Francis suggests Church’s view of marriage has been too abstract, idealistic
Note: TCK does not hold Francis as the true Pope
"They think the New World Order has something to do with Christ"
“We
have presented a theological ideal of marriage that is too abstract,
almost artificially constructed,” Pope Francis suggested last month.
Pope Francis received all members of the academic community
of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and
the Family in an audience in the Vatican on October 27. The meeting made
headlines after Francis’ decision to personally replace Cardinal Robert Sarah for this address.
In his speech, available in English here,
at the Vatican’s Clementine Hall on the occasion of the opening of the
academic year, Francis explained that the Church’s catechesis on
marriage sometimes might have been too abstract for the common faithful.
Francis suggested that sometimes teachings on marriage were
unable to combat the challenges of contemporary families: “Therefore,
we must learn not to be resigned to human failure, but let us sustain
the rescue of the creative plan [for humanity] at all costs.” Francis
went on to say that many people were put off by an unobtainable ideal.
“This excessive idealization, especially when we have not reawakened
confidence in grace, has not made marriage more desirable and
attractive, but all the contrary.”
While Francis pointed out that the family needs help and
accompaniment, his strong insistence on “at all costs” and his strong,
generalized denunciation of past praxis threatens to give rise to
interpretations such as Cardinal Walter Kasper’s in his recent publication.
Where Cardinal Kasper writes that the moral “ideal” is an “optimum” —
implying too that it is unreachable by many — and states that
“oftentimes, we have to choose the lesser evil […]; in the living life
there is no black and white but only different nuances and shadings,”
one could easily connect the statements of the Supreme Pontiff with
those of the German theologian and Cardinal.
It is not the first time that Pope Francis publicly criticized “rigidity.” Earlier
the same week, on October 24, Pope Francis called “rigid” people “sick”
in his daily Mass homily at the Casa Sancta Martae. “Behind an attitude
of rigidity there is always something else in the life of a person.
Rigidity is not a gift of God. Meekness is; goodness is; benevolence is;
forgiveness is. But rigidity isn’t!” he said.
It is surprising that Pope Francis addressed these words to
the members of the John Paul II Institute, who have historically held
to the Church’s Magisterium with fidelity and clarity. The Pope
suggested that upholding the ideal of the Church’s teaching seems to
create a “distance” from the common people: “Today’s pastoral topic is
not only that of the ‘distance’ of many from the ideal and practice of
the Christian truth of marriage and the family; more decisive yet is the
topic of the Church’s ‘closeness,’ closeness to the new generations of
spouses so that the blessing of their bond increasingly convinces
them and accompanies them, and closeness to the situations of human
weakness, so that grace can rescue them, give them new courage and heal
them.”
The “new horizon of this commitment” invokes Cardinal
Kasper and others to claim they have the right understanding of mercy,
in which the doctor (the pastor) somehow has to enter the sickness
rather than heal it from his “sane” and “healthy” standpoint. Pope
Francis explained in this matter: “Let us not forget that good
theologians also, as good pastors, smell of the people and of the street
and, with their reflection, pour oil and wine on men’s wounds.”
A reader can only hope that the secular world, together
with its media spin-doctors, does not take Francis’ words on “the
Church’s closeness” to situations of “human weakness” and the “crisis
of the contemporary family” as to mean that the Church condones gay
"marriages," divorce and remarriage, and abortions in certain cases. And
indeed, Francis himself condemned in his speech the “imposition of
ideologies that attack the family project directly,” which can hardly be
something else than the modern ideologies like gender theory.
At the same time, Pope Francis respected Pope John Paul
II’s teaching that the Institute continues in living tradition,
praising it as “timeless” and “fruitful.” “His wise discernment of the
signs of the times restored with vigor the attention of the Church and
of human society itself to the profundity and delicacy of the bonds that
are generated from the conjugal alliance of man and woman. The
development that the Institute has had in the five continents confirms
the validity and meaning of the 'catholic' form of its program,” Francis
said.
The Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and Family
has its campus at the Lateran University of Rome and has been forming
and educating students since 1981. Their latest academic addition is a Masters in Bioethics.