Dear friends of Istituto Acton,
Nearly ten years ago, while preparing for an interview on the life and legacy of Pope St. John Paul II, CNN’s Richard Quest asked me which aspects of liberty are of interest to the Acton Institute. He seemed rather disappointed that it was the economic rather than the sexual kind and then proceeded to accuse me on-air of calling the late pontiff a free-trade ideologue and, horror of horrors, a capitalist. (See the interview here.) Something tells me he would have reacted differently if we promoted women priests, contraception, divorce, homosexuality and abortion instead.
Some things never change. Religious and secular progressives held out similar hopes that the recently-concluded Extraordinary Session of the Synod of Bishops on “Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context of Evangelization” would be the first step towards allowing Catholics the same types of sexual license that are now commonplace in the Western world. It’s as if we’re back in 1968, just before the publication of Blessed Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae and maybe, just maybe, the pope isn’t Catholic after all.
What is it about sex and the Catholic Church that commands so much overheated attention? Progressives have achieved nearly all their objectives when it comes to sexual liberation, short of requiring men to bear children. But until a 2,000-year-old divinely-founded institution comes to worship at the altar of libido, the war is not yet won. Strangely enough, I hear fewer people question fundamental mysteries of the faith, such as the Resurrection or the Trinity, than express strident disagreement over the Church’s teachings on human sexuality, which are easily accessible to anyone who’s willing to think a little bit about the matter.
It’s pretty clear that many people would rather not think about sex at all – just do it and get over whatever hang-ups we may have about it. The kind of talk you’d expect to hear from teenagers who want to escape the prudery of their oppressive parents, without stopping to consider that they resulted from their parents’ own sexual activity. What is perhaps more surprising is that some Catholic bishops are included in the many.
To paraphrase what I heard from a few evangelicals at a course I was teaching in the UK last week, what in the world is happening when the Catholic Church doesn’t stand up for marriage and family anymore, or at least not in ways recognizable to anyone born before 1980? Just as Richard Quest mistook economic liberty for sexual license in the Acton name, we seem to have forgotten what it means to exercise freedom together with moral responsibility; turning Lord Acton’s dictum on its head, we want to do only what we want, not what we ought.
The problem of “ought” is of course related to a larger crisis of authority and growing individualism, which is cited several times in the Synod’s final report as possibly the biggest problem facing the family in its daily life. The secular world expressed its shock but also its approval when Pope Francis asked, “Who am I to judge?” even if nearly everyone forgets the qualifying “if they’re seeking the Lord in good faith”. That’s a big “if,” one the Church probably gives people the benefit of the doubt about when it welcomes us sinners and calls us to repent. It should go without saying that the repentance part involves that dreaded “ought” and implies a certain standard about how we are to live.
It is not entirely unrelated that seekers of religious truth find themselves especially lost in the midst of family breakdown. The intergenerational solidarity within the family that the pope so often praises has been replaced first by the concept of the nuclear, and now the single-parent, family. It’s why the Holy See always has to accept the notion of “various forms of the family” in United Nations documents. The family has been in crisis long before gay “marriage” even appeared in our vocabulary.
Students of political philosophy will recall that Plato drew attention to the tensions between the family and the city or society at large. The Euthyphro begins with a son taking his father to court for impiety, and in the Republic, Plato famously relates how the city must tell “noble lies” about human origins in order to unite its citizens. Socrates was a notoriously bad husband and father. Aristotle’s Politics says that the family is the basis of society but also questions whether parents are the best educators of their children. Much later, philosophers such as John Locke and especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau would also devote great attention to the political effects of marriage and family, albeit with radically different conclusions. Locke sought to undermine paternal rule in favor of more mercenary relations between fathers and sons, while Rousseau emphasized the romantic bond between man and woman as taking on even greater importance in a liberal age.
The family has always existed within society, yet not all societies treat the family similarly. Think of the feudal society and its laws of primogeniture and inheritance. India’s caste system is another example of how different religious and familial arrangements affect each other. Those of us familiar with the problems of southern Italy will also admit that the good of the family is not always the good of the city, as the social scientist Edward C. Banfield described “amoral familism” in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. A good society is more than a collection of families but it cannot do without them.
Christianity is based on the revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a communion of three divine persons in one, as well as the creation of male and female in the image and likeness of God. Indeed, it is “in the beginning” where the indissolubility of marriage originates, as Jesus tells the Pharisees who ask him about divorce. Upon this “beginning” is where John Paul II founds a theology of the body, with the gift of self expressed both between husband and wife and later Christ and his Church. As Pope Benedict XVI noted on several occasions, theology remains politically relevant.
Another aspect of Christ’s moral teaching, the relationship between justice and mercy, was also very present in Synod news and commentary. The overemphasis of one to the neglect of the other is evident in the debate over denying divorced-and-remarried Catholics Holy Communion in particular. Pope Francis has clearly made mercy the main theme of his pontificate, and the world definitely needs to listen and learn from what he is saying. Mercy, however, is more than simply being nice and non-judgmental; there would be nothing particularly impressive or difficult about it if it wasn’t. Taken together with other statements, such as the pope’s absolute condemnations of the death penalty and even life imprisonment, one may ask if justice is being given its due.
If liberty is to mean something more than license, free people have to be held accountable for their actions and therefore punished for the bad use of their freedom. Such punishment often happens naturally, such as when we overindulge in food or drink. Other times it needs to be meted out proportionally – “let the punishment fit the crime,” as the saying goes – not because justice is exact or perfect, but because it holds people, even criminals, morally responsible. The beauty of Christian mercy is not that it negates justice and treats us like we’re all insane; it clearly recognizes that we are free and responsible beings, albeit wounded by original sin and called to conversion over and over again.
Free and responsible also in our sexual lives, it must be said. I know this goes very much against the grain in more ways than one; it’s not easy to deny oneself (especially when no one else is); it is, however, possible, as all those who diet and exercise for the sake of their physical health prove on a regular basis. The Church’s teaching on the unitive and procreative aspects of the sexual act between man and woman is actually a blessing because it takes our human dignity seriously, even if and especially when we fail to live up to its high standard. With God’s grace and a little thought and effort (i.e., the practice of the virtues) on our part, we can. This is the hopeful message the Church can never deny us, despite the meanderings of some of our bishops at the Synod.
Kishore Jayabalan
Director
