Catholic Archdiocese of Johannesburg - Marriage: a call to Greatness

Catholic Archdiocese of Johannesburg

Marriage: a call to Greatness

Home : The Tribunal : Marriage: a call to Greatness

Not logged in | Login or register

Marriage Tribunal
Tribunal Home
Marriage: a call to Greatness
Preparing for a Wedding - Where?
Pope John Paul's 2005 Address to Roman Rota on Marriage Annulmnets
Gaudium et Spes
The Dignity of Marriage and the Family

Focus on Marriage

A call to Greatness

Rev Ronald Lawler ofm Cap

One of the constant objections to Natural Family Planning is that it asks too much of people. Many will acknowledge its positive features as a form of family planning: it reverences life, is never abortifacient; it has no deadly side effects; it demands only a moderate amount of abstinence. Still! - it requires self-denial and self-discipline of a kind that ordinary people will not put up with. At the bottom line, it wont work.

Contempt for ordinary men and women

This objection is, I think, unchristian and anti-human. It shows contempt for ordinary men and women, and fails to appreciate what an ordinary person can and will do given a motive and given loving help. But it speaks to a point I do think is essential. If we do not think that the ordinary person is transcendently important and essentially capable of greatness, we cannot talk of Christian morality at all.

Hardness of hearts

The New Testament portrays Christ as actually demanding far greater things of people than Natural Family Planning does. Everywhere He appears pastoral and compassionate, understanding about human weakness. For that very reason everywhere He made great demands. "Is divorce permissible for any cause?" This was asked by legal minds expecting a legal answer in accord with somewhat lenient Jewish divorce practice, but the question evoked a stunning answer. "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." "But Moses said"

Christ did not despair of us

That was no answer to Him. "From the beginning it was not so." It was the hardness of hearts that had generated laxity in this matter of principle. And our human hearts do tend to be hard. Still Christ did not despair of us, and find technological ways to solve problems while our hearts remain unaltered. He demanded and made possible newness of heart. His own disciples were stunned at this sexual ethic. "If what you say is true, it is not good to marry at all!" Implicit in the apostles protest was the lament, "You dont understand."

The unconverted heart

Throughout the Gospels there seems a readiness to acknowledge that the Christian teaching on sex and love is incredible to the unconverted heart. To live as husband and wife until death is a grand ideal. Mere common sense can dismiss difficult ideals. We are beginning to understand more how much children suffer from divorce, how much men and women are shredded by it, how the practice of divorce makes faithfulness seem impossible. In its suffering the modern world may be ready to hear again and to understand Christ. In theatres all over the world people have been weeping at Kramer versus Kramer, they were weeping for their own lives. Thus they became candidates to understand Christ, and to grasp that flabbiness in acknowledging what married love demands, only tortures people.

Sacred values

The cruelest people in the Church, I think, are those who, hoping to be kind to suffering people today, destroy or neglect (or fail to insist on) the sacred values that are needed to brace ordinary lives.

Again, in a typical Sermon on the Mount, Christ speaks of faithfulness in marriage. "You have heard it said in ancient times: thou shall not commit adultery, but I say to you: whoever looks at a woman, with lust after her, has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Christ makes difficult demands in order to be kind.

Demands on the heart of man

St Thomas Aquinas treats brilliantly the meaning of the new law of Christ in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, qq 106-108) At one place he asks, "Is the new law of Christ more burdensome than the old law?" In the objections he observes that it certainly seems so; and he refers to such passages as the one just cited. His final answer, of course, is very different. The Lord in the Gospel calls ordinary people who labour under heavy burdens and he is calling them to rest. "For the yoke I would lay on you is easy, and the burden you bear for me is light." (Matt. 11:20) Then Thomas explains two ways in which it is true that the Gospel law is light. Jesus indeed demands more excellent lives than the old law did. He demands more excellent lives by far than the shabby secularism asked, or decadent theology would ask. He makes demands on the heart of man: to faithful love and forgiveness, and generosity. The entire change of heart he requires at first seems extremely difficult to people who would wish to follow him.

Joyful and free

But all life is bitter and unsupportable to an unconverted heart. When the heart has reflected, and begun to acquire some virtue, then to live more excellently is astonishingly less burdensome than to live casually without virtue. (People experienced in Natural Family Planning regularly report that the measure of temperance required is found easy, and the life that has become somewhat more disciplined has become more joyful and free than life in which technology replaced temperance.)

New law grace of the Holy Spirit

Secondly, there is the very nature of the new law itself. That new law is not essentially a law at all in the ordinary sense. Basically it is not even the command of love. At its core, St Thomas says, the new law is the grace of the Holy Spirit. The new law is grace that gives men power to do with generosity what is necessary for them to do to be good persons at all. Bishop Stewart, in his report on the Happy Family Movement in South Korea, notes how mighty is the power of such grace. Christ asks excellent lives of ordinary people because he respects them highly, and he himself confers the power to do what he requires. Their lives could not be happy or human without the measure of excellence he insists upon. That is why Paul VI wrote movingly in Humanae Vitae (N.29), "It is an excellent work of Divine Love to lessen in no way the saving law of Christ."

Vocation of the ordinary Person

Moral theology ought always to be written with remembrance of the sublime vocation of the ordinary person. Its task is not to make life easy in the flabby and self-destructive sense, but to help make a good life possible.

Gods call to greatness

In the light of the gospel ordinary people are capable of greatness and are called to it. And the experience of those in pastoral life call people to live the Gospel is that the grace of God and the longing for goodness he has placed in them makes ordinary people live towards what they were made to be. Gods call to greatness is the very meaning of their lives. Marriage, the ordinary vocation, is a sign of the love between Christ crucified and his Church. It is both a grand and frightening vocation. It cannot be lived without anguish unless people who can do it make efforts towards love that is like Christs, that is, unless they let him make them begin to be great.

Natural Family Planning takes the dignity of ordinary men and women seriously. It is sensitive to their needs and has experience of their weakness. But it knows how splendid the greatness is that can spring up in the human spirit. It is for the sake of this goodness and greatness that the universe was made.

Gospel openness to Truth

In the Gospels, openness to the Truth is central to goodness and greatness of heart. Our times are days of image-making and advertising, days of rhetoric, propaganda, days of untruth. By nature men long to know the Truth; but when God begins to touch the human heart with grace there is a deeper longing for the saving Truth. There are truths of transcendent importance: about God, that he is a friend, a teacher and near to us. There is the truth about what a good life is, and how one is to walk in the truth and please God. One of the great requirements of love in the constant teaching of faith, is that we should always seek to do good and for no reason to do evil.

Not quite open to the Truth

There is always a temptation when faithfulness to known truth would be demanding, to be false to the truth and the truly good one knows. This is not out of any direct contempt for truth; but there can be a kind of willingness to be not quite open to the truth. There can be fear to acknowledge truth, or compassion may make us run from it; a pastoral care gone astray can make us less than eager to grasp what God really wishes. Life is difficult; so let us not seek too much to know what is utterly true and truly good. Let us be moderate in the pursuit of truth; let us not be so entranced by it that it can make great demands on us, or ask even greatness.

Christ dwells always in the Family of Faith

All this is very opposed to the truthful joy of Catholic faith. "He will teach us His ways and we shall walk in His paths." "For this was I sent into the world, to give testimony to the Truth." Beyond the obscurities of human confusion Christ dwells always in the family of faith, and by His Spirit guides us into all the truth. He teaches us what love requires and gives strength to do it.

'Pastorally tolerable' ways of living

When there is too great a concern to find pastorally tolerable, that is, soft and undemanding, ways of living Christianity, a terrible price is paid. Then priests begin to hear the terrible words we now hear too often: "We dont know what faith teaches anymore". Unwillingness to recognize Gods call to greatness, and his promises to make ordinary men and women capable to do what he requires of them and so to be truly human and truly children of God has brought into our midst a temptation to be faint-hearted. We are inclined to be silent, even unsearching, even not much caring about what the truth that we are to live in love might be.

Conscience

Faith certainly teaches the sacredness of conscience. Vatican II, in its Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, declares, "For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. His dignity lies in observing this law, and by it he will be judged. His conscience is mans most secret core, and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in the depths" (Gaudium et Spes, 16). For Catholic faith, conscience is not a mere subjective norm, an inner voice that a man has the right to follow in contradiction to what he is able to realize is Gods law. Rather, the truly conscientious man must always be truly seeking what is really Gods will, what he speaks to us in the family of faith. Thus Vatican II says also, "All men, because they are persons, that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore having personal responsibility, are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to this truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth." A Catholic who follows his conscience prepares himself to do whatever is Gods will, and truly good, whatever that costs. He desires earnestly never to confuse what he would like to do with what God calls him to do. In faith he is confident that to do what is right, and what God requires of us, is the best thing any human person can do.

The lurching away from Catholic ideals

But in the lurching away from Catholic ideals concerning sex and love in recent years, there has, often regrettably, been a base appeal to a distorted sense of conscience. At times there has been a suggestion that it is not really so necessary to proclaim the truth clearly, or to seek the real truth; it is enough to do what one feels is good, without a deep concern for correcting ones feelings in the light of the teaching of faith. "Follow your conscience!" people are told, in a way that suggests at times, "whatever the truth may be." It suggests, "Whether contraception (or fornication, or adultery) is good or evil, if your conscience holds that it is all right, it is good for you. Do whatever your conscience tells you (and here conscience is perhaps made to signify whatever your inner inclination earnestly urges upon you, for whatever reason). There is no need for you to go beyond the subjective feelings to any teacher, human or divine.

Henry the Eighth

One remembers stories about Henry the Eighth. This tragic man always consulted his conscience. He had good reasons (of state, of public order, as well as his own desires), one might even say proportionate reasons, to dispose brutally of some wives, and get other wives. But he always consulted his conscience before he would do such deeds. He carefully avoided consulting the Holy See, which would have told him not to kill unwanted wives and get new ones. But he had the same kind of conscience that we find in many people. Since he withdrew himself from the teaching authority of the faith, he always learned that what he himself decided to do was right. He prayed over things, and always found that the Lord agreed with him. Even in some of the most dreadful things that he did, he found the Lord agreed with him. Whoever mocks the Lord in the way that he seeks light, likewise is likely to find darkness instead of light for his answers.

A duty to shape conscience well

It would be a dreadful assault on truth to say that if one follows ones conscience, however wrong, and however dishonestly shaped that conscience may be; that whatever bad faith may lurk in the shaping of the conscience still, if one follows ones conscience, one will be acting well.

Catholic faith has never taught that absurdity. It never believed that Eichmann would have been justified in murdering Jewish captives if, as he said, his conscience insisted that he should. The good man has a duty not only to follow his conscience, but also to shape his conscience well. He has a duty to have a truth-seeking spirit. He must be eager to know what is true, and what Gods will is, however he may feel about it.

A truth-seeking spirit

The good man has a duty to have a truth-seeking spirit. He must be eager to know what is true, and what Gods will is, however I may feel about it. And if one does not much care about truth, and for that reason judges good what is not truly good and which he can know is not good, then in the very roots of his moral life he is acting badly. A badly and dishonestly shaped conscience is no excuse for further bad acting. As Vatican II teaches us, "It often happens that conscience goes astray due to ignorance which it is unable to avoid, without thereby losing its dignity. This cannot be said of the man who takes little trouble to find out what is true or good". (Gaudium et Spes, 16)

Good conscience?

I believe that many of our pastoral leaders are making a terrible mistake in this matter. They sometimes seem unconcerned that so many of their people are habitually doing deeds that faith calls mortally sinful. Yet the pastors are not concerned, because they tell themselves the people are doing this in good conscience. Do they really believe that Catholics who earnestly desire to know what God teaches in his Catholic faith, to seek this truth with all their hearts, are not able to find it?

Is there no bad faith?

Doubtless there are some who are in good faith; but can we really believe there is no bad faith, no pain that needs healing, no spiritual wounds that need anxious curing when so many turn away from the clear teaching of the faith?

Free to make their own decisions

It is sometimes said that when scholars debate much about the acceptability about certain elements in the present sexual revolution, "People have to be free to make their own decisions." Many unhappy kinds of sleight-of-hand, of lack of concern for truth, can lie in such slogans. Of course people must be free to make their own decisions. Only in freedom can anyone humanly decide anything. But freedom and responsibility to choose truthfully are not opposed. We have also a duty to decide (freely) to do what really is good, to the extent that God enables us to know that. And the power to know what God wants of us is far more generously given than some suggest.

Contraception

Similarly, many say, "Since many theologians have taught that contraception is permissible in many sorts of circumstances, people may practise it in good conscience." Following the same principles, some have also taught that fornication and homosexual deeds and other sins always prescribed as grave sins by the saints and doctors of the Church, are now permissible, at least in many circumstances. They claim that these acts too are now acceptable to members of Christs mystical body.

A travesty of truth

This is a travesty of truth. The Church indeed has had great openness to diverse views whenever that is suitable. Many moral questions are infinitely complex. When revelation and the earnest reflection in faith has led us to no decisive teaching, the Church always calls for freedom. Some questions, because of their complexity or newness are not really solved. And Catholic tradition teaches, "In matters freely disputed in the Church, any opinions shown to be solidly grounded by reputable theologians may be followed." But such so-called probable opinions hold only for matters freely debated in the Church.

Duty to give religious assent

When the Church has taken a decisive position, when the Holy Father, who has authority to teach and govern, has clearly taught the need to uphold a principle for faith reasons, then scholars, and indeed all the faithful, have the duty to give religious assent. This holds even if the teaching is not presented as infallible (Lumen Gentium, 25) The Holy Father will insist on moral teachings only when there is sufficient evidence from scripture and the lived experience of the Church that what is being taught is truly authentic. Those who believe that Christ really dwells in the Church as a teacher, and that His spirit guides it into the truth, are ready to say yes when the Church insistently proposes a moral teaching which expresses the convictions of the lived experience of a Church guided by the Spirit of Christ.

Responsible use of sex

Recent articles by leading moral theologians show that the teachings of the Church about the responsible use of sex are not simply official teachings; they indeed bear the marks of infallible teachings of the Church. As the Second Vatican Council points out (Lumen Gentium, 25), there are three ways in which the Church exercises its infallible teaching authority. The Church teaches infallibly in matters of faith or morals through the solemn definitions of councils, or through the ex-cathedra declarations of the Holy Father on such matters. But even more basic to the Church than these solemn forms of infallibility is the infallibility of the ordinary teaching of the Church. If the Church, in all places, and constantly, teaches as a word to be believed as expressing Gods will and teaching, and to be observed by all who serve God faithfully, and if the Church does this with moral unanimity, then the family of faith is indeed presenting itself as a witness to divine truth, and what it says is decisively true. The basic moral teachings of the Church concerning sex and love have had these traits.

Demanded by the saving Word of Christ

The Church from its first century has taught what it now teaches about adultery and contraception and fornication, and it has always taught these not as possible philosophies of life, but as what is demanded by the saving Word of Christ. Now Christ is with his Church, and his Spirit dwells in it. The Church constantly teaches this as Gods word and as a truth important for salvation, and if the faithful of all generations believed as earnestly, then if the faith is true this teaching is true. God could not allow this to be constantly and everywhere taught in his name if it is not so. If the Church from time immemorial taught insistently as Gods word what is not Gods word, she could not be a true witness to divine faith. But all who have Catholic faith recognize that Christ is in the Church, and this makes her a faithful witness to what is true and truly good.

Disagreement with the Pope?

Sometimes the daily papers (and, in disaster areas, even the diocesan papers) give the impression that scholars generally disagree with the Pope on the intensely debated sexual ethics issues of our time. It is even suggested that dissenting theologians have profound reasons, drawn from new study and learning, that legitimize turning aside from the ancient and present teaching of the Church.

Claims visibly false

But these claims are visibly false. First, there are an immense number of Catholic moral thinkers who insistently teach what the pastors of the Church teach. Among these are the most brilliant moral thinkers of our time: people like John Finnis of Oxford, G.E.M. Anscombe of Cambridge, John Ford and Germain Grisez of this country (USA) and that distinguished moralist Karol Wojtyla who has since received a more important office. Moreover, it becomes more and more evident that the arguments of the dissenters are trivial arguments. Though some Catholic scholars, highly skilled in the use of the media, have rejected the received teaching of the Church in moral areas, the most creative, the most respected, thelet me be boldthe best and most intelligent Catholic moral teachers of our day stand steadfastly with what the Church has always believed, and what the Popes continue to witness to steadfastly: that the sublime moral teachings of the Church about sexual love, which faith has always taught, remain viable and necessary today. One of the most intelligent and competent of dissenters, Richard McCormick, has boldly acknowledged how frail are the intrinsic arguments that he and others have used to reject Catholic teaching in sexual ethics and life ethics. Surveying the efforts of theologians to provide rational grounds for their rejection of what the Church has taught, he wrote, These reflections should be regarded as no more than gropings and explorations undertaken with the hope that others more competent will carry them further and bring greater clarity to the question. (In Ambiguity and Moral Choice R McCormick, Milwaukee 1973)

That is to say, moral revolution has been foisted upon the faithful by theologians who devoutly hoped that some good arguments for what they are doing might appear in the future. As yet, alas, they have not appeared.

Pastoral reasons

But the moral revolution was motivated not so much by profound moral thinking, but by pastoral reasons. The dissenters often felt that people need to limit their families, and adjust to the pressures of this culture realistically. But the only secure ways of limiting families, that do not make impossible demands on people, involve contraception and other kinds of acts the family of faith has rejected. If we continue to insist on these teachings (so the argument goes), people will not be able to stay in the family of faith. So let us boldly reject them, in pastoral compassion and love.

This is, in a way, understandable. But it is based on too much that is not true, and it distorts what faith has meant by pastoral kindness.

Doing evil in order that good come of it?

The inner arguments of theologians to justify moral revolution (revisions of the principle of double effect, compromise theories of morality, consequentialism, proportionate-reason thinking) have all been based on very weak arguments. All these arguments are in fact forms of a claim that we may do evil that good may come of it. This moral revolution has gone on without serious debate. There has been no honest effort on the part of the dissenters to meet with the most brilliant minds that want to defend Catholic teaching, and to determine where the truth of things really lies. Instead of debate we have had propaganda, and insincere insistence that all contemporary moralists agree with what very many of them do not agree with. The revolutionary changes suggested deserve the most intense debate and the most honest debate possible, and it still has not had it, though a dissenting position has effectively been thrust upon many helpless people in the Church.

Dignity of man and human love

The moral revolution in the Church was not based on any real grounding in serious scripture scholarship, in investigations and tradition, or in rational developments in moral theory. It was based on a mistaken sense of pastoral compassion, and on the forlorn hope that someone will provide justification for what people are now urged to do. This is a frail footing for those who would stand against what the fathers and doctors and saints have always said, and against what experience and faith have taught us as necessary for honouring the dignity of man and of human love.

Important people making mistakes

But let us not fall into the trap of lamenting the trials of our times, and the regrettable positions of others, and excusing ourselves.
If we see the age as in spiritual turmoil, and if we believe important people are making mistakes that they should not, and losing vision and courage, then we are infinitely more responsible to act as God in his mercy gives us power to act.
We are not innocents in a world gone astray. If we were better witnesses to the vision God has given us, we could have helped those we love to be more human and more Christian.

We know some modest truths that many others do not clearly realize. It is our duty to make them known forcefully, truthfully, charitably; and we are not doing that. Is it not a shameful truth that most Catholics have not really heard of Natural Family Planning in any serious way at all?

Needed in the whole family of faith

The task we have to do for the Church is so overwhelmingly important that we cannot be content with small successes and self-righteousness. For all our frailty, God has given us something needed in the whole family of faith and the whole human family. Let us acknowledge our responsibility.

Longing for goodness of heart

We must ask God to make us and our leaders long for greatness and goodness of heart. Our vocation to become Christians is a serious one. With such a vocation you are called to help the world; and to do this you must lean on Christ and draw from him the courage to carry out your vocation faithfully. God has not given us heroic models like John Paul II and Mother Teresa simply so that we might admire them. You too must be flames of fire. For the whole world wants and resists what God calls you to give. So you must give generously.

(Fr Lawler was a member of St Thomas University, Houston, Texas when he gave this lecture in Los Angeles in January 1980. He died in November 2003. The lecture is taken from the Bulletin of the Ovulation Method Research and Reference Centre of Australia, March 2004)

Add a comment