Edmond Grace SJ answers a query from a concerned parent about her son who rejects the right of the Church to guide his life.
My son tells me that he believes in following his conscience and that no Church will tell him how to live his life. To be honest I find myself at a loss as to how to answer him, because he does live a good life and often goes out of his way to help others.
I pointed out last month that few enough people have any major dispute with the Church’s teaching about honesty or social justice. What people today take exception to is what she has to say in the area of sexuality. The traditional teaching on these matters, in the eyes of many, is a regrettable hangover from the days of fire and brimstone, when people were bullied into conformity in sexual matters.
Our need for Christ’s love
The heart of all the Church’s teaching is that we love as Christ loves. He sets a standard of heroic unselfishness. At the same time, he is merciful to those who, through human weakness, fall short of that standard in one way or another.
Jesus is constantly understanding of our failures, and in the ‘Our Father’ invites us to pray for forgiveness. He does not expect perfection, although he does expect us to struggle for the perfect standard which he sets before us. We cannot do this unless we accept that we are sinful and that we need his help and his love.
In the area of sexuality, we are still recovering from a time when the message of the Church as popularly preached seemed to be: Be perfect or go to hell. It is no exaggeration to say that many people lived in a state of terror with regard to this intimate and fragile area of their lives, and many still do.
Rebellion
In recent times, people have rebelled, rightly, against an attitude to sexuality which was so
lacking in love and mercy. Part of this rebellion is that many people of goodwill have become averse to allowing the Church to engage their conscience in any form of dialogue in relation to their sexuality. This, I suspect, is what underlies your son’s insistence that no Church will tell him how to live his life.
When it comes to forgiving our enemies, few have any difficulty accepting that this is the right thing to do, even though, in practice, we may struggle painfully with deep feelings of hatred against those who have hurt us. We struggle and we fail, but we don’t pretend that our failure to forgive is anything other than failure. We need to be honest about that if we are to grow in our ability to love as Christ loves.
Jesus and marriage
In personal relations, perhaps the most painful experience of all is the failure of a marriage. According to scripture, Christ’s relationship with the Church is the model for every marriage, but that relationship could hardly be called a conventionally happy one! His marriage was, literally, a crucifixion, and therefore the standard he sets in his teaching on marriage is a daunting one.
When the disciples first heard Jesus’ teaching on divorce, they reacted by doubting if it would be advisable ever to marry. Jesus’ response was to say that it was not everyone who could accept what he had said, but ‘only those to whom it is granted’ (Mt.19:1l). To understand the value of this teaching and to be able to live according to it is a grace, something to be prayed for.
Accepting the standard
In every area of our lives, we fall short of the heroic standard set before us by Jesus, but that is no reason to reject his standard and the challenge it sets before us. To accept this is to live a truly conscientious life – open to growth and to learning from our experience.
Acceptance of Christ’s teaching on divorce enables married people to develop, with the help of prayer, a deeper sense of compassion for each other’s failings, even in the midst of very painful conflict. In this way, married people are better able to challenge each other lovingly instead of lapsing into a spiral of mutual criticism and condemnation when they find themselves at odds with each other.
It’s a mistake to think that those marriages which don’t end in separation do not go through moments when both partners despair of each other – in much the same way that Christ at times must have felt like giving up on his disciples.
Divorce
Primarily, the teaching on divorce is for those who are dedicating themselves to living their marriage vows. It is not there as a means of condemning those for whom an unhappy marriage becomes unendurable; but even for them, it is a call to learn from the tragedy they have endured and, through that learning, to grow in selflessness.
To accept divorce simply as unavoidable reality is itself an avoidance of the challenge of the Good News to love as Christ loves. The only significant voice in our society which has not sought to dilute this challenge in recent times is the teaching office of the Catholic Church. That should give any reasonable and conscientious person food for thought.
Contraception
There is another area where the Church stands by a teaching which all Christian Churches accepted until the twentieth century: contraception. This teaching does call for a genuinely heroic selflessness in a couple’s relationship. It is rare to hear couples talking about their own experience of following it, but it has been my privilege to do so.
The periodic abstinence which it calls for can have two highly beneficial effects. Firstly, it can make the man more aware of the woman’s cycle and by that very fact more attentive to her in a very intimate area of her life. That, in turn, can make her more appreciative of him. Secondly, it can introduce an element of continuing courtship and anticipation into a couple’s sexual relationship. When contraception makes the option of sex always available, the question of who wants it, and when, can give rise to a cycle of frustration and resentment, which cannot but be a strain on any relationship.
Contemporary attitudes
In modern society, periodic abstinence from sex is not simply regarded as too demanding, it is dismissed as ridiculous and perverse. As with the issue of divorce, the only voice of any significance to support this value is the teaching office of the Catholic Church.
We live at a time, at least in the western world, when people have never enjoyed more material comfort, have never lived longer, never been so well educated and never been healthier. In spite of all these genuine blessings, the population of Europe has gone into decline to the point that in the coming years it will be increasingly difficult to sustain the degree of economic productivity – and benefits – which have been a feature of the past half century. As this reality takes hold, people may begin to see Church’s teaching on contraception in a more positive light.
Questions for consideration
Your son is right in refusing to be told what to do by the Church. Is he right, however, in refusing to allow his consCience to be formed by an open-minded and thoughtful consideration of Church teaching – especially in those areas where it challenges the prevailing assumptions of our society? Is such an outright rejection wise? And in what way does it encourage fidelity to Christ’s law of love? These are questions which he might consider.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (March 2004), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
