Sex and the Synod

Ron and Mavis Pirola who spoke
on sexuality at the Synod on the
Family 

I am anxious to get back to the history of Anglicanism and to tie up the reign of Queen Elizabeth so that we can move into Jacobean Anglicanism where the story takes on several curious twists and turns, but this Synod on the Family is just producing so much important news signaling some interesting developments in the Church’s History-In-The-Making that I need to give it the attention that it is due.

Ron and Mavis Pirola are an Australian Couple who have been married for fifty-five years and have four children and eight grand-children. They are co-directors of the Australian Marriage and Family Council which is an advisory body to the Australian Bishops Commission for Pastoral Life.  Pope Francis invited the Pirolas to be among the lay auditors at the Synod.  As auditors they do not vote but have speaking rights on the floor and were among the first scheduled to address the Synod.  They gave a rip-roaring talk about the role of sex in marriage that could best be titled: The Joys of Sex.  They spoke very frankly how it was sexual attraction that brought them together in the first place almost six decades ago and how it continues to play the central role in their marriage even now when they are in their seventies. 

“The little things we did for each other, the telephone calls and love notes, the way we planned our day around each other and the things we shared were outward expressions of our longing to be intimate with each other.”

As if that wasn’t hot enough for a room full of aged celibate males to take in, they became more explicit and continued

“Gradually, we came to see that the only feature that distinguishes our sacramental relationship from that of any other good Christ-centered relationship is sexual intimacy, and that marriage is a sexual sacrament with its fullest expression in sexual intercourse.”

This is great because it lifts the veil—albeit discreetly by today’s standards—from the fact that husbands and wives actually “do the dirty” and moreover it is an essential part of their sacramental life—a conversation to bring the churchmen down from their lofty intellectualized towers.  But they went far beyond that. The Pirolas also spoke about sex in more than its role in traditional marriage. They told the story of friends of theirs, also devout Catholics, whose gay son asked to bring his partner to Christmas dinner with the family.

“They fully believed in the church’s teachings and they knew their grandchildren would see them welcome the son and his partner into the family,” they said. “Their response could be summed up in three words: ‘He’s our son.’”

This has sent a legion of the neo-trads totally and completely out of their minds, admittedly not a long journey.  At the Synod, Cardinal Burke is “pained” by the proceedings.  Just as well for him, then, that he mostly likely will over on Aventine with his Knights by the 2015 follow-up meeting where the input of this year’s synod will be discussed and acted upon after a year of reflection.  His Eminence can lead the Malta-teers in practice sword charges against imaginary Islamic hordes, unless of course, he gets his rapier tangled up in that 27 feet of scarlet silk he likes to trail behind him.  Closer to home, our friends at LifeSite News are rousing the peasantry to take their torches and pitchforks and storm the Synod Aula by reporting the dangerous ideas being advocated by such figures as the Bishop of Antwerp, Johan Bonny and Archbishop of Wellington, John Dew.  Archbishop Dew is a member of the Synod; Bishop Bonny is not. 

And the mob is arming.  Just check out the Katholic Krazies and their blogs about the SinNod as they have retitled it.  Their usual hysterics totally miss the point about what is happening because they want to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that the toothpaste of the modern world can be put back into the tube of Ozzie and Harriet.  Would that that were possible, but we as Church are confronted with the task of how to bring the Good News of Salvation to a world that no longer follows the traditional norms of Christian morality.  And part of that evangelization effort requires the Church to re-evaluate its teachings to bring them into line, not with post-Christian culture—but with contemporary knowledge of the behavioral, social, and medical sciences.   Doctrine is not something static.  It never has been.  Our understanding of the Truth is something that develops through history.  It took the Church three centuries to be able to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity.  It took the same amount of time to articulate clearly the Divine Nature of Jesus Christ.  This is not say that the ante-Nicene “Fathers” of the Church did not believe either doctrine, but both doctrines required drastic paradigm shifts from the Church’s origins in a rigidly monotheistic Judaism that could not begin to comprehend God as being personalized in three distinct persons or in how a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, could share fully in the Divine Nature.  Similarly, the oldest stories of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary date from the fourth century but it was not until the 8^th century that it found itself officially accepted in the Western Church and only in the 20^th was it defined as an infallible dogma.  The precise nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist was a matter of debate until the 13^th century at the Fourth Lateran Council and even subsequent to that definition, the doctrine has been refined by subsequent councils and papal teachings.  Truth is eternal but our appreciation of the Truth is evolutionary. 

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the threat of modernism, a heresy which undermines the objectivity of Truth, led to an almost total paralysis of Catholic theological scholarship.  This radically changed the dynamic by which academic theology “informs” the Magisterium and left the Magisterium on its intellectual own—a precarious stance for intellectual credibility at any point of history.  The work of theologians in the first half of the 20^th century was at best ignored and far too often censured in what was a theological dark ages.  It was Pius XII who began to open the doors again to a dialogue between scholarship and the Church’s teaching office, but it was a very tentative opening and especially so in the final years of his papacy when Pius’ health issues gave rein to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, of the Holy Office (today’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) to take over doctrinal supervision unsupervised himself.  It was a dreadful time when such theologians as John Courtney Murray, Jean  Daniélou, Marie-Dominque Chenu, and others were silenced.  Even the saintly mystical Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was prohibited from publishing his scientific findings.  John XXIII, Vatican II, and Paul VI opened the windows to a renewed effort at serious dialogue between theology and the various sciences, but the negative reaction to the publication of Paul’s encyclical Humanae Vitae caused a reaction in which those branches of moral theology that dealt with sexual issues were frozen shut.  Theologians like Charles Curran, Margaret Foley, Anthony Kosnik, John McNeill, Jacques Gaillot, among others were censured by Rome and forced from teaching positions and, in some cases, even from their religious communities and priestly ministry. The frankness of this Synod—and the tone set by Pope Francis—indicates that the thaw is on and the Church is open to dialogue again with the world outside its stained-glass windows to come to a better understanding of human sexuality, human relationships, and human reproduction.  It is long overdue.  Yeah Francis.  You go Synod Members.  Thank you Mr. and Mrs. Pirola—keep on making love.  

Synod on the Family: The Battle Lines Are Forming

So we are going to change our rules on divorce and remarriage.  This seems to be the foregone conclusion of many on both the right and the left about the upcoming Special Synod of Bishops on the Family scheduled for Rome from October 5-19^th and as a rising tide lifts all boats, the rumors about the synod has raised both the hopes of the left and the fears of the right.  Actually, the synod rumors are like the astonishing tides in the Bay of Fundy as the hopes and the fears of each party have rarely before been raised to this height. 

The Isaiah of the Left has been Cardinal Walter Kasper, former President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.  Kasper’s theological insights have long been admired by Jorge Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, and Francis asked the German Cardinal to give the keynote address to a meeting of the Cardinals last February.  The meeting was part of the preparation for the upcoming Synod and Kasper, never one to avoid an issue, jumped right in and proposed theological justifications for admitting those who have been divorced and remarried to receiving Holy Communion.  Present Church discipline does not permit the divorced and remarried to receive the sacraments without first obtaining an annulment from the Church of their previous marriage(s).  Kasper did not propose a carte blanche for all divorced and remarried but he did outline certain circumstances in which a pastoral decision might be made in which the Church could accept the couple back into full communion without giving its blessing to the second marriage.  Basically the Cardinal is proposing nothing different from what has long been called the “internal forum” process in which the priest confessor or advisor of a couple who have found it, for one reason or another, impossible to obtain an annulment but whose first marriage(s) were seriously flawed to the point where an annulment should have been granted, assures the couple that they can in good faith return to the sacraments.  An example would be a Catholic whose second marriage is to a Protestant who is unwilling to go through the Catholic annulment process for a previous marriage and there is nothing that the Catholic party can reasonably do to convince their Protestant spouse to regularize the marriage.  Another example might be that of a Catholic who has tried to have his or her marriage annulled but was unsuccessful because a witness, for reasons of spite, lied to the Tribunal hearing the case.  Such internal forum solutions have long been practiced though somewhat unevenly as much depends on the openness of the priest who is the confessor or spiritual advisor.  Priests are extremely reluctant to discuss particular cases—sometimes because it involves material learned in the Sacrament of Reconciliation—and the Cardinal’s proposals would not so much change the rules as bring out into the open a practice which has long lurked in the shadows of the confessional.  Nevertheless, the Cardinal’s proposals have triggered a strong reaction even among his fellow Cardinals.

Partly in reaction to Kasper’s proposals and partly to prepare for the Synod, several prelates—including six Cardinals—contributed to a book, Remaining in the Truth of Christ that argues for the indissolubility of Christian marriage.  Those who see this book—and many do—as a reaction to Kasper’s position have set up a bit of a straw man as it is highly simplistic, even disingenuous, to say that Cardinal Kasper has attacked the indissolubility of marriage.  The Cardinal has only said that we need to bring out into the open the pastoral practice that has long been practiced behind the closed and sealed door of the confessional and that furthermore, we need to follow our own theology on the healing and forgiving power of the Eucharist and give those whose lives have been broken by a failed marriage access to the graces of that healing and forgiving power. 

Well, it would appear to be one Cardinal against six but in fact it is no secret that Cardinal Kasper is only the spokesperson for Pope Francis who cannot himself declare on the subject without prejudicing the Synod.  While he has not spoken on the matter, Pope Francis has sent every signal that he not only approves of the Cardinal’s position but that he actively endorses it.  This, in turn, has triggered a reaction of panic on the part of the Katholic Krazies who see any change in Church discipline as yet a further step away from the beloved mix of myth and tradition that they consider authentic Catholicism.   The krazies have lit up the blogosphere like Bastille Night on the Champs Elysees. 

Among the participants in the synod are Cardinals Muller, Burke, Caffarra, and Pell—all contributors to Remaining in the Truth of Christ.  Pope Francis has appointed liberal Cardinals Kasper and Daneels to the Synod—but Cardinal Caffarra, one of the contributors to the book, is also there as a papal appointee.  Other prelates who are most likely sympathetic to the Kasper position are Cardinals Schönburn of Vienna, Dolan of New York, Marx of Munich, Nichols of Westminster, Koch of the Curia, and Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, also of the Roman Curia.  The answer to the question, however, will not lie with either the Kasper group or the Burke group but with the much larger assembly of bishops from around the world and from whom we have yet to hear.  To a certain extent, actually to a great extent, the final decision will be an affirmation of or disaffirmation of the papacy of Pope Francis as everyone is aware of where the Pope wants to go with this and how it fits into the overall theme of his papacy which stresses mercy and reconciliation of those alienated from the Church. 

Meanwhile the Krazies are beside themselves.  I noticed Lifesite News (http://www.lifesitenews.com) is appealing for its readers to send in money so that they can go to Rome and lobby the Synod against any change.  Lifesite News is the internet face of Campaign Life Coalition, sometimes just called Campaign Life, a Canadian division on the conservative side in the culture wars.  While they espouse a pro-Life agenda, a careful examination of their publicity materials shows them to be a movement somewhat of the same nature and goals as the Tea Party in the United States.  In addition to the pro-Life issues of abortion and euthanasia they have taken very active stands against Same Sex Marriage, LGBT rights, sex-education, adoption by same sex couples, gender and orientation inclusivity, ALS research, and the Gay-Straight Alliance.  In addition to being opposed to human cloning and stem-cell research, they take a particularly narrow and unnuanced approach to questions of bio-ethics and consider bullying in schools and among teens and pre-teens to be “a myth,” particularly when it is related to sexual orientation. They also insist that Climate Change is a myth—something that one would think a Canadian might be less quick to deny.  While they are a Canadian organization—and one without any official Church recognition—the Campaign Life Coalition and its website Lifesite News, have spilled across the northern border and joined the American krazies in taking on Catholic Relief Services and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for not buying into their limited understanding of the Church and its mission.  They are currently appealing to their faithful for the funds to sponsor their junket to Rome to lobby the Synod. 

They are only one of several groups who are planning on demonstrating in Saint Peter’s Square against any relaxation of Church discipline in an effort to find pastoral solutions to the complexity of questions rising from contemporary issues of family life.  What will happen if the Synod should address and attempt to remedy the pastoral concerns faced by families today—divorce and remarriage, same-sex adoptions, bullying of children, contraception and family planning, in vitro conception, gay children, transgendered persons, or who knows what else?  And of course families are faced with a host of other issues as well that need to be addressed and which have political and cultural undertones—unemployment, immigration, abandonment, run-aways, health care and more.  There is no way that the Synod can tackle the issue of the Family and not be caught in the culture wars. 

My suspicion is that the end result of the Synod will be a somewhat ambiguous document that can be interpreted a number of ways, allowing a bit of wiggle room for confessors and spiritual directors to help people re-integrate themselves into the full life of the Church but without actually changing the official line.  In this sense it will be a disappointment to many who have what I think are unrealistic hopes for drastic public change.  If there is no change, I think business will go on as usual with progressive clergy helping people find sensitive and pastoral solutions to the dilemmas of modern life that face them and more conservative clergy wringing their hands as they explain that there is nothing they can do.  On the other hand, if there is a significant change of direction in the Church, and anything is possible when the bishops come together, I think we will see a revolving door as a significant number of Catholics who have been alienated from the Church decide that it is “safe to go in the water again,” but an equally significant number of neo-traditionalists go over to the various Latin Mass schismatic groups and the sedevacantists, claiming that Pope Francis and the Synod have abandoned the historic faith.  It is interesting to see how those who used to dine in the Magisterium’s Restaurant are now filling the cafeteria and those formerly relegated to the cafeteria are now enjoying the haute cuisne of Francis’ papacy.  As Saint Luke records the Blessed Mother saying: The mighty shall be cast down and the lowly raised up.