The Ratzinger and Cafarra Interventions – April 27, 2015
Ratzinger’s
Theological Intervention
In his address at the Vatican Press Office, March
25, 2014, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical
Council for the Family, recalled that “Pope Emeritus Benedict, in his
homily at the Opening Mass of the Synod on New Evangelization, said that there
is a clear link between the crisis in faith and the crisis in marriage….In
1998, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same
Pope emeritus as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger remarked that “further study is
required… concerning the question of whether non-believing Christians –
baptized persons who never or who no longer believe in
God – can truly enter into a sacramental marriage. In other words, it needs to
be clarified whether every marriage between two baptized persons is ipso facto a sacramental marriage. In
fact, the Code states that only a ‘valid’ marriage between baptized per sons is
at the same time a sacrament (cf. CIC, can. 1055, par. 3). Faith belongs to the
essence of the sacrament; what remains to be clarified is the juridical
question of what evidence of the ‘absence of faith’ would have as a consequence
that the sacrament does not come into being.”[7]
Theological
Evaluation on Matrimony: Given the state of affairs of a world culture that
is turned back on self as a “structure of sin” and trapped in a global economic
ideology of self where the bottom line is profit and not gift; and given that
faith in truth is an habitual state of being turned away from self as gift to
Other, the real question is not so much trying to see where
there may be “an absence of faith” but where in fact, it may be present
and validating matrimony as a sacrament.
And since the true exercise of faith may be scarce, the real
import of the pope’s enquiry into the possibility of communion for the divorced
and remarried is to go deeply enough into discerning the real state
of validity to confront the fact that the entire ascetical culture of the
Church must change. That it is not enough to “beef up” pre-Cana as entre
into marriage, but the entire orientation of the Church toward sanctity in
ordinary life must go through conversion. That is, failure to approach matrimony
as the ordinary way to achieve sanctity from baptism through family, classroom,
pulpit, confessional, spiritual direction and pre-Cana will leave the sacrament
invalidly administered because the attitude of the spousal-ministers was self,
superficial, bourgeois and banal.
Cafarra Intervention
To go yet a step
further: Cardinal Carlo Cafarra suggests[1]
there may be a more radical problem after the demolition of “natural marriage”
in contemporary culture: for those who are asking for sacramental marriage, he
asks, are they capable of natural marriage? Has there been such
devastation, not of their faith but of their humanity, that they are no longer
capable of marriage? Attention must certainly be paid to canons 1096 [of the
1983 Code of Canon Law] (“For matrimonial consent to exist, the contracting
parties must at least not be ignorant that marriage is a permanent partnership
between a man and a woman ordered to the procreation of offspring”) and 1099.”
* * * * * * * *
I, blogger, take this to mean that a person can be so dumbed-down in his capacity to make the gift of self to another, i.e. so self-referential – so selfish - that he is not capable of the level of generosity necessary to be self-gift. This would not be strange in a secularized culture of individuals who have lived only for self. The natural language of love is gift of self to death, which is obviously the same in a Christian culture where martyrdom for the love of Christ is the denoument of Christian life. In a word, sanctity. This is for all, Christian or not. The difference is that Christian culture and sacramental order empower s the person to achieve in fact and deed who he is as created image. The background to this is the revelation that man has been created in the image and likeness of the divine Person of the Son, and therefore, has the “natural” ontological tendency to self gift to the Father .
I, blogger, take this to mean that a person can be so dumbed-down in his capacity to make the gift of self to another, i.e. so self-referential – so selfish - that he is not capable of the level of generosity necessary to be self-gift. This would not be strange in a secularized culture of individuals who have lived only for self. The natural language of love is gift of self to death, which is obviously the same in a Christian culture where martyrdom for the love of Christ is the denoument of Christian life. In a word, sanctity. This is for all, Christian or not. The difference is that Christian culture and sacramental order empower s the person to achieve in fact and deed who he is as created image. The background to this is the revelation that man has been created in the image and likeness of the divine Person of the Son, and therefore, has the “natural” ontological tendency to self gift to the Father .
Cafarra adds to this that the total gift of self demands that the intelligence
be informed by absolute truth. At the moment, as Benedict XVI remarked in 2005,
world culture is dominated by a relativist dictatorship. The Church, however,
has in its arsenal the Magisterium of John Paul II, the Theology of the Body,
which places the Truth that is the Person of Jesus Christ as the incarnate
Absolute that can inform, theoretically and practically, the conjugal under
taking.
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