What is a Marriage?

The question about the true nature of marriage is not new, despite the current discussion of same-sex unions. Most people opposed to such unions argue that marriage "has always been" about creating a family. But has it?

When I taught the work of Milton and the 17th century, I often surprised my students by telling them how "radical" the poet of Paradise Lost was when, in 1644, he advocated divorce when a man and woman were incompatible; and he defined the early modern attitude toward marriage: that it was a union of souls, not merely a means of producing offspring.

I was taught a narrow view of marriage in my Catholic education: that procreation was the ultimate end of marriage. Luckily, the Church has shifted a bit on this simplistic view, putting pastoral emphasis on love on an equal footing with or ahead of procreation. There is still more work to be done on this before Catholic practice catches up with reality.

A recent article, found on the internet, by Thomas M. Finn, a religion professor at William and Mary, puts the issue of marriage in a fuller, historical light. He shows that Augustine in the 4th century changed his earlier view after the pastoral experience he gained as a bishop of Hippo: what made marriage marriage, he said, was mutual consent to a life together by two people (one of each sex, presumably) who were committed to love, support and respect each other.  The importance of offspring took second place in his mind, says Finn, as he encountered countless childless marriages that he considered true marriages.

Since he was the only early Church father to write extensively on the topic, Augustine remains a key figure in the Western idea of sex and marriage. Medieval arguments among scholars at the early universities ended up, says Finn, following Peter Lombard's text which said that consent, given in the present, to live together as partners, with mutual affection and respect--the very idea advocated by Milton--was the essence of marriage.

So, for 1,600 years, the definition of marriage hinged on consent, from which its secondary benefits, including children, flowed. Whether a couple could have children was not what made marriage marriage.

The historical lesson is always important in illuminating the present, and Finn sums up clearly what is at stake in today's debate about same-sex couples getting married even though they can produce no offspring.  Some 60% of Americans, he reports, including Catholics, agree with the historical consensus about what constitutes marriage: the consent of two people to live together in mutual respect and affection. It all comes down to love.

All too often, people of my generation, especially Catholics, tend to think of marriage as monolithic, unchanged since the Garden of Eden, rather than an evolved understanding of a commitment to love.

More about Pope Benedict

There has been a rich assortment of reflections about the papal resignation, many of them echoing my own initial reaction: that this is the most significant thing Benedict XVI has done for the future of the church.

I was particularly struck by a Commonweal post by Joseph A. Komonchak (2-19-13), "Benedict's Act of Humility."  The humility and courage of B-16, as they call him in the social media (or Benny), is that he has subordinated the person to the office: it is not the man, often seen as a kind of god-king, who is above and beyond the church (and criticism), but the office he holds that matters. That, too, is a human institution in need of change.

In resigning, Pope Benedict has brought the papacy down to earth, according to Komonchak and others) just as his decision humanizes him.

After all, the church is not the pope, and the pope is not the church. The church is not the hierarchy, the institution in Rome. We who try to be faithful Catholics do not look to Rome for spiritual nourishment but to our local parish; there we find the community of believers who are the church.
The church is not our religion; our religion is Christianity. Such insights have come through in many of the articles reacting to the pope's decision.

So this historic resignation is a sign of some creeping (dare I say it?) democracy. Yet, ironically, at the same time, the media's glare on his possible successor and the coming conclave once again suggests the old, inflated notion that the Bishop of Rome is of such supreme importance that the existence of the church, its future, depends on the man elected.

So it is hard to leave the mystique of the papacy behind. It does not help that popes continue to live in the gilded splendor of a Renaissance palace, dressed as if part of an ancient culture rather than as part of the 21st century. (Surely an Italian tailor could come up with a sharp white suit, with pants, for the pope.)

The pope is important as a symbolic source of unity, as Bishop of Rome, but he must also be human, accessible, perhaps (like John XXIII) a man of humor and common sense. A man who knows something of family life and human struggles. A man who can listen as well as teach.

Benedict XVI, for all his missteps, moved us closer, I think, to shifting the papacy from its lofty isolation to the real world. The church--the faithful--are open to change. Now is the time for its leaders to follow, in humility, and for the pope to be the Servant of the Servants of God (one of his many titles worth retaining).

Being Religious

What does it mean to be religious?  Many people would probably think of church (or temple) attendance along with adherence to a specific set of beliefs.  But the term is much broader, having something to do with the role of the sacred in human life.

I have known many people who, like my father, attended no church, knew little about any particular denomination, yet had a religious perspective, an awe at the beauty of creation and the value of love. They honor and respect sacred places and holy traditions, perhaps sensing in them something ancient and profound. You might prefer the word 'spiritual,' yet that word, for me, suggests the cultivated inner life and a sense of the transcendent in the ordinary that 'religious' does not.

Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996), a North Carolina native who moved to New York in 1929 and began to write about the city, left an unfinished memoir, part of which is published, in all its copious detail, in the current New Yorker.  He lists, with apparent delight, the sights and sounds of the faces and places of the huge metropolis as only an outsider can.  Reading it, I was reminded of Whitman in his all-embracing catalog of life.

Mitchell captures something of the religious sensibility I am trying to define. Although a member of no church, he found himself attracted to churches, especially Catholic ones. Sometimes he went to several Masses in a single day, at different places, with different accents (Polish, Italian, etc.) and, having read a good bit, reflects on the religious impact his experiences had on him.  The following passage is worth quoting in detail:

"One dimly remembered observation about the ancientness of the Mass--that it and its antecedents go farther back into the human past than any other existing ceremony--began to haunt me. I began to feel that the Mass gave me a living connection with my ancestors in England and Scotland before the Reformation and with other ancestors thousands of years earlier than that in the woods and in the caves and on the mudflats of Europe. It put me in communion, so to speak, with these ancestors, no matter how ghostly or hypothetical they might be." ("Street Life," New Yorker, Feb. 11 & 18, 2013, p. 68).

He goes on to say how deeply satisfying this was because it was like finding a "tiny crack in the wall" through which he could look into his unconscious. As a result, he developed a respect for the Mass that had nothing to do with his beliefs about organized religion. It had a lot to do with the past and its presence in the liturgy.

I wonder how many people today are drawn to churches and other places of worship not merely because of the architecture but because they need, in a way impossible to articulate, to be part of a community that carries on a tradition of prayer. They need to be connected to a history wider and deeper than their own lives.

I know that, whenever I grow restless or distracted or bored at Mass, I will recall Mitchell's words and remind myself of what being religious in its broadest sense means and why it is important for me to be fully present there.

The church is not my religion

A good friend, who happens not to be a Catholic, expressed surprise that I have been openly critical of the church in some of my posts, even though he knows that I remain a faithful Catholic.

I recalled at once the words of Mario Cuomo:  "If the church were my religion, I'd had given it up a long time ago. Christianity is my religion, the church is not."

It takes someone with a broad view of history and the reality of church politics, perhaps, to make this important distinction, which many Catholics do not make.  If they remain active in the church, they may disagree with or ignore the statements that come from the Vatican or the American bishops, especially when it comes to moral and social issues.  They may seek advice from their confessors on such topics as contraception or follow their own conscience.

We who remember the spirit of the Second Vatican Council know that the church as a human institution should be the object of criticism, and, as Cardinal Newman said more than a century ago, the laity have a responsibility to play a role in the ongoing reform and renewal of the church. The Council also reaffirmed the primacy of conscience for all who constitute the church.

People like me, who have read a great deal over the years and have a critical view of clerical power, need an awareness that "Rome has spoken" is not necessarily the final word.  I think of the crisis in the priesthood, as an obvious example, and the large defections by angry ex-Catholics weary of official teachings on sexual morality that do not conform to the reality of people's lives.

I do not attend Mass because of church doctrine or theology or because of what priests say or do as men but because of my spiritual needs, which are fed by the Eucharist and the word of God. I need to be part of a community of prayer, preferably one with deep roots.

I know that, when the faithful disagree with a teaching of the church (such as the ordination of married men or women), we who are the church have an obligation in conscience to respectfully disagree. Don't patriotic Americans have an obligation to critique unjust laws and corrupt government practice?

Hence the recent tours by "nuns on the bus," who challenged the bishops in some of their appeals to the conservative cause, by emphasizing the needs of the poor and hence the need for Obamacare, among other things during the recent election campaign.  Many of us who consider ourselves liberal Catholics cheered these nuns and their long record of courageous service.

One of them, Sister Margaret Farley, a theologian censured by Rome, asked a telling question this past summer:  :"Is it a contradiction [in our Catholic tradition] to have power settle questions of truth? Or to say we know all we can know?"  A bold and important question.  History is replete with thinkers who have been unjustly silenced by the teaching authority of the hierarchy, only to have their views later validated by history.

Hence someone like Garry Wills, a Catholic intellectual whose historical books and articles reach a wide audience, is among those faithful to Catholic tradition who look critically at what the official church says--not in matters of settled dogma but in those moral issues on which there is divided opinion.

The church has, in a sense, been kept alive, theologically, by discussion and even dissent, by critical inquiry--at least among the elite. Now that lay people have become as well educated as priests, they can look, as I try to do, with a broad historical view at the church and can, as mature Catholics, respectfully agree to disagree with certain practices and teachings. Thus I can make a distinction between  my faith, a personal matter, and my adherence to the church, whose efforts in many areas I support, especially outreach to the needy.

I have chosen to remain within the troubled institution of the Roman Catholic Church, aware of its imperfections and sins, yet mindful of what is more important: the tradition of public prayer, the liturgy that enables the religion itself, not the institution, to survive and flourish.

Recently, the retiring Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams made one of his many astute observations that is relevent here: "Christianity is not essentially a big idea we must try to spread by arguing the truth, but a cultural tradition, centered on the church's ritual."  In this cultural tradition, he goes on, supreme authority belongs to the cross and resurrection, which the church performs in the Eucharist.

So the church is an essential vehicle for communicating something more important than the institution itself: the life of faith, sacraments, and prayer through an ancient and ongoing tradition of practice. My religion is not about theology or philosophical arguments.  As the old saying has it, what we believe is secondary to how we pray and what we do, the cultural language we speak.

I choose to remain faithful to the cultural language made possible by the church in which I was raised, mindful that "church" means much more than the men who run it.