As a contribution to the coming Synod on the family The Tablet has published numerous articles about the need to rethink the Church’s teaching on sexuality. There are two recurring arguments that give me bellyaches.
The first is the simplistic equation of the majority opinion of Catholics with the “sensus fidelium”. Too often in history the moral high ground was held not by the majority, but by a often tiny minority within the Church, sometimes only a handful of saints and martyrs. This is true of the early Church in the Roman Empire, Spain at the time of the conquistadores, England during the Reformation or Nazi Germany. The moral standards of the Sermon on the Mount would have never passed a referendum in first-century Israel and were not even understood by Jesus’ closest followers. Opinion polls, statistics and referenda are a very slippery theological ground.
The second tendency I find disturbing is that the discussion about marriage and family is almost exclusively centered on the question of the quality of the relationship between partners. Totally missing in the discussion about family are the children or more precisely the fundamental human responsibility to pass on the gift of life to another generation, biologically, culturally, spiritually.
For centuries the aim of marriage was seen primarily under the biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply.” Vatican II tried to re-establish a sound balance between “conjugal love” and being “open to fertility”. Now, we tend to narrow the view of the family to the love relation between partners, whether homo- or heterosexual, married or divorced. Children have become an optional accessory of partnership in contemporary society and now also in Western christianity. We forget that without children there is no long-term future, neither for our church nor for our civilisation. The central problem of highly industrialised societies is not the discrimination of minority groups, but the danger of a long-term demographic extinction. I cannot help feeling some sympathy with Synod bishops from cultures where children are treasured as the greatest gift.
Fr Wolfgang Schonecke MAfr, Berlin, Germany
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