running in directions which obscure the Church’s teaching. And that is exactly what afflicts most Catholics around the world. At best they are caught in the trap of entering into ostensibly Catholic marriages in the context of deeply secularized attitudes toward life, love, sex, marriage, children and human fulfillment.

An Uphill Battle

I cannot speak for the situation in the Philippines, which in fact Cardinal Tagle did not address. But if I were to extrapolate from the experience of the Church in the United States and Europe over the past few generations, I would conclude that the Church has seldom sought to present her case to the faithful with anything like the kind of systematic frequency and power required for success against a hostile culture. Catholics desperately need more comprehensive and more frequent instruction. The best and easiest forum for such instruction is obviously the pulpit, which must to some extent be rescued from vague aspirations drawn unimaginatively from the daily readings.

It ought to be obvious that the Gospel must be imparted with the clarity, the specificity, and the attendant explanations necessary to guide the basic actions of life, and to dispel our cultural myths. Beyond the pulpit, of course, the Church must reach out far more aggressively to pack the pews with lapsed and inactive Catholics who still bear her name. It goes without saying that catechetical instruction for those who lack it must be comprehensive and sound, but the key point is that the Church cannot provide a countercultural space, within which souls can grow in Catholic knowledge and sensibility, unless there is constant good, effective, and specific preaching at the parish level on the major problems which dominate our states in life.

I began by stating that I have no quarrel with the facts on the ground; they are obvious enough. But I do have a modest quarrel with Cardinal Tagle’s shock. It is utterly beyond me that these facts should be news to any experienced Churchman. Therefore I take the Cardinal’s use of the term “shock” to be a bit of a euphemism to cover what has now become a public embarrassment for the Church. Though neither is desirable, it is always better to be thought a fool than a knave.

In any case, the solution is an uphill battle across the cultural terrain of individualistic desire, immediate gratification, and ultimate despair. One hopes that the upcoming Synod will have much to say about how this battle should be waged. As Cardinal Tagle said, it is not a question of changing Church teachings, but of making them known, and making them known in the most credible way.

But the Church must be honest here. She cannot focus exclusively on tactics for some battle that could be fought or might be fought or ought to be fought. However important this may be, the first step is not really a matter of using the right vocabulary, of saying things in the right way. The very first step, before we learn to speak about these things effectively and often, is simply to speak about them at all.

A battle must be joined before it can be fought. As raw recruits become veterans, tactics will improve.