Paul KeenanThe Church needs to devise a response to growing challenges to the family
Here in Ireland and in other Western countries we think one of the burning issues facing October’s Synod on the family in Rome is whether or not divorced and remarried Catholics should be allowed to receive Communion.
But in Africa they face other issues. For example, what happens when a man with more than one wife converts to Christianity? What happens to his second wife, or to his third wife if he has one?
This is one of the questions asked in the working document prepared by the Vatican ahead of the synod and published last week.
The working document is a synthesis of the responses of all the bishops’ conferences in the world to a questionnaire the Vatican circulated last year.
We can easily make the mistake of thinking the concerns of the Church in this corner of the world are the concerns of the Church everywhere, but that is far from being the case. We don’t have to worry about polygamy, but in Africa they do.
Shapes and forms
However, every society has to deal with family life in its many shapes and forms so the Church in every corner of the world has that in common.
What the Church in every corner of the world also has in common is the Church’s teaching on marriage, namely that marriage is the indissoluble union of one man and one woman.
In the West, divorce is now commonplace and many Catholics divorce despite the Church’s teaching on the matter. Divorce is on the rise in some other parts of the world as well.
In any case, for centuries divorce has existed in most places the Church has existed. Ancient Rome allowed divorce, for example.
As we’ve just seen, in Africa and some other parts of the world the Church’s teaching that marriage is monogamous clashes with local customs that allow polygamy and have done so for a very long time.
In the West, but also in Latin America, cohabitation is on the increase.
And in the West, there is a demand to redefine marriage completely and to say that the sexual unions of two people of the same sex can be just as much a marriage as the sexual union of a man and a woman, as if there is no significant and important difference between them.
Communion
Some coverage of the working document of the Synod has given the impression that it is preparing the way for changes to the Church’s teaching on divorce and contraception, among other things.
But there is no real hint of this in the document. In fact, even in respect of divorced and remarried Catholics receiving Communion, there isn’t much evidence of demand for a change from the bishops.
The document does say that we ought to find out more about what the Eastern Orthodox Churches do in this regard.
They have found a way of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.
We would have to decide whether this is really faithful to the will of Christ.
In respect of contraception the focus of the various bishops’ conferences isn’t so much on changing the teaching as on how to better explain it and make it better known.
The bishops say that one difficulty in passing on the teachings emerges from the fact “that the clergy sometimes feel so unsuited and ill-prepared to treat issues regarding sexuality, fertility and procreation that they often choose to remain silent”.
Unfortunately the same can probably be said for many bishops as well.
Natural law
One of the topics the Vatican questionnaire asked the bishops and other interested Catholics to consider was how well understood the natural law is among Catholics.
The answer, as expected, is not very. In fact, one revealing quote in the document shows how badly understood it is: “The responses and observations also show that the adjective ‘natural’ often is understood by people as meaning ‘spontaneous’ or ‘what comes naturally’.”
For the Church, the natural law is the law of God “written on our hearts”. It can be discovered through reason and does not have to be revealed to us in the way the doctrine of the Trinity was revealed to us.
The bishops also considered the demand for same-sex marriage and the pretence that the differences between men and women are not the result of nature but are simply the result of how we are brought up. (This is called ‘gender ideology’.)
The bishops are well aware that especially in the West there is an intense ideological campaign aimed at destroying the notion that, while people can find themselves in many different family situations, the ideal remains the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman.
In fact, just last week, Ireland, along with other Western countries, voted against a resolution at the UN which commits member states to protecting the family. They voted against it because it mentions the ‘family’ and not ‘families’.
However, the UN Declaration of Human Rights mentions the ‘family’, not ‘families’, and so does the Irish Constitution.
It is perfectly obvious, therefore, that our Government sees no particular form of the family as the ideal.
So the challenges to the Church’s teaching on marriage, in fact to what the natural law itself tells us about the family, marriage, and parenthood, are enormous and growing daily.
The Church will have to devise a systematic response to all this that is aimed first at Catholics and then at the wider world.
Hopefully October’s synod will be a major step on that road.