David QuinnSometimes mercy and the truth seem to be at loggerheads, writes David Quinn
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recently urged Catholics to remember that ‘Jesus the Pastor’ and ‘Jesus the Teacher’ are one and the same person and they cannot be separated.
He said this in the context of the debate about whether or not Catholics who divorce and remarry should be allowed to receive Communion.
On the one hand, the current practice that they should not seems to be lacking in compassion.
On the other hand, it would seem to betray the clear teaching of Jesus about divorce to allow them to receive Communion. Technically, someone who divorces and remarries is committing adultery in the eyes of the Church. Are these people, therefore, sufficiently in communion with their Church in order to receive Communion?
And so we can see the tension between the pastoral role of the Church and the teaching role of the Church. Sometimes mercy and the truth seem to be at loggerheads.
Challanges
One of the biggest challenges facing the Church today is what you might call ‘lifestyle individualism’.
The Christian community (and not just the Catholic Church) finds itself confronting a whole array of lifestyle choices which are very much at variance with how Christianity believes we should order our lives. People are living together without marrying in large numbers. People are having children outside marriage in large numbers. Large numbers of women are having abortions. People are divorcing and remarrying in large numbers.
Then there are those in same-sex relationships. They make up only a very small percentage of the population because only 2-3% of the population are same-sex attracted, but those in same-sex relationships pose a particular challenge to the Church’s teaching on sex and human relationships because of the pressure on the Church at the present time to accept gay relationships.
In the face of lifestyle individualism, wouldn’t it be easier for the Christian community simply to declare that so long as you are acting in a loving way you are acting as Jesus would want you to and therefore people should be trusted to make their own judgements as to what is best for them?
Within the Church itself – and again I mean not only the Catholic Church here – there are many who want us to follow exactly this course.
Within Irish Catholicism, a prominent advocate of this kind of thinking is Fr Tony Flannery. There are many examples in the other Churches as well.
The trouble is, it separates Jesus the Pastor from Jesus the Teacher.
Some courses of action are wrong in themselves no matter how right they might seem to someone at a given point in time.
The moral normativeness of heterosexual marriage is an absolutely consistent teaching of the Church right down the ages, and long predates the Church.
It is sometimes pointed out that the Church did not recognise marriage as a sacrament until relatively late in the day. But the Church has always upheld marriage as extremely important and right back to Genesis the complementarity of the sexes has been taken for granted.
How could it not be? We are created male and female.
Interestingly, Donal Lynch, himself gay, wrote an article for the Sunday Independent last weekend in which he seemed to implicitly acknowledge that marriage is a better fit for men and women than it is for homosexual males. (I’ll come back to lesbian couples in a moment).
Lynch tries to explain why, in countries with same-sex marriage, the take-up rate by same-sex male couples has been quite low.
He writes: “A part of this is just a function of the current crop of gay people living most of their lives on the sidelines. Having felt disapproval for our unions, less of us are in the type of secure long-term relationships that would naturally lead to marriage.
“But a part of it is also intimately tied up with gender. In the push to get the Yes vote over the line, we were constantly told by pro-marriage campaigners that love is not dependent on the sex of the couple. This is, of course, true but, political correctness aside, a willingness to submit to the bourgeois conventions of matrimony is usually more likely if at least one of the participants is female…Men see marriage as being connected to loss of financial freedom, while women associate it with desirable stability. This is of course connected to children and female reproductivity, which casting the rhetoric of the referendum aside, won’t really come into the equation for most gay male couples.”
Lesbian couples will obviously involve no man at all. Does this make them even more likely to marry than male/female couples? No it does not.
We know from Scandinavian data that the marriage take-up rate is also low among lesbian couples and they are more likely than either homosexual couples or heterosexual couples to break up.
Over time we will find out once and for all whether or not marriage is a better ‘fit’ for opposite-sex couples than for same-sex couples as more and more information comes in about the marriage take-up rate and break-up rate of same-sex couples compared with opposite-sex couples.
This is only one reason why the Church must stick to its guns on the nature of marriage. Marriage as a social institution arises out of the fact that the sexual unions of male and female are simply different from any other kind of union. No amount of wishful thinking can make it otherwise.
The Church’s teaching on marriage isn’t arbitrary. It is not an attempt to be cruel. What it says about the essential nature of marriage simply fits with the facts. This is why it will prove to be correct over time.
At the end of the day, departing from the teachings of Jesus in order to be more ‘pastoral’ serves no-one because no-one is ever served by pretending what is true, is not true.