Breda O'BrienThere are huge challenges facing this month’s Synod on the Family
While Holy Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics has captured the attention of the media, there are huge challenges facing this month’s Synod on the Family which have little to do with this issue at all.
Take this passage from the working document prepared before the synod: “Bishops in western Europe recall the powerful generational conflict which seemed to have taken place in the 60s and 70s of the last century. Today, perhaps conditioned by those experiences, parents appear overly cautious in applying any pressure on their children in religious practice.
“Precisely in this regard, they seek to avoid any type of conflict instead of dealing with it. In addition, when the subject of religion is raised, these same parents often feel insecure and, instead of passing on the Faith, they often remain silent and relegate their task, even if considered important, to religious institutions. This seems to demonstrate a weakness among adults, especially young parents, in transmitting the gift of faith with a spirit of joy and conviction.”
Practical
atheists
In recent times, I have been struck by the number of faithful, practising Catholics whose children have rejected the Faith. These adult children now live as practical atheists, that is, as people for whom religious faith has absolutely no relevance, even if they have not formally left the Church.
It is a huge cross for parents, and a great source of guilt and worry. There is no doubt that influences from the wider culture play a very significant role.
Just as once people absorbed Catholic values at a largely unconscious level, people are now absorbing values from online media. When some of my children attended a Youth 2000 event recently, they suggested to a new friend that they attend a pro-life event taking place at the retreat.
The new friend said innocently: “I like pro-choice.” Aside from the choice of language, given the importance of ‘likes’ on Facebook, it emerged that this person had never been presented with a coherent pro-life position, and was quite open to it. Instead, she had been subjected to a daily diet of pro-choice propaganda on Facebook and Tumblr.
The paragraph cited from the working document talks about relegating the task of handing on the Faith to religious institutions. Yet how many parents can be sure that their children are receiving a basic grounding in faith in school, especially in secondary school?
And how many parishes preach the basics, so that people grasp concepts such as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and what that might mean when we leave our churches each week?
A priest friend told me recently of a layperson volunteering to get hosts from the sacristy when he ran out of consecrated hosts. He was shocked to realise that the layperson, while well-intentioned, saw no difference between un-consecrated and consecrated hosts.
As Pope emeritus Benedict once said: “We must honestly admit that we have more than enough by way of structure but not enough by way of Spirit. I would add: the real crisis facing the Church in the western world is a crisis of faith. If we do not find a way of genuinely renewing our faith, all structural reform will remain ineffective.”
To me, this is the core question of the synod. The teaching of the Catholic Church on marriage and the family is extremely demanding, and only makes sense in the context of a faith commitment to God, who pours out grace and makes the impossible, possible.
The American blogger Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig speaks of the concept of transformative marriage. She talks about the difference between marriage that is seen as serving one’s own purpose, usually of personal fulfilment, and one that sees marriage as having its own purpose that we serve.
She says: “When one is married… something rather profound changes: A diminishment in satisfaction doesn’t impact that change, nor does the waning of sentiments or even a loss of love. Marriage, rather, changes the individuals who enter into it: sealed together, they are fundamentally different than they were before. It is the capaciousness of this truth that allows it to sustain the metaphor of the mystery of Christ’s union with the Church, and it’s the strength of that metaphor that informs us of the gravity of marriage.”
This is about as far from the modern Western cultural idea of marriage as it is possible to get, and it makes absolutely no sense outside a Christian framework.
Communion for the divorced and remarried is a very important question, but it is a vastly less important question than whether people have a clue that marriage is meant to be, as Pope Francis calls it, an “icon of God’s love for us.”