Astonishment
at the General Cultural Level
Ross
Douthat, in the "Opinion Pages" of the NYT, May 21, 2014, confronted the purported remark of the pope through Cardinal Walter Kaspar
that “50 percent of marriages are not valid” with well-educated and informed
astonishment. He said: “Consider, first, that while Catholic teaching regards
sacramental marriage as the most elevated and potentially grace-filled form of
marital union, the church has also extended the presumption of validity to
non-Catholic and indeed non-Christian marriages, on the grounds that wedlock is
a natural institution as well as a supernatural one, and that human couples do
not need the specific benefits of the sacrament, or the specific beliefs of
Catholic faith, in order to enter into a valid union…. [For marriages outside
the Church] the presumption is still that most marriage vows…, so long as they
take the proper form — in the sense of involving a lifelong promise
of fidelity, and an openness to children — are as legitimate in God’s
eyes, and as morally binding in the church’s, as a sacramental marriage is for
Catholics.
He continues: “Then consider that where Catholic marriage
specifically is concerned, the church teaches the graces available from the
sacrament are not a one-off infusion that’s only available during the wedding
ceremony itself. This means that the immature Catholic couple that doesn’t
grasp the full import of their vows, and thus might be prime candidates for an
annulment if they parted ways three months later, can still grow into a valid, supernaturally-graced
Catholic marriage over years of fidelity, childrearing, and mutual love…. And
then honing in on the real wide-spread issue: “And… even if a larger-than-usual
number of Catholic marriages are not immediately valid, because of bad
catechesis, “baptized paganism,” immaturity or what-have-you, you can’t just
assume that if they stay married, their invalidity necessarily perdures across
the years and decades.
Finally, he confronts the across the boards assumption
that marriage is not for the heroic. Rather… “marriage is supposed to
be the easier path — as much “a remedy against sin,” in the language of the
Book of Common Prayer, as a counsel of perfection — with celibacy
potentially the higher and holier one. “Easier” does not mean “easy,”
obviously, but still the basic idea is that marriage is an institution suited
to our fallen nature, rather than a beatitude-level call to transcend
fallenness entirely. And part of that suitedness lies in the fact that its
demands and prescriptions are relatively easy to understand, naturally
appealing to most couples in the initial bloom of love, and near-universally
grasped by people of disparate beliefs: One does (not) need a doctorate in
theology to “get” what the church asks of married couples, and what they’re
supposed to ask of one another, and so even an intellectually-immature or
badly-catechized Catholic should have some idea of what he’s vowing himself into.
So it
would be remarkable enough, given all of these points, if Kasper had merely
asserted that half of non-Catholic marriages were invalid —
remarkable and, I would say, quite anti-ecumenical, and fairly insulting to
non-Christian married couples, to say nothing of Anglicans and Lutherans and
Baptists and Pentecostals. But to say what he said about sacramental Catholic marriages is more remarkable still: It amounts
to a claim that our current social situation is so unusual, so extraordinary
and revolutionary, that basic assumptions about humanity’s natural ability to
marry no longer obtain, and that supernatural graces taken for granted in
Catholic ritual and teaching are no longer nearly as efficacious as the church
has traditionally assumed.”[1]
Rumblings
on the Deeper Theological Level
On the
other hand, 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.”
Discernment
of the State of the Culture (Benedict XVI):
Benedict: Question: Why
publish a ‘universal catechism’ in 1992? Were previous catechisms inadequate?
Answer: Now we are close to the end
of a millennium and in an entirely new historical period, indicated by schemas
of thought, science, technology, culture and civilization, breaking completely
with all that we knew previously.
“This is why it was necessary to
reformulate the logic and the sum total of the Christian faith. This is the
fruit of a reflection, over some years, by the universal Church to rethink
re-articulate and bring up-to-date her doctrine.”
Question:
what’s the novelty? “The novelty is that we have wished to present a unifying
and organic vision of the faith. It’s not just a question of having dogmas here
and moral commandments there. There is one fundamental vision of man, his life,
his destiny. And this vision of man is the fruit of an action and a word of
God. To show this profound unity, the character deeply rooted in man by the act
of faith, was our first intention.”
What is
that organic vision? “This sacred dimension of man is the pivot of all
Christian morals. Christian moral teaching rests on an anthropology [Gaudium et
Spes #24: imaging the divine Persons as going beyond themselves, man is the only
earthly being that masters himself such that he can make the gift of himself,
and thus become himself] that is directly inspired by our Christology [Gaudium
et Spes #22]… that we put forward answers to the problems of the man of today...
What has
been the root of the problem? Faith has been understood intellectually and not
personalistically as the total gift of self to the revealing Person of Christ.
First, for authoritative reasons consider the words of John Paul II from #88 of
Veritatis Splendor: “It
is urgent to rediscover and to set forth once more the authentic reality of the
Christian faith, which is not simply a set of propositions to be accepted with
intellectual assent. Rather, faith is a lived knowledge of Christ, a living
remembrance of his commandments, and a truth to be lived out. A word, in any
event, is not truly received until it passes into action, until it is put into
practice. Faith is a decision n involving one’s whole existence. It is an
encounter, a dialogue, a communion of love and of life between the believer and
Jesus Christ, te Way, and the Truth, and the Life (cf. Jn. 14, 6). It entails
an act of trusting abandonment to Christ, which enables us to live as he lived
(cf. Gal. 2, 20), in profound love of God and of our brothers and sisters.”
“9. Faith also
possesses a moral content. It gives rise to and calls for consistent life
commitment.”
John
Paul II on Faith:
“These admirably compact and
precise words do not yet speak of faith but of Revelation. Revelation is ‘God
communicating himself.’ It thus possesses the character of a gift or a grace: a
person-to-person gift, in the communion of persons. A perfectly gratuitous free
gift which cannot be explained by anything but love.
“All this concerns Revelation. What about faith?
“We read further on in the same text: ‘To God who reveals himself we must bring
the obedience of faith by which man entrusts himself entirely,
freely, to God, bringing to him who reveals the complete
submission of his intelligence and heart and giving with all his will full
assent to the Revelation which he has made.’ Thus faith is man’s reply to the
Revelation by which God ‘communicates himself.’ The constitution Dei
verbum expresses perfectly the essentially personal character of
faith.
“In the words, ‘man entrusts himself to God by the obedience of faith,’ one
musts see, if only indirectly, the thought that faith, as response to the
revelation by which God ‘gives himself to man,’ implies through its internal
dynamism a reciprocal gift on the part of man, who in a way ‘also gives himself
to God.’ This gift of oneself is the profoundest and most personal
structure of faith.
“In the act of faith, man does not respond to God with the gift of a bit of
himself, but with the gift of his whole person. Of course, in this reciprocal
relationship the disproportion remains.’
“So misapprehension is frequent. Those who say, ‘faith is a gift,’ implying
that they have not received it, are at the same time both right and wrong.
Right, because there really is a gift on the part of God. Wrong, because this
gift is not one of those which require only a banal acknowledgement of receipt;
it only takes effect when there is reciprocity.
‘Man gives himself or “entrusts himself” to God in faith, by the response of
faith in the measure of his created – and therefore dependent – being. It is
not a question of a relationship between equals; that is why Dei verbum uses
with superb precision the words ‘entrusts himself.’ In the ‘communion’ with
God, Faith marks the first step.
“According to the teaching of the apostles, faith finds its fullness of life in
love. It is in love that the confident surrender to God acquires its proper
character and this dimension of reciprocity starts with faith.
“Thus while the old definition in my catechism spoke principally of the
acceptance as truth’ of all that God has revealed,’ the conciliar text, in
speaking of surrender to God, emphasizes rather the personal character of
faith. This does not mean that the cognitive aspect is concealed or displaced,
but it is, so to speak, organically integrated in the broad context of the
subject responding to God by faith….
“Before I tell you how I am inclined to conceive this commitment, allow me to
examine once again the fundamental meaning of this word in the light of the
confident surrender to God.
“I have already drawn your attention to the difference between the catechism
formula, ‘accepting as true all that God reveals,’ and surrender to God.
In the first definition faith is primarily intellectual, in so far as
it is the welcoming and assimilation of revealed fact. On the other hand, when
the constitution Dei verbum tells us that man entrusts himself
to God ‘by the obedience of faith,’ we are confronted with the whole
ontological and existential dimension and, so to speak, the drama of existence
proper to man.
“In faith, man discovers the relativity of his being in comparison with an
absolute I and the contingent character of his own existence.
To believe is to entrust this human I, in all its transcendence and
all its transcendent greatness, but also with its limits, its fragility and its
mortal condition, to Someone who announces himself as
the beginning and the end, transcending all that
is created and contingent, but who also reveals himself at the same time as a
Person who invites us to companionship, participation and communion. An
absolute person - or better, a personal Absolute.
“The surrender to God through faith (through the obedience of faith) penetrates
to the very depths of human existence, to the very heart of personal existence.
This is how we should understand this ‘commitment’ which you mentioned in your
question and which presents itself as the solution to the very problem of
existence or to the personal drama of human existence. IPt is much more than a
purely intellectual theism and goes deeper and further than the act of
‘accepting as true what God has revealed.’
“When God reveals himself and faith accepts him, it is man who sees
himself revealed to himself and confirmed in his being as man and person.
“We know that God reveals himself in
Jesus Christ and that at the same time, according to the constitute ion Gaudium
et spes [22], Jesus Christ reveals man to man: ‘The
mystery of man is truly illumined only in the mystery of the Word incarnate.”
“Thus these various aspects, these different elements or data of Revelation
turn out to be profoundly coherent and acquire their definitive cohesion in man
and in his vocation. The essence of faith resides not only in
knowledge, but also in the vocation, in the call. For what in
the last analysis is this obedience of faith by which man displays ‘a total
submission of his intelligence and will to the God who reveals himself’? It is
not simply hearing the Word and listening to it (in the sense of obeying it):
it also means responding to a call, to a sort of historical and eschatological
‘Follow me!’ uttered both on earth and in heaven.
“To my mind, one must be very conscious of this relation between knowledge and
vocation inherent in the very essence of faith if one is to decipher correctly
the extremely rich message of Vatican II. After reflecting on the whole of its
content, I have come to the conclusion that, according to Vatican II, to
believe is to enter the mission of the Church by agreeing to participate in the
triple ministry of Christ as prophet, priest and king. You can see by this how
faith, as a commitment, reveals to ur eyes ever new prospects, even with
respect to its content. However, I am convinced that at the root of this aspect
of faith lies the act of surrender to God, win which gift and commitment meet in
an extremely close and profound way;” Be Not Afraid, St.
Martin’s Press (1981)64-67.
Positivism
and the De-mystification of Sex (and then Gender): Roger Scruton
The
difficulty with matrimony lived in a culture which is positivistically
dominated is its superficiality of an experience that is on the level of the
purely sensible and rational. There is no commitment of the self because there
is no self, and what we are is merely lean individual.
In the realm of sexuality, consider
what the reductive epistemology of sexuality to mere facts has does to validity.
Roger Scruton writes: “There is a picture of human sexuality that
is propagated by the media, by popular culture, and by much sex education in
our schools, which tries both to discount the differences between us and the
other animals and also to remove every hint of the forbidden, the dangerous,
and the sacred. It is a picture that makes no place for shame, save as a
lingering disability, and which describes the experience of sex as a kind of
bodily sensation. Sexual initiation, according to this picture, means learning to
overcome guilt and shame, to put aside our hesitations, and to enjoy what is
described in the literature as ‘good sex.’ The function of sex education in
schools – and especially in those schools controlled by the state – is to rescue
children from the commitments that have been attached to desire by displaying
sex as a matter of cost-fee pleasure. Even to describe desire as I have done in
the foregoing paragraphs is regarded, by many educationists, as an offense – a way
of cluttering the minds of children with unmanageable guilt. Such educationists
regard the free play of sexual titillation as a far healthier option than the
death-encompassing passions associated with the old conception of erotic love.”[2]
Scruton offers the kiss as a
synecdoche of the whole of pre- and post- modern sex. “When the erotic kiss first
became obligatory on the cinema screen, it was construed as a coming together
of faces, each fully personalized through dialogue. The two faces had carried
the burden of a developing drama, and were inseparable in thought from the
individuals whose faces they were. When, in the last seconds of the Hollywood
movie, the faces tremblingly approached each other, to be clichéd together in a
clinch, the characters sank away from us into their mutual desire. This desire
was their own affair, a kind of avenue out of the story that took them quickly
off the screen and into marriage.
“Pornography is the opposite of
that: the face is more or less ignored, and in any case is endowed with no
personality and made party to no human dialogue. Only the sexual organs, construed
not as agents but as patients, or rather impatient, carry the burden of contact.
Sexual organs, unlike faces, can be treated as instruments; they are rival
means to the common end of friction, and therefore essentially substitutable.
Pornography refocuses desire, not only the other who is desired, but on the
sexual act itself, viewed as a meeting of bodies. The intentionality of the
sexual act, conceived in this disenchanted way, is radically changed. It ceases
to be an expression of interpersonal longing, still less of the desire to hold,
to possess, to be filled with love. It becomes a kind of sacrilege – a wiping
away of freedom, personality, and transcendence, to reveal the passionless contortions
of what is merely flesh. Pornography is therefore functional in relation to a
society of uncommitted partnerships. It serves to desecrate and thereby
neutralize our sense that the object of desire is made sacred and irreplaceable
by our longing. By shifting the focus downwards, from the end to the means,
from the subject to the object, pornography diverts sexual feeling away from
its normal course which is commitment, and empties it of its existential
seriousness.”[3]
Ratzinger
on the Crisis of the Culture:
Ratzinger saw clearly that the West
and the world is a moment of grave crisis culturally in that the self is at the
absolute center. He was asked in 1993 “Why
publish a universal catechism’ in 1992? Were previous catechisms inadequate?”
He answered: “The reason is that today we are in a situation exactly like that at
the time of the Council of Trent, which, held in the middle of the 16th
century, marked the dawn of modern times.
“Now we are close to the end of a
millennium and in an entirely new historical period, indicated by schemas of
thought, science, technology, culture and civilization, breaking completely
with all that we knew previously.
“This is why it was necessary to
reformulate the logic and the sum total of the Christian faith. This is the
fruit of a reflection, over some years, by the universal Church to rethink,
re-articulate and bring up-to-date her doctrine.”
Asked further: “Does it bring any innovations to Christian
doctrine?,” he answered: “A catechism never has any pretension of
being original… The novelty is that we have wished to present a unifying and
organic vision of the faith. It’s not just a question of having dogmas here and
moral commandments there. There is one fundamental vision of man, his life, his
destiny. And this vision of man is the fruit of an action and a word of God. To
show this profound unity, the character deeply rooted in man by the act of
faith, was our first intention.”
Without making explicit reference
to Gaudium et Spes #24 and #24 where the anthropology of self-gift is grounded
in the Christology of the constitutive relationality of the Son to the Father
in the Trinity, Ratzinger says: “The sacred dimension of man is the pivot of
all Christina morals. Christian moral teaching rests on an anthropology that is
directly inspired by our Christology. And it is following the compass of this
anthropology… that we put forward answers to the problems of the man of today…”
And so, the question of the validity
of matrimony will depend on the determination to commit to making the total
gift of self to the other. It always did. But now the Church’s explicit
understanding of faith has caught up with the superficiality of the culture,
and the question is asked: are these marriages “valid” if there is no faith-filled
gift of self? When the Magisterium speaks of faith in Veritatis Splendor, it talks about martyrdom. “Martyrdom, accepted as an
affirmation of the inviolability of the moral order, bears splendid witness
both to the holiness of God’s law and to the inviolability of the personal
dignity of man, created in God’s image and likeness.”[4] Faith
and the spousal gift of self have the
same anthropology. The martyrdom is life-long in the deed, but present from the
beginning. The commitment must be there and the grace of the sacrament in this
small thing builds on the previous gift of self, and so on until it is all
given. The spouses are the ministers, the bond is their personas, the priest is the witness. But it must be clear
that the mutual commitment to the gift is the very meaning of the Church
understands by “faith.” No commitment to death, no faith, no validity.
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.”
Me [Blogger]:
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.
Consider the meaning of
faith as understood in the Magisterium of Vatican II, Dei Verbum #5: “ ‘The
obedience of faith’ (rom. 16, 26; cf. Rom. 1, 5; 2 Cor. 10, 5-6) must be given
to God as he reveals himself. By faith man freely commits his entire self to
God, making ‘the full submission of his intellect and will to God who reveals,’
and willingly assenting to the Revelation given by him.”
John Paul II:
“These admirably compact and
precise words do not yet speak of faith but of Revelation. Revelation is ‘God
communicating himself.’ It thus possesses the character of a gift or a grace: a
person-to-person gift, in the communion of persons. A perfectly gratuitous free
gift which cannot be explained by anything but love.
“All this concerns Revelation. What about faith?
“We read further on in the same text: ‘To God who reveals himself we must bring
the obedience of faith by which man entrusts himself entirely,
freely, to God, bringing to him who reveals the complete
submission of his intelligence and heart and giving with all his will full
assent to the Revelation which he has made.’ Thus faith is man’s reply to the
Revelation by which God ‘communicates himself.’ The constitution Dei
verbum expresses perfectly the essentially personal character of
faith.
“In the words, ‘man entrusts himself to God by the obedience of faith,’ one
musts see, if only indirectly, the thought that faith, as response to the
revelation by which God ‘gives himself to man,’ implies through its internal
dynamism a reciprocal gift on the part of man, who in a way ‘also gives himself
to God.’ This gift of oneself is the profoundest and most personal
structure of faith.
“In the act of faith, man does not respond to God with the gift of a bit of
himself, but with the gift of his whole person. Of course, in this reciprocal
relationship the disproportion remains.’
“So misapprehension is frequent. Those who say, ‘faith is a gift,’ implying
that they have not received it, are at the same time both right and wrong.
Right, because there really is a gift on the part of God. Wrong, because this
gift is not one of those which require only a banal acknowledgement of receipt;
it only takes effect when there is reciprocity.
‘Man gives himself or “entrusts himself” to God in faith, by the response of
faith in the measure of his created – and therefore dependent – being. It is
not a question of a relationship between equals; that is why Dei verbum uses
with superb precision the words ‘entrusts himself.’ In the ‘communion’ with
God, Faith marks the first step.
“According to the teaching of the apostles, faith finds its fullness of life in
love. It is in love that the confident surrender to God acquires its proper
character and this dimension of reciprocity starts with faith.
“Thus while the old definition in my catechism spoke principally of the
acceptance as truth’ of all that God has revealed,’ the conciliar text, in
speaking of surrender to God, emphasizes rather the personal character of
faith. This does not mean that the cognitive aspect is concealed or displaced,
but it is, so to speak, organically integrated in the broad context of the
subject responding to God by faith….
“Before I tell you how I am inclined to conceive this commitment, allow me to
examine once again the fundamental meaning of this word in the light of the
confident surrender to God.
“I have already drawn your attention to the difference between the catechism
formula, ‘accepting as true all that God reveals,’ and surrender to God.
In the first definition faith is primarily intellectual, in so far as
it is the welcoming and assimilation of revealed fact. On the other hand, when
the constitution Dei verbum tells us that man entrusts himself
to God ‘by the obedience of faith,’ we are confronted with the whole
ontological and existential dimension and, so to speak, the drama of existence
proper to man.
“In faith, man discovers the relativity of his being in comparison with an
absolute I and the contingent character of his own existence.
To believe is to entrust this human I, in all its transcendence and
all its transcendent greatness, but also with its limits, its fragility and its
mortal condition, to Someone who announces himself as
the beginning and the end, transcending all that
is created and contingent, but who also reveals himself at the same time as a
Person who invites us to companionship, participation and communion. An
absolute person - or better, a personal Absolute.
“The surrender to God through faith (through the obedience of faith) penetrates
to the very depths of human existence, to the very heart of personal existence.
This is how we should understand this ‘commitment’ which you mentioned in your
question and which presents itself as the solution to the very problem of
existence or to the personal drama of human existence. IPt is much more than a
purely intellectual theism and goes deeper and further than the act of
‘accepting as true what God has revealed.’
“When God reveals himself and faith accepts him, it is man who sees
himself revealed to himself and confirmed in his being as man and person.
“We know that God reveals himself in
Jesus Christ and that at the same time, according to the constitute ion Gaudium
et spes [22], Jesus Christ reveals man to man: ‘The
mystery of man is truly illumined only in the mystery of the Word incarnate.”
“Thus these various aspects, these different elements or data of Revelation
turn out to be profoundly coherent and acquire their definitive cohesion in man
and in his vocation. The essence of faith resides not only in
knowledge, but also in the vocation, in the call. For what in
the last analysis is this obedience of faith by which man displays ‘a total
submission of his intelligence and will to the God who reveals himself’? It is
not simply hearing the Word and listening to it (in the sense of obeying it):
it also means responding to a call, to a sort of historical and eschatological
‘Follow me!’ uttered both on earth and in heaven.
“To my mind, one must be very conscious of this relation between knowledge and
vocation inherent in the very essence of faith if one is to decipher correctly
the extremely rich message of Vatican II. After reflecting on the whole of its
content, I have come to the conclusion that, according to Vatican II, to
believe is to enter the mission of the Church by agreeing to participate in the
triple ministry of Christ as prophet, priest and king. You can see by this how
faith, as a commitment, reveals to ur eyes ever new prospects, even with
respect to its content. However, I am convinced that at the root of this aspect
of faith lies the act of surrender to God, win which gift and commitment meet in
an extremely close and profound way;” Be Not Afraid, St.
Martin’s Press (1981)64-67.
Kasper/Commonweal
Interview:
CWL: In your address to the
consistory, you ask whether we can, “in the present situation, presuppose
without further ado that the engaged couple shares the belief in the mystery
that is signified by the sacrament and that they really understand and affirm
the canonical conditions for the validity of the marriage.” You ask whether the
presumption of validity from which canon law proceeds is often “a legal
fiction.” But can the church afford not to make this
presumption? How could the church continue to marry couples in good faith if it
assumed that many of them were not really capable of entering into sacramental
marriage because they were, as you put it somewhere else in your speech, “baptized
pagans”?
Kasper: That’s a real problem. I’ve
spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent
of marriages are not valid. Marriage is a sacrament. A sacrament presupposes
faith. And if the couple only want a bourgeois ceremony in a church because
it’s more beautiful, more romantic, than a civil ceremony, you have to ask
whether there was faith, and whether they really accepted all the conditions of
a valid sacramental marriage—that is, unity, exclusivity, and also indissolubility.
The couples, when they get married, they want it because it’s stable. But many
think, “Well, if we fail, we have the right.” And then already the principle is
denied. Many canon lawyers tell me that today in our pluralistic situation we
cannot presuppose that couples really assent to what the church requires. Often
it is also ignorance. Therefore you have to emphasize and to strengthen
prematrimonial catechesis. It’s often done in a very bureaucratic way. No, we
have to provide catechesis. I know some parishes in Rome where couples have to
attend catechesis, and the pastor himself does it. We must do much more in
prematrimonial catechesis and use pastoral work and so on because we cannot
presuppose that everybody who is a formal Christian also has the faith. It
wouldn’t be realistic.
CWL: But you can imagine the outcry
there would be if priests regularly told couples, “I can’t marry you because I
don’t really think that you believe in the things people have to believe in
order to get married.”
Kasper: That's why there must be
dialogue between the couple and the priest, who should teach them what it means
to marry in the church. You can’t presume that both partners know what they are
doing.
Large
Conclusion:
Matrimony as the universal call to holiness. Not merely pre-Cana, but the
entire pastoral mission of the Church.
