No Family, No Peace

Posted by Rebecca Teti in Marriage on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 10:00 AM

Weeks ago I promised a further look at this quotation from Pope Benedict XVI.

”...everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life, everything that obstructs its right to be primarily responsible for the education of its children, constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace.”

The original post highlighted the latest scenes in a political and cultural drama about marriage being played out in our nation right now—one which confounds conventional Left/Right categories in some respects.

No one would doubt former Vice-President Cheney’s credentials as a political conservative, yet he publicly supports same-sex marriage. Many politically liberal people of faith can’t in conscience do so.

See also this clever (though occasionally coarse)  video which manages to be morally liberal, politically conservative and snarky to both sides. (Although the broader political point about dialogue is probably correct.)

Pope Benedict XVI similarly defies political categories, but the nature of his defiance is quite different—and not at all snarky.

The quotation at the head of this post comes from His Holiness’ 2008 Message for the World Day of Peace. That year’s message was dedicated entirely to the family, but defense of the family as the first step towards peace has played a part in every World Peace Day message of this pope’s pontificate.

His premise—that we don’t get politics right when we don’t first get human nature right—is the main idea of his latest encyclical, and a recurring theme of his interactions with bishops and other teachers of the faith.

The Pope’s message to Swiss bishops, delivered in spontaneous remarks at the close of their ad limina visit in 2006, gives an excellent window into his conception of how the Church must evangelize in our age.

First, a little digression, which will set up the point he is about to make, but is also amusing. For more than 20 years, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger served as head of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. During that time, hardly any member of the Curia made himself more available to the press than himself, but rarely did anyone think to ask him anything other than the most predictable questions. I think you can sense the amusement with which he recounts his experiences with the media here:

when I used go to Germany in the 1980s and ‘90s… I was asked to give interviews and I always knew the questions in advance. They concerned the ordination of women, contraception, abortion and other such constantly recurring problems.

  (The idea of anyone playing “gotcha” with Joseph Ratzinger amuses me to no end.)

At any rate, these kinds of questions pose a danger to the Church—though perhaps not the ones either we or our critics think.

If we let ourselves be drawn into these discussions, the Church is then identified with certain commandments or prohibitions; we give the impression that we are moralists with a few somewhat antiquated convictions, and not even a hint of the true greatness of the faith appears. I therefore consider it essential always to highlight the greatness of our faith - a commitment from which we must not allow such situations to divert us.

Benedict—the intellectually fearless man—is telling us that both believers and unbelievers too often share the belief that the Church will wither away under the onslaught of persistent questions.  The person who has truly met Christ knows quite the opposite is true.

God is Spiritus Creator, he is Logos, he is reason. And this is why our faith is something that has to do with reason, can be passed on through reason and has no cause to hide from reason, not even from the reason of our age.

Our faith not only can withstand the reason of our age, it outstrips it: 

this eternal, immeasurable reason is not merely a mathematics of the universe and far less, some first cause that withdrew after producing the Big Bang.
This reason, on the contrary, has a heart such as to be able to renounce its own immensity and take flesh. And in that alone, to my mind, lies the ultimate, true greatness of our conception of God. We know that God is not a philosophical hypothesis, he is not something that perhaps exists, but we know him and he knows us. And we can know him better and better if we keep up a dialogue with him.

This insight leads the pope to some practical conclusions.

First and foremost, the primary task of the Church is not apologetics, even though connecting faith to reason is a vital task. The essential task is prayer and teaching people to pray.

it is a fundamental task of pastoral care to teach people how to pray and how to learn to do so personally, better and better. Today, schools of prayer and prayer groups exist; it is obvious that people want them. Many seek meditation elsewhere because they think that they will not be able to find a spiritual dimension in Christianity.

We must show them once again not only that this spiritual dimension exists but that it is the source of all things. To this end, we must increase the number of these schools of prayer, for praying together, where it is possible to learn personal prayer in all its dimensions: as silent listening to God, as a listening that penetrates his Word, penetrates his silence, sounds the depths of his action in history and in one’s own person; and to understand his language in one’s life and then to learn to respond

Secondly, the Pope reflects on the split of morality into deficient forms in the Western world. He says he has personally meditated a great deal on this problem.

There’s the morality those German reporters reject and which can make the faith seem small if we don’t present it in perspective.

And there’s an alternative morality—“peace, non-violence, justice for all, concern for the poor and respect for creation”—which has become a substitute for true morality.

The problem is not with peace, justice, non-violence, concern for the poor or creation as such, obviously—those are true, necessary concerns of any Christian and those themes have authentic expression in Catholic Christian tradition. The contemporary Church must do more to promote those goods, the Pope says. True social justice is a good we all must work for.

The difficulty with “social justice” as it commonly manifests itself is two-fold. One problem is that by cutting itself off from a true vision of the human person, this strain of morality—even when it correctly identifies problems—isn’t usually capable of coming up with good solutions. (Think of people who see abortion and contraception as “green.”)  As the Pope says,

this morality exists and it also fascinates young people, who work for peace, for non-violence, for justice, for the poor, for creation. And there are truly great moral themes that also belong, moreover, to the tradition of the Church. The means offered for their solution, however, are often very unilateral and not always credible

But that’s not the real problem, he says. To the extent people are attracted to social justice, it’s a positive sign of the deep moral impulses lying within the human person, and believers should be encouraged by it. The deeper problem is that for many people, social justice movements have become a substitute for religion. We conceive our dignity not as coming from God’s love for us, but from the degree of our participation in one or more of these political movements.

This split of morality in two leads much of the Western world into a kind of cultural schizophrenia. On the one hand, there are great movements of respect for life from conception to natural death. Where else but in the West do we see such tender care for the handicapped in our schools and public life? The universal admiration for people like Mother Teresa shows we know that life is a gift.

At the same time, in the name of justice, equality or compassion, we see all kinds of counter-movements to manipulate life or take it for our own purposes.

Marriage, Benedict says, is one of those concepts being damaged by this culture torn in two. On the one hand, things look bleak:

We are aware of the example of certain countries where legislation has been modified so that marriage is no longer defined as a bond between a man and a woman but a bond between persons; with this, obviously, the basic idea is destroyed and society from its roots becomes something quite different.

The awareness that sexuality, eros and marriage as a union between a man and a woman go together - “and they become one flesh” (Gn 2: 24) - this knowledge is growing weaker and weaker; every type of bond seems entirely normal - they represent a sort of overall morality of non-discrimination and a form of freedom due to man.

Naturally, with this the indissolubility of marriage has become almost a utopian idea which many public figures seem precisely to contradict. So it is that even the family is gradually breaking up.
There are of course many explanations for the problem of the sharp decline in the birth rate, but certainly a decisive role is also played in this by the fact that people want to enjoy life, that they have little confidence in the future and that they feel the family is no longer viable as a lasting community in which future generations may grow up.

In these contexts, therefore, our proclamation clashes with an awareness, as it were, contrary to society and with a sort of anti-morality based on a conception of freedom seen as the faculty to choose autonomously with no pre-defined guidelines, as non-discrimination, hence, as the approval of every type of possibility.

On the other hand, “marriage” as a concept hasn’t been conquered; it persists with remarkable strength.

Culturally, then, the Christian project is to join these two streams of morality. This transcends the “seamless garment,” which has its virtues as a way of conceiving of Catholic commitments, but unfortunately has had the practical effect of encouraging Catholics to pick and choose which thread of the garment is most important to them personally. What Benedict wants us to understand is that yes, social justice and stewardship of the environment are vital, but they cannot be properly understood before the good of the human person in his right relationship to God is first understood.

Social justice is made for man, not man for social justice, we might say.

Only if human life from conception until death is respected is the ethic of peace possible and credible; only then may non-violence be expressed in every direction, only then can we truly accept creation and only then can we achieve true justice.

This is not a matter of taking political “liberals” down a peg; it’s a profound challenge to us all.

What Benedict is saying is that true justice is far deeper and more beautiful than any of us know, and the human tendency to make the faith too small in different ways exists at both ends of the political spectrum and everywhere in between.

The Pope concludes:

this is the great task we have before us: on the one hand, not to make Christianity seem merely morality, but rather a gift in which we are given the love that sustains us and provides us with the strength we need to be able to “lose our own life”. On the other hand, in this context of freely given love, we need to move forward towards ways of putting it into practice, whose foundation is always offered to us by the Decalogue, which we must interpret today with Christ and with the Church in a progressive and new way.

We defend life, marriage and the family not instead of peace and justice, but as the foundation of peace and justice. We work for peace and justice not instead of marriage and the family, but with them as touchstone: if it undermines human dignity or breaks down the family, it is not just and will not bring peace.

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