Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Thoughts on the Upcoming Synod on the Family



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.





[1] Ross Douthat, NYT, May 21, 2014
[2] Roger Scruton, “Sacrilege and Sacrament,” The Meaning of Marriage,” Scepter (2010) 16-17.
[3] Ibid 18-19
[4] VS #92.

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