Sacramentology IV Order and Marriage
Please answer question 1 and one other question.
(In the exam, question 1 will appear and three questions from the other seven).
1. Write about the priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood, describing the relationship between them and the ways in which they participate in the priesthood of Jesus Christ 10.
2. What contributions were made by the following to our thinking on marriage: The Book of Genesis 2, The Prophet Hosea 3, The Gospel of Luke 4, Paul of Tarsus 10, Augustine of Hippo 5, Pope Nicholas I 1, The Council of Verona 1, The Council of Trent 4, and The Second Vatican Council 10.
3. Why did the Church have reservations about declaring marriage a sacrament? 12 Give the reasons why the Church eventually accepted marriage as a sacrament? 12 Explain briefly the following: banns of marriage 4, clandestine marriages 2, canonical form of marriage 4 and marriage as a domestic Church 6.
4. Why is Christian marriage a sacrament? 2 Describe some essential positive values in Catholic marriage 8. Write about marital covenant and marital contract 11. Discuss the role of faith in the sacrament of marriage 5. As a pastor, why would you encourage those baptised, who are engaged to get married, but are not practicing Catholics and may have little or no ‘faith,’ to marry sacramentally? 14
5. Write briefly about: Gaudium et Spes 48-50 (20 marks), Eph 5:32, Tametsi,
the Pauline Privilege, marriage separation, and marital support (4 marks each).
6. Describe some ways in which a couple experience the grace and invitation of sacramental marriage 10. Write about the following: co-habitation, polygamy, and civil divorce with remarriage 15. What is the Catholic Church’s attitude towards people living in these situations? 3 Present some essential elements of a marriage preparation course 12.
7. Explain why some theologians propose that the Church should separate the marital contract from the marital sacrament 12. Give reasons against having civil divorce. 16 The Catholic Church staunchly defends the indissolubility of marriage and prohibits divorce and remarriage, except in exceptional circumstances. Give reasons for her position 12.
8. What did Jesus say about marriage? 8 What prophetic words of Jesus give us the origin of the Sacrament of Marriage? 8 Explain philia love and agapaic love. 10 As a pastor, what should your attitude be to those who are in relationships of love 4 and why would you encourage those who are cohabitating to marry? 10
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Marriage Part 2
Chapter Seven Friendship
Every person recognizes that he or she cannot survive without other people. The people that I let into my life, and who reciprocate by letting me into theirs, are apart from the general crowd and are special. They are called friends. Philosophers have given a great deal of attention to friendship, but Christian theologians have given it scant attention, and they have never listed it among the Christian virtues. Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of friendship: first, that of pleasure, someone amuses me and gives me pleasure. In the second, the other person is perceived as useful to me and in the third, I am attracted to and love something good in the other person. In each of the three friendships, it is something good that is loved, for good is always the object of love, but in each of the three it is a different good that is loved. Though all three loves may be called friendship, only the third is true friendship. Everyone who has experienced true friendship knows that it takes time to develop. Aristotle says: “It is impossible for men to know one another before they have eaten salt together.” They cannot admit each other to intimacy nor become friends before each appears to be worthy of friendship and confidence. To be perfect, friendship must be reciprocal. Aristotle suggests three reasons why we need friends. First, friendship is a crucial source of self-understanding. Second, friendship supports us against loss of interest in and commitment to even the most necessary activities, including the pursuit of good. Third, I cannot become morally good except in relation to another self, a friend, because virtue cannot be attained alone.
Cicero claims that friendships based on desire of gain, prestige, power, or wealth, or those based on carnal or erotic pleasure, are not true friendships. These benefits may derive from true friendship, but they are not its motivation. A rule of friendship is this: “We expect from our friends only what is honourable and for our friends’ sake do only what is honourable.” True friendship for Augustine is a gift from God, is rooted in God, transformed by God, and brought to its full perfection in eternal friendship with God. By living it in imitation of Christ, friendship is transformed into Christian universal neighbour-love.
Aelred of Rievaulx writes that there are four steps towards true friendship. “The first is choice, the second is testing, the third is acceptance, and the fourth is ‘the highest agreement on both human and divine affairs, combined with good will and mutual esteem.” There are two things to look for when choosing a friend, vices that make friendship impossible and virtues that are congenial to it. Among the vices are reproach, pride, betrayal and slander. Among the virtues conducive to friendship are faithfulness, intention, judgement and patience. What distinguishes true spiritual friendship is the love of God. Aelred is so convinced of the eternal character of true friendship that he dares to transpose the consecrated biblical phrase “God is love” (agape) (1 Jn 4:16) into “God is friendship” (philia).
Love and Friendship: Agape and Philia
There are two Greek words for love: agape and philia. Philia is the particular, preferential, and reciprocated love of a friend over all others. Agape is the universal, non-preferential, and not necessarily reciprocated love of others, the love commanded by Jesus: “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mk 12:31) and “love your enemies” (Mt 5:44). Though there is evidence that the early Christians referred to themselves as “friends (philoi) of God,” it was quickly superseded by “children of God,” which might have been judged to be more familial and intimate.
The relationship between philia and agape became problematic when the latter was promoted as Christian love, the love that makes us perfect as our heavenly father is perfect (Mt 5:48), leaving philia to languish as a lesser love that does not measure up to all that is required of the Christian. Friendship may be a good and powerful love; it may be necessary and very useful in every human life. It is just not specifically Christian and does not lead to God as agape does. Love of one’s neighbour is self-renouncing love and self-renunciation casts out all preferential love just as it casts out all self-love.
But it is not so clear that agape and philia are separate and unconnected. Augustine certainly does not think so. For him, friends are brought together by God. When friends respond to their friendship as a gift of God, root it in God, and live it as disciples of God, their friendship leads them to God as surely as agape. Indeed, when accepted as gift of God and lived in Christ, philia leads to agape, for when friends learn to love whom God loves they learn to love all God’s children as friends. The love of all comes best when the love for those, one is next to, comes first. Friendship has a twofold function: it teaches men and women to love particular friends, and it teaches them to love their universal neighbours. Far from being opposed, agape and philia are truly inseparable.
The problem in history is that agape was enthroned as the norm of all love and philia did not measure to that norm. Agape, however, is not the norm of love; God is the norm of all love, both agape and philia. Friendship by itself is not a non-Christian love; friendship without God and Christ is a non-Christian love. Human friendship-love and neighbour-love both originate in and are images of the love of God.
If friendship leads to a Christ-like life, it leads to God as surely as agape. “God is love” (agape), John tells us. However impossible it is to describe the inner relationships of the divine Trinity, it is equally impossible to imagine a divine love that is not particular and reciprocal benevolence between the three divine persons. In God, deep and lasting philia must surely coexist and particularize agape. If that is true in God, there is no reason to think it is not true also in humans made in God’s image (Gen 1:26).
Philia and caritas-agape so mutually enrich and nourish one another that Aquinas is led to identify them. To be friends with God, or to love God as a friend, is possible only because God has first loved us as friends (I Jn 4:19). Citing John 15:15, where Jesus calls his disciples “friends,” Aquinas suggests the friendship-love of Jesus for his disciples as a model for us.
Friendship and Marriage
Both inclusive and exclusive love, agape and philia are extolled in the Scriptures. Still, the tension between the universal, inclusive love of all and the particular, exclusive, or preferential love of some is retained in Galatians 6:10. Christian love is both universal (“all”) and legitimately particular (“especially”). The particularity is made even more exclusive, the relation even more preferential, in Timothy’s community: Note 1 Tim 5:8. The universal love of all comes easiest when the particular love of some, spouse, parents, children, fellow Christians, come first. The developing Christian tradition held firmly to this Pauline tradition. Martin Luther King teaches that agape is ‘love seeking to preserve and create a community.’ Community is preferential, mutual, reciprocal love, or philia. It is agape longing for communion, King adds, that impelled Jesus towards the cross, which is the symbol of the length to which God will go to restore broken community.
The Second Vatican Council defined marriage as “a community of love… an intimate partnership of life and love” (GS 47-48). Community derives from the Latin communis and is defined as common or reciprocal sharing, common or reciprocal ownership, common or reciprocal responsibility. For friendship, it is not enough to love another; my love of benevolence must be explicitly reciprocated. Thus it is conceived as adding to a one-sided love of benevolence (agape) a certain society of lover and beloved in their love. For the majority of modern men and women, the interpersonal partnership or community created by love continues to be publicly formalized in marriage and, in the community between spouses, marital love includes the reciprocal responsibility to maintain and develop the friendship love that founded communion in the first instance. Spousal love cannot be only agape, it must be also philia. It must be also affection (storge) and sexual love (eros); these are not being dealt with here.
The communion between spouses in marriage is not a monarchy, which is about unequal individuals; it is not a democracy, which is about equal but separate individuals. It is about equal individuals who are so united that they can truly be said to be “two in one body” (Gen 2:24), a small community a relational and coupled-We. When such love is Christian, it is a school for learning philia, particular, preferential, and reciprocal friendship-love of another and others, and agape, universal, non-preferential, and unconditional neighbour-love of all. Social-scientific evidence show that preferential philia is the best lasting foundation of a good marriage, because it cements with mutual virtue the community and communion marriage is. Research shows that friendship between the spouses makes good marriages succeed.
Loving is affirming the being, the very well being, of another. To love is to will the good of another. Willing the good of another is not yet friendship-love; that occurs only when my love is reciprocated by another, who wills my good in return. This mutual friendship-love between equal selves creates between us the communion, the reciprocal bond that is the distinguishing mark of lovers, the fertile root through which we draw life from and give life to one another. Reciprocal love does not lead to communion; reciprocal love is communion. Love can consent to bind itself further by social ritual. In marriage, it consents to bind itself legally by law; in sacrament, it consents to bind itself religiously by the grace of God. In a marriage between Christians, therefore, three bonds arise: an interpersonal bond of love between the spouses, a legal bond of marriage, and a religious bond of sacrament.
The most fundamental bond is the bond forged by both friendship and unconditional neighbour-love. It is the bond ritualized in both marriage and sacrament. Only if this root is healthy and strong can the bonds of marriage and sacrament flower as lasting bonds of satisfying and stable commitment. When the root friendship-love, through which the spouses give marital life to and draw marital life from one another, is healthy, so too are the marriage and sacrament which draw sustenance and flower from the root.
Chapter Eight COVENANT and SACRAMENT
Covenant
Sinai Covenant – Ex 19 ff
Last Supper – l Cor 11:25
1983 Code: Canon 1055, 1 – marriage covenant
Canon 1057, 2 – matrimonial consent is an act of the will by which a man and a woman by an irrevocable covenant mutually give and accept one another for the purpose of establishing a marriage
Contracts and Covenants
Things – people
Services – persons
Period of time – forever
Broken with material loss – cannot be broken: broken hearts
Secular affairs – Sacred affairs
Market place – Home, Temple, Church
Lawyers – poets
People & state is guarantor – God & God is guarantor
Children – mature adults
Legal reality – Bond of Love
Impersonal – Personal
Limited – Open-ended
Rights & Duties – Relationship
(cf., Christian Marriage, Paul Palmer, TS 33 (1972), 639)
Reflection of God’s Covenant
1. Covenant between God and People: Is 61:10-11, 62:4-5.
2. Covenant between Christ and Church.
3. Covenant of Marriage.
Prophetic Symbol
A sacrament may be seen as a prophetic symbol with which the Church proclaims and makes real and celebrates for believers that presence and action of God which is called grace. In the bible, we see that a prophetic act is an ordinary human action that proclaims something deeper and more sacred (Jer 5.1-6, Ezek 19.1-13). The Church recognises Jesus as the Spouse of Israel. The prophetic act that comes to be interpreted as the origin of Christian is based on the event narrated in (Mk 2:18-20). "Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?" This is a sign of the eschaton, the endless banquet between the Bridegroom and his Spouse, the Church.
First Completion of Prophetic Act: Paschal Mystery (This is my body given for you).
Marriage - Makes visible the attitude of Christ’s fidelity to Church.
The Intermediate Accomplishment of fidelity – Marriage.
Final Completion - Entry of faithful Church into the eternal joy of her Spouse.
So marriage is a two tiered reality: the human tier is the love between husband and wife, the religious tier is the proclamation of the covenant love between Christ and the Church. Christian married love is modelled on and reflects the love of God; it is Hesed, steadfast faithful love
There are two quite distinct prophetic actions in Christian marriage. There is, first, the action ritualised in the wedding ceremony, the action of mutual consent "by which a man and a woman by an irrevocable covenant mutually give and accept one another for the purpose of establishing a marriage" (Canon 1057, 2). There is, secondly, and perhaps more crucially, the action of living that conjugal covenant in an "intimate partnership of married life and love."
Two-Tiered Reality
1. Celebrates intimate conjugal community
2. Celebrates steadfast faithful covenant between Christ & Church Eph 5:21-32
Experiencing the Sacrament
Sexual: The newly married couple is very often filled with gratitude to each other and to God that their sexual experience of each other is both thrilling and fulfilling. In their gratitude they thank God for their bodiliness, for their God-given capacity to be able to express their love for one another so intimately and completely. The invitation is for spouses to use their bodies responsibly and with respect for each other, to be chaste in their sexual relationship. When they love each other this way, they are proclaiming the desired harmony between body & soul, man & woman, parent & child, loved & undesired and they are opposing a vision that favours exploitation, abuse and domination.
Creative: The capacity to be creative is another level on which Christian couples experience their marriage as sacramental. Their love summons them to an expansive care for others. Their call is to nurture and generate a world of care, compassion, reconciliation, justice and peace (1 Tim 5.8).
Loving: A husband and wife are truly grace to each other. This is the core of marriage as a sacrament because that special comprehensive and unconditional love between the marriage partners makes real God’s love in the world.
Ecclesial-Domestic Church: The Church proposes to the couple the mutual love between Christ and the Church as a model for their own love relationship. Christian marriage is meant to be the most basic instance of Christian community. Many writers, including Popes and the Bishops of Vatican II, have spoken of the Christian family as a domestic Church, a place where the love of God and religious faith are learned and celebrated. The Fathers of the African Synod acknowledge that seeing the Church as God’s family is particularly appropriate for Africa. ‘For this image emphasises care for others, solidarity, warmth in human relationships, acceptance, dialogue and trust’ (EA 63)
Spiritual: The fifth level of sacramentality experienced by Christian couples is called the spiritual experience of God’s love. Perhaps the most difficult thing to believe is that one is important enough to be loved by God. Nothing makes this more credible than the discovery of being important to and loved by another human. The bedrock of every friendship is generativity. For a marriage to be genuinely Christian, it must nurture Christian life and communion not only between the spouses and their immediate family, but also within the human community in which they live.
RITUAL
1. Vows: these are promises of fidelity before God, exchanged between the partners as they declare their consent. The mutual consent of the partners, their acceptance of each other with the words 'I do', has been seen by many theologians as the essence of marriage. When the couple exchange the words of the consent, they are declared to be husband and wife. If that moment is lacking or in any way flawed, there is no valid marriage. Before they exchange consent, they are questioned individually about their freedom with which they are undertaking their marriage, about their mutual love and their openness to having children. After their consent, there may be a blessing and exchange of rings.
2. Prayers said over them, possibly including a celebration of the Eucharist, commending their union to God and seeking divine grace for them.
3. Consummation: The sacrament is ratified with the exchange of consent, and is consummated by the conjugal act. For obvious reasons, the sexual act takes place at a later time, when the marriage ceremonies are over. Unless a marriage is consummated by the sexual act, it is considered null, as if it had never taken place at all.
4. Process: Marriage is not just an event that occurs on a given day at a given time, but a process that had already begun before the wedding ceremony and that will continue long after.
5. The characteristics of a friendly agapaic consent are: a. linking each other’s well-being; b. mutual consultation; c. now a coupled-We; d. shared interpersonal identity; f. investment in freedom of coupled-We.
Chapter Nine Commitment and Fidelity
A marriage covenant is a deeply serious commitment. To covenant is to commit oneself radically and solemnly. Together the husband and wife commit themselves mutually to create and sustain a climate of personal openness, acceptance, trust, and honesty that will nurture intimate community and abiding love. Marital responsibilities are certainly not of the kind that can be undertaken lightly
Moreover, we live in a time when long-term commitments, including the commitment to a lifelong monogamous relationship, do not attract many people. The trend toward temporary relationships is strong. The number of unmarried couples living together has greatly increased in recent decades. In the US, a 2000 study found that more than half of newlyweds have lived together, at least briefly, before walking down the aisle. It is also becoming common in many African countries. Co-habitation for convenience and for discernment is a growing world-wide trend.
Beyond question, absolute fidelity is similar to celibacy for the Kingdom, and is just as demanding. The apostles understood this well (Mt 19:10). The obligations in marriage are, indeed, quite frightening, and it is not surprising that people shrink from them. Can we really expect young couples to enter into such a profound marital commitment that calls for mental, emotional, and spiritual maturity? Would it not be more sensible to make only a provisional commitment? ‘If things work out, I stay with this; if not, I look elsewhere’. Many people think this is the common sense approach to relationships; they think that the ideals of Christian marriage have become obsolete.
Forming Character. Before we accept this view, we have to ask whether it is compatible with becoming a truly human person. All of us, in matters small and great, are constantly making promises, committing ourselves, taking on obligations. Such a core of commitments form a unified personality, rather than a bundle of loosely connected and possibly competing instincts, opinions, urges, likes and dislikes. Some commitments are essential to the attainment of a full personhood.
Insecurity: Because they are living together as long as they are happy with each other, and not for life, an atmosphere of insecurity prevails; they can never be fully themselves in the relationship. This results in a slowing down of the personal maturation process and the formation of character, which in turn leads to detrimental effects for the children born in such relationships. (The Church has never accepted co-habitation as a preparation for marriage, because the partners are doing what they will promise not to do when they get married. They are living a contradiction in relationship and an inconsistency in faith. So the Church invites them to move towards a marital situation).
Created in Image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27). Since we are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27), partners in marriage have the ability to be like God in being a community and in living faithfully towards each other
Faithfulness and forgiveness. Faithfulness to a covenant involves the ability to forgive. Since God is always faithful, the God of the covenant is the God of forgiveness. In marriage, faithfulness and forgiveness are always linked. Since couples have the ability to forgive, they can make fidelity a reality in their relationship.
Chapter Ten FAITH and SACRAMENT
Non-Believing Catholics
Sacrament and Contract: The Council of Trent states emphatically: "If anyone says that marriage is not one of the seven sacraments…Let him be anathema." The 1917 Code states equally emphatically: "Christ the Lord raised the marriage contract between baptised persons to the dignity of sacrament. Therefore, there cannot be a valid marriage contract between baptised persons without it being, by that very fact, a sacrament" (Canon 1012, 2). The 1983 Code makes the same statement (Canon 1055, 2).
Faith: In Catholic tradition, only the Church offered sacrament approached in personal faith is a personally accepted sacrament and, therefore, only that marriage approached in Christian faith is Christian sacramental marriage.
Baptised non-Believers: The Catholic tradition holds that the gift of faith is bestowed in baptism. Baptism gives the know-how to faith and to being a believer, but it does not make believers. Before that gift may be attributed to anyone it must be activated freely, consciously, and deliberately into an actual act of faith. It is the personal act of faith that transforms both the human being in a Christian believer and human marriage into sacramental marriage. Sadly, our times have brought to the forefront of Christian consciousness a new phenomenon of countless numbers all over the world who have received the gift of faith in baptism, but who have never made a personal act of faith. They comprise a group of baptised persons; those who though baptised remain all their lives nonbelievers. These baptised nonbelievers ought not to be equated with Catholic faithful in Catholic law.
Church Weddings: Those who marry without Christian faith, be they ever so baptised, whether they marry with or without the prescribed canonical form, marry indeed validly and do not live in concubinage, but they do not marry sacramentally.
Delay: We withhold or delay the Eucharist and all the other sacraments for lack of adequate faith. All the newer rituals warn that the sacraments are not to be celebrated lightly by those of little or of no faith. Delay, at least, is recommended until such people reach a tolerable faith and practice level.
Marriage outside Church: Since the Church has so identified the contract and the sacrament, if it refuses or delays a marriage because of lack of faith; it in effect denies the couple their natural and human right to marry. If the couple is honest about their lack of faith, what option is open to them? Not to marry at all? Marry “outside the Church”? But if they adopt the latter course, the Church will not recognise their marriage. In Church eyes their natural right to marry is thwarted. They have a right and they cannot, according to the Church, exercise it. One has to ask, “Has baptism rendered them totally incapable of intending a permanent union unless it is a sacrament?”
Stages towards Marriage: This in turn might lead the Church, from a pastoral point of view, to permit and recognise several stages towards a full sacramental marriage, much like the various stages of holy orders or the stages of the RCIA.
The 1980 Roman Synod of Bishops urged the development of just such betrothal rites and even of celebrating engagements in the presence of the community.
Autun: In the early 1970s, the diocese of Autun, in France, initiated a radical marriage programme. A couple considering marriage was given a pamphlet which outlined three forms of marriage, and was asked to reflect and choose the form which corresponded best to their situation. The first form listed is civil marriage. The second form listed is welcomed civil marriage, a celebration which takes place, perhaps, at home, in the Church, in the town hall, but always with some sort of Church setting. The third form is sacramental marriage, celebrated by those couples who, in Christian faith, wish their marriage to be an explicit symbol of the covenant union between Christ and his Church.
Not Accepted: Despite the fact that the Autun solution was later banned by the Vatican, it presented a practical and forthright way of dealing with large numbers of baptised non-believers.
Experience Marriage as a Sacrament: It is one thing for the Church to state in the Code of Canon Law that every marriage between baptised Christians is de facto a sacrament; it is another thing for the couple themselves to experience their marriage as a sacrament.
The Way Forward: - Recognition of Consent, Inculturation and Independence of Earthly Affairs: Some theologians think that the time has come for the Catholic Church to assert the inalienable validity of every human marriage constituted by proper consent, including the validity of the marriages of the baptised outside the Tridentine form. For many centuries the Catholic Church taught what it continues to teach today: consent makes marriage. So, an ecclesiastically-witnessed ritual should not be essential for a valid human marriage. Such decisions would seem to be well in line with the proclamation by Vatican II on the independence of earthly affairs. Human marriage is one of those created realities that enjoy its own meanings and values apart from the Church. To acknowledge that simple fact would free marriage to be a truly human reality which, in its very created humanness, can become the basis for the sacrament of covenant marriage.
The Present Situation
1. Tradition: The recent tradition of the Church teaches that the marriage between two baptized persons is a sacrament and the Church leader as a representative of the official Church is expected to hold this position.
2. Love and Faith: While people may not believe intellectually in the Church’s teachings or practice as members of the Church, this does not imply that they do not have faith. Indeed the love they have their spouse, however imperfect it may be, is a sign that they have some faith.
3. Strengthening the Bond: We believe marriage is a gift from God and marital living is graced by God - Mt 19:11. The gift of their marriage continues to be graced by Christ. Christ is present in it, providing the model of steadfast love on which it is based, nurturing the love and faith the spouses have for each other and making the spouses holy by his presence (CCC 1641). When the couple respond to this gift by becoming married, the sacrament of their marriage in itself strengthens their commitment and consecrates them for their marital duties (CCC 1638). Besides, sacramental marriage shows that the couple is open to receive help from God in their relationship, an opening that gives the pastor and the ecclesial community an opportunity to support and care for the marriage. Couples, who receive help, are more likely to grow together in love and understanding. Sacramental marriage, then, may facilitate a greater commitment in the couple to grow in their love for each other and may strengthen their bond of union.
4. Marriage Preparation: Canon Law states that the pastor has a responsibility to provide personal preparation for entering marriage, so that the spouses are disposed to the holiness and the obligations of their new state (1063, 2). Priests are to facilitate the strengthening and nourishing the faith of those about to be married, for the sacrament of marriage presupposes and demands faith.
5. Family of God: Where there are no Christian families, the Church community struggles to exist. The first step towards a Christian family is sacramental marriage. So the pastor has a responsibility to promote sacramental marriage among Christians and to support the Christian families under his care, because they are the basis of the Church he leads.
6. Prophetic Calling: Sacramental marriage, which is graced by Christ and supported by the Christian community, facilitates this prophetic example expected by the spouses.
For these reasons, the Catholic pastor has a responsibility to encourage Catholic couples intending to marry to do so sacramentally.
Invitation for Inculturation
An important way of encouraging couples to marry sacramentally is to ensure that the marriage rite is significant and meaningful for people. This involves work at inculturating the rite in the local traditions and an invitation to create new canonical rites of marriage for peoples of diverse cultures so as to preserve their own authentic marriage customs. In the 1980 Synod, many African bishops demanded a thorough revision of the Christian marriage rite to make it compatible with the customs of Africa. The Praenotanda to the Marriage Ritual encourages such adaptation and inculturation. The creation of new marriage rites would be a remarkable sign that the Catholic Church is becoming a truly world Church, as distinct from an exclusively European one. Pastors, therefore, are encouraged to reflect on ways of adapting the marriage rite so that it is attractive, evocative and sacred for couples.
Chapter Eleven Marriage Preparation
Research shows that marriage preparation is most helpful when it is preceded by adult religious education, when it is presented by a team of clergy and lay people, when it is done in a participative workshop style and when it deals with the six Cs.
1. Communication.
2. Commitment.
3. Conflict and ways of resolving it.
4. Children.
5. Church.
6. Careers.
The Pre-Cana Programme and FOCCUS, facilitating open couple communication, understanding and study, as resources for a marriage preparation course. Information on them can be got from their web sites. Note also the acronym SPICE, signifying, we feel loved when spiritually we pray together, when physically we touch and hold each other, when intellectually we share a project or new learning, when we creatively communicate with each other in written or oral forms, and when we emotionally share our feelings, desires and humour.
Chapter Twelve UNITY & SEXUALITY
Unity
In the human person three levels of being and action may be distinguished, which may be designated as the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual. The physical is the level of biology and physiology; it is the level that humans share with others in the genus animal. The psychological is the level of sense and imagination and memory and understanding and reason and judgement and emotion; it is the level that is specific to the human animal. The spiritual is the level of all that transcends the physical and the psychological, all that reaches to the depths and without to the beyond of the human; it is the level which only the religious animal attains. To become one biblical body, one whole person, a man and a woman must become one on all three levels.
Needs
If spouses are to grow, individually and together, each needs both to esteem himself or herself and to feel esteemed by the other.
Comfort & Challenge
It is precisely because of the difficulties in becoming one body, and therefore adequately sacramental, that Christian marriage is an essentially eschatological symbol. Although it is already a prophetic symbol and sacrament of the covenant union between Christ and his Church, it is not yet the perfect symbol it needs to be. This already-but-not-yet dimension of Christian marriage presents it with both a comfort and a challenge. A comfort to the extent that Christian spouses can claim, in faith and in truth, that their intimate union is both modelled upon and a model of the intimate union between Christ and his Church. A challenge to the extent that they confront constantly their falling short of and their need to be more attuned to their model.
Sexuality
Human: Sexuality is essentially human; there has never been a normal human being who was not sexual.
Spiritualising: There is a danger in modern Catholic theology of a spiritualising approach to sexuality and sexual intercourse in marriage. To transfer human sexuality up to the exclusively spiritual level is just as untrue to human nature as is transferring it down to the exclusively animal level.
One Body: Becoming one person with another human being includes becoming not only one spirit and one mind, but also one body. Married love is agape; the love of the spouse for the spouse's sake, but it is also more than agape. Married love is philia, the love of the spouse as a friend, but it is also more than philia. Married love is eros, the love of the spouse for one's own sake, but it is also more than eros.
Selfish Love: Married love that leads two to become one body is never exclusively selfish love, but it is unquestionably in part selfish love. Married love is loving your neighbour (spouse) as yourself (Mt 22:39).
Eros & Agape: Eros cannot be transformed; it is an essential form of human love. We do better to accept it, to integrate it, and to give it a distinctively human form. That distinctive form appears when the power of eros is harnessed by human wisdom. Eros, by definition, is the love of the spouse for one's own sake. Where eros dominates, I trample others and make them means to my ends. Such an approach produces what it seeks to avoid, emptiness and loneliness. Where wisdom dominates, I recognise that my partner's happiness is the only way that I, too, can be happy. In that wisdom, strangely, eros is not transformed into, but is allied to, agape. It is precisely this alliance of eros and agape that allows married love to persist and to grow when those things that fuel eros, youth, beauty, health, grace, have long since passed away.
Sexual Pleasure: Sexuality, sexual passion, sexual pleasure, eros, derive their sacramental character not from any purpose that human beings might assign to them, but from the simple theological fact that they are from God. They are God's gifts to us, and they are good gifts. For two human animals to become one body-person includes essentially, though not exclusively, becoming one body physically. Physical union is not all there is to becoming one body. Still it has a place in Christian marriage, as prophetic symbol of the covenant uniting humanity and God, who does not shrink from proclaiming his love for his beloved in that most beautiful, and most erotic, of love songs, the Song of Songs.
Song of Songs: This Song has always posed problems for both Jews and Christians, specifically whether it is a poem to divine or human love. For centuries, unwilling to consider that human, erotic love would have any place in the Scriptures, commentators opted for an allegorical reading. The Song of Songs, they explained, was about divine love. But even if it is, God, good communicator that he is, always reveals himself in the language of his hearers. The emergence of the historical-critical approach to reading the Bible led to a growing consensus that the meaning of the Song was its literal meaning. It is about the love of humans, male and female, who in love always seek the bodily presence of the other. This love is celebrated as gift, and as image of the Creator God and of his love for us.
Acceptance & Integration: In response to the view that sex cannot be fully humanised, it does not need to be humanised because it is already fully human, precisely as gifted to us by the God. While human sexual passion can never be fully humanly mastered, because such mastery attains only to the rational, and sexual passion and pleasure have much in them that is non-rational, one fully human way to respond to the non-rational is to accept it joyfully and playfully. Man and woman, husband and wife, do not become fully human by ignoring eros, or by negotiating their way carefully around it, above it or beyond it. They become human only by accepting it and integrating it into the rest of their human and Christian lives. (From Michael G. Lawler, "Theology of Marriage: A Contemporary View," Chapter Four of Secular Marriage, Christian Sacrament. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1985, pp. 56-80).
Chapter Thirteen DIVORCE & RE-MARRIAGE
CIVIL DIVORCE
1. The introduction of divorce in any society abolishes the right to life-long indissoluble marriage by making 'for life' become 'as long as'.
2. Inhibitions: Some spouses, fearing the ever-present threat of divorce, pull their punches out of fear of provoking their partner into leaving.
3. The unity and indissolubility of marriage ensure a greater security and stability in the relationship.
4. The availability of divorce introduces instability and uncertainty into the marriage.
5. The absence of divorce allows people to enter into marriage with a greater sense of commitment, and within marriage they will take their commitment more seriously. Where marriage is permanent couples are more inclined to struggle to make a success of their marriage; with divorce, they are more inclined to give up.
6. The absence of divorce invariably means that individuals are more cautious in selecting a partner because marriage is seen as permanent.
7. It is not simply failed and problematic marriages that are dissolved; divorce also destroys happy marriages.
8. In difficult circumstances, once the option for divorce is taken, spouses are inclined to act consistently and follow through on their decision.
9. Children: Parental divorce is a major disruption in children's lives.
10. Divorce has no basis in human rights.
11. Law: It has been argued that the law cannot make people morally good. However, while you cannot by Act of Parliament make a person morally good, you can by Act of Parliament supply the conditions which facilitate the growth of moral goodness and remove conditions which obstruct it. Moral convictions need the support of law. It is common sense that laxity in the law, e.g. through the introduction of divorce, makes decent living more difficult for all.
12. Divorce, once introduced, gathers pace. Even while society highly prizes both marriage and family life, the universal experience is that divorce legislation results in more people availing of it.
13. The machinery of the State switches sides and actively facilitates people who wish to abandon their pledge of lasting fidelity and who seek to remarry.
14. Good of Society: Because divorce damages society, a prohibition on it should not be seen as lacking in compassion but rather appreciated as an attempt by the State to help promote the stability of marriage and family life and, in a particular way, to protect the welfare of women and children.
15. Government Support: In the short term the government should provide adequate support for the institution of marriage. If society wants to have successful marriages and strong family life then there must be a similar commitment to the legal and social conditions which will encourage these.
16. The individual, rather than the family or the institution of marriage itself, is a starting point in the realm of principle for many proponents of divorce.
17. The provision of a right to remarry rewards infidelity.
18. Divorce indirectly results in serious long-term social disorder.
19. Finance: Divorce is a very expensive activity. Many second families are broken up because of the tension over supporting the first family.
CATHOLICS & MARITAL BREAKDOWN
While many other institutions are open to dissolution of marriage, the tradition in the Catholic Church against divorce is very strong.
The Orthodox Churches, while stressing the indissolubility of marriage in theory, in practice allow for solubility and second marriages for the greater good.
Sacrament and Love: If the marriage no longer embodied and expressed that kind of love, it would in fact be no longer sacramental, and by the same token it would be liable to end in divorce.
Ethical Demand: Again others point out that indissolubility as a sign and a precept is an ethical requirement (the person should not put asunder) rather than a statement of fact (the person cannot put asunder).
Historical Research calls into question the present juridical system.
Marriage is a Living Relationship, not a Contract.
Reality of Divorce: The theological justification for the permanence of the marriage bond is weakened in the shift from scholastic to personalist philosophy and in the view that the marriage is not a legally binding contract but a living relationship between two people. The practical justification for the impossibility of divorce is questioned by the fact that the prohibition no longer deters Catholics from obtaining divorces but rather prevents them from remaining Catholics.
Pauline and Petrine Privileges: There is a tradition that in special cases the Church has granted divorces. The Pauline Privilege, then, permits divorce and second marriage to a person who receives baptism when the non-Christian partner is unwilling to live with the baptised person or to live peacefully without offence to the Creator, unless the baptised partner has, after the reception of baptism, given the other just cause to leave (Canon 1143). Moreover, the Pope may dissolve certain natural marriages to enable a new convert to remarry and even marriages between non-Catholics to enable a divorced non Catholic marry a Catholic. These are clearly expansions of the Pauline privilege and are allowed in virtue of what is called the Petrine privilege. This privilege, by custom and not by law, gives permission to the Pope to dissolve natural marriages in special circumstances and even sometimes in more extensive situations. Some think that with the papal prerogative, it would seem feasible to permit divorce in exceptionally serious situations.
Annulment: Reluctance and Irksome System: Most legally divorced Catholics are unwilling to put themselves through the equivalent of another divorce trial in an ecclesiastical court. Some canonists, a minority, have questioned the value and relevance of the whole ecclesiastical judicial system which researches and tries marriage cases, and have recommended that it be dismantled.
The Church maintains marriage is indissoluble by divine law. Jesus: “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery, and the man who marries a woman divorced by her husband commits adultery” (Lk 16:18). Just as Christ always remains faithful to the Church, spouses are always to remain faithful to each other.
Separation: When one spouse is unfaithful or causes grave danger of soul or body to the other or to the children or makes the common life unduly difficult, then the other spouse has a case for separation (Can 1151-1155).
Annulment: Many divorced and remarried Catholics who want to be reinstated into full membership in the Church try in increasing numbers to have their first marriage officially annulled.
Preparation and Support: Catholic dioceses offer marriage preparation courses for engaged couples; priests are expected to counsel them about the duties and responsibilities of marriage as well as help them prepare their wedding liturgy and strengthen their faith (Can 1063, FC 66). The Christian Family Movement, Marriage Encounter (George & Salome Mwangi, Kenyan ME Coordinating Couple, package@wananchi.com), Retrouvaille, which gives assistance to marriages in difficulties (Tablet, 12 August 2006, p. 17), and similar organisations offer group support for maintaining married and family life.
Compassion: The Church has always tried to offer support and compassion to those whose marriages have failed, as she counsels the parties to live a single lifestyle as long as their spouse is still living. Unfortunately the Church’s efforts to encourage permanence and to discourage divorce have often led to a very negative attitude toward those who have experienced a divorce. This has caused many of the divorced and separated to feel rejected by the Church community, precisely at a time when they greatly need the support of the community.
Permanent Commitment: For the past eight hundred years or so the Catholic Church has vigorously maintained that a validly contracted marriage is indissoluble not only by Church law but also by divine law. The future of Christian marriage is bound up with the future of Christianity itself.
Chapter Thirteen Polygamy
Bibliography: Cairncross, John (1974). After Polygamy Was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-7730-0. Hillman, Eugene. Polygamy Reconsidered: African Plural Marriage and the Christian Churches. New York: Orbis Books. ISBN 0-88344-391-0. Evangelizing Polygamous Families, Peter M Kanyandago, Amecea Gaba Pubs, Eldoret, No 116-118.
Polygamy exists in three specific forms, polygyny (one man having multiple wives), polyandry (one woman having multiple husbands), or group marriage (some combination of polygyny and polyandry).
Judaism
Scriptural evidence indicates that polygamy among the ancient Hebrews, though not extremely common, was not particularly unusual and was certainly not prohibited or discouraged. The Hebrew Scriptures document approximately forty polygamists, including such prominent figures as Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Esau, and David, with little or no further remark on their polygamy as such. Exodus 21:10, Deuteronomy 21:15-17, Deuteronomy 17:17, Deuteronomy 25:5-10. At present, Judaism has essentially outlawed polygamy.
Christianity
Augustine refrained from judging the patriarchs, but did not deduce from their practice the ongoing acceptability of polygamy. Martin Luther granted Philip of Hesse, who, for many years, had been living "constantly in a state of adultery and fornication," a dispensation to take a second wife. In response the Council of Trent: “If anyone says that it is lawful for Christians to have several wives at the same time and that this is not forbidden by divine law (Mt 19:9ff), anathema sit” (CF 1809, p. 769). The Church asserts that "polygamy is not in accord with the moral law. [Conjugal] communion is radically contradicted by polygamy; this, in fact, directly negates the plan of God which was revealed from the beginning, because it is contrary to the equal personal dignity of men and women who in matrimony give themselves with a love that is total and therefore unique and exclusive." (CCC 2387, FC 19). Moreover, the Church states: “Polygamy is incompatible with the unity of marriage” (CCC 1664). Note also CCC 1645, GS 49, and GS 47. The Catholic Church cannot accept polygamous marriages because she values the unique and exclusive communion of the partners in marriage, the total love of the partners for each other, the equal personal dignity of men and women, and the unity of marriage. Sociologists claim that polygyny discriminates both against women and against less privileged men, since some men have many wives while many younger, poorer men have none. Others see polygyny as an extension of social, political and economic power into sexual relationships.
In Africa, there has often been a tension between the Churches' insistence on monogamy and traditional polygamy. In recent times there have been moves for accommodation in some non-Catholic churches.
Pastoral Care
1. Towards polygamous family
Follow diocesan guidelines.
Admit them into the catechumenate.
Show explicit care.
Be open to conversion and administering the sacraments at the time of death.
In cases of conversion, try to ensure that the other wives and their children are maintained.
Dialogue with the local Community.
2. Towards a baptised married man who takes a second wife.
Follow diocesan guidelines.
Show understanding.
Be caring to the first wife.
Be open to helping a practicing Catholic husband and second wife.
Dialogue with the local Community.
Chapter Fourteen CONCLUSION
Basis: Jn 13:34-35. Institution: Mt 19:3-6. Practice: Eph 5:22-27. Prophetic Act: Mk 2:18-20.
Definition: Marriage is a community of life and love, founded in a mutual and irrevocable covenant, by which a Christian man and a Christian woman give and accept one another for the purpose of establishing an intimate partnership of their whole life. Marriage is a sacrament when the couple want their life and love to reflect the relationship between Christ and the Church.
Vision to Reality:
There is a great need to make the vision of a true Christian marriage become reality in the lives of those who are married and those who are preparing to enter marriage. The work is really more the responsibility of the married than of the clergy. This vision of marriage must be taught in the home and exemplified by married couples if it is to grasp the imagination and the hearts of the community. Words and formal teaching are important, but example is still the best teacher. May the Lord give to all married Christians the courage and depth of love necessary to be faithful to their commitment and to be effective sacraments of God’s love for all people.
Every person recognizes that he or she cannot survive without other people. The people that I let into my life, and who reciprocate by letting me into theirs, are apart from the general crowd and are special. They are called friends. Philosophers have given a great deal of attention to friendship, but Christian theologians have given it scant attention, and they have never listed it among the Christian virtues. Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of friendship: first, that of pleasure, someone amuses me and gives me pleasure. In the second, the other person is perceived as useful to me and in the third, I am attracted to and love something good in the other person. In each of the three friendships, it is something good that is loved, for good is always the object of love, but in each of the three it is a different good that is loved. Though all three loves may be called friendship, only the third is true friendship. Everyone who has experienced true friendship knows that it takes time to develop. Aristotle says: “It is impossible for men to know one another before they have eaten salt together.” They cannot admit each other to intimacy nor become friends before each appears to be worthy of friendship and confidence. To be perfect, friendship must be reciprocal. Aristotle suggests three reasons why we need friends. First, friendship is a crucial source of self-understanding. Second, friendship supports us against loss of interest in and commitment to even the most necessary activities, including the pursuit of good. Third, I cannot become morally good except in relation to another self, a friend, because virtue cannot be attained alone.
Cicero claims that friendships based on desire of gain, prestige, power, or wealth, or those based on carnal or erotic pleasure, are not true friendships. These benefits may derive from true friendship, but they are not its motivation. A rule of friendship is this: “We expect from our friends only what is honourable and for our friends’ sake do only what is honourable.” True friendship for Augustine is a gift from God, is rooted in God, transformed by God, and brought to its full perfection in eternal friendship with God. By living it in imitation of Christ, friendship is transformed into Christian universal neighbour-love.
Aelred of Rievaulx writes that there are four steps towards true friendship. “The first is choice, the second is testing, the third is acceptance, and the fourth is ‘the highest agreement on both human and divine affairs, combined with good will and mutual esteem.” There are two things to look for when choosing a friend, vices that make friendship impossible and virtues that are congenial to it. Among the vices are reproach, pride, betrayal and slander. Among the virtues conducive to friendship are faithfulness, intention, judgement and patience. What distinguishes true spiritual friendship is the love of God. Aelred is so convinced of the eternal character of true friendship that he dares to transpose the consecrated biblical phrase “God is love” (agape) (1 Jn 4:16) into “God is friendship” (philia).
Love and Friendship: Agape and Philia
There are two Greek words for love: agape and philia. Philia is the particular, preferential, and reciprocated love of a friend over all others. Agape is the universal, non-preferential, and not necessarily reciprocated love of others, the love commanded by Jesus: “love your neighbour as yourself” (Mk 12:31) and “love your enemies” (Mt 5:44). Though there is evidence that the early Christians referred to themselves as “friends (philoi) of God,” it was quickly superseded by “children of God,” which might have been judged to be more familial and intimate.
The relationship between philia and agape became problematic when the latter was promoted as Christian love, the love that makes us perfect as our heavenly father is perfect (Mt 5:48), leaving philia to languish as a lesser love that does not measure up to all that is required of the Christian. Friendship may be a good and powerful love; it may be necessary and very useful in every human life. It is just not specifically Christian and does not lead to God as agape does. Love of one’s neighbour is self-renouncing love and self-renunciation casts out all preferential love just as it casts out all self-love.
But it is not so clear that agape and philia are separate and unconnected. Augustine certainly does not think so. For him, friends are brought together by God. When friends respond to their friendship as a gift of God, root it in God, and live it as disciples of God, their friendship leads them to God as surely as agape. Indeed, when accepted as gift of God and lived in Christ, philia leads to agape, for when friends learn to love whom God loves they learn to love all God’s children as friends. The love of all comes best when the love for those, one is next to, comes first. Friendship has a twofold function: it teaches men and women to love particular friends, and it teaches them to love their universal neighbours. Far from being opposed, agape and philia are truly inseparable.
The problem in history is that agape was enthroned as the norm of all love and philia did not measure to that norm. Agape, however, is not the norm of love; God is the norm of all love, both agape and philia. Friendship by itself is not a non-Christian love; friendship without God and Christ is a non-Christian love. Human friendship-love and neighbour-love both originate in and are images of the love of God.
If friendship leads to a Christ-like life, it leads to God as surely as agape. “God is love” (agape), John tells us. However impossible it is to describe the inner relationships of the divine Trinity, it is equally impossible to imagine a divine love that is not particular and reciprocal benevolence between the three divine persons. In God, deep and lasting philia must surely coexist and particularize agape. If that is true in God, there is no reason to think it is not true also in humans made in God’s image (Gen 1:26).
Philia and caritas-agape so mutually enrich and nourish one another that Aquinas is led to identify them. To be friends with God, or to love God as a friend, is possible only because God has first loved us as friends (I Jn 4:19). Citing John 15:15, where Jesus calls his disciples “friends,” Aquinas suggests the friendship-love of Jesus for his disciples as a model for us.
Friendship and Marriage
Both inclusive and exclusive love, agape and philia are extolled in the Scriptures. Still, the tension between the universal, inclusive love of all and the particular, exclusive, or preferential love of some is retained in Galatians 6:10. Christian love is both universal (“all”) and legitimately particular (“especially”). The particularity is made even more exclusive, the relation even more preferential, in Timothy’s community: Note 1 Tim 5:8. The universal love of all comes easiest when the particular love of some, spouse, parents, children, fellow Christians, come first. The developing Christian tradition held firmly to this Pauline tradition. Martin Luther King teaches that agape is ‘love seeking to preserve and create a community.’ Community is preferential, mutual, reciprocal love, or philia. It is agape longing for communion, King adds, that impelled Jesus towards the cross, which is the symbol of the length to which God will go to restore broken community.
The Second Vatican Council defined marriage as “a community of love… an intimate partnership of life and love” (GS 47-48). Community derives from the Latin communis and is defined as common or reciprocal sharing, common or reciprocal ownership, common or reciprocal responsibility. For friendship, it is not enough to love another; my love of benevolence must be explicitly reciprocated. Thus it is conceived as adding to a one-sided love of benevolence (agape) a certain society of lover and beloved in their love. For the majority of modern men and women, the interpersonal partnership or community created by love continues to be publicly formalized in marriage and, in the community between spouses, marital love includes the reciprocal responsibility to maintain and develop the friendship love that founded communion in the first instance. Spousal love cannot be only agape, it must be also philia. It must be also affection (storge) and sexual love (eros); these are not being dealt with here.
The communion between spouses in marriage is not a monarchy, which is about unequal individuals; it is not a democracy, which is about equal but separate individuals. It is about equal individuals who are so united that they can truly be said to be “two in one body” (Gen 2:24), a small community a relational and coupled-We. When such love is Christian, it is a school for learning philia, particular, preferential, and reciprocal friendship-love of another and others, and agape, universal, non-preferential, and unconditional neighbour-love of all. Social-scientific evidence show that preferential philia is the best lasting foundation of a good marriage, because it cements with mutual virtue the community and communion marriage is. Research shows that friendship between the spouses makes good marriages succeed.
Loving is affirming the being, the very well being, of another. To love is to will the good of another. Willing the good of another is not yet friendship-love; that occurs only when my love is reciprocated by another, who wills my good in return. This mutual friendship-love between equal selves creates between us the communion, the reciprocal bond that is the distinguishing mark of lovers, the fertile root through which we draw life from and give life to one another. Reciprocal love does not lead to communion; reciprocal love is communion. Love can consent to bind itself further by social ritual. In marriage, it consents to bind itself legally by law; in sacrament, it consents to bind itself religiously by the grace of God. In a marriage between Christians, therefore, three bonds arise: an interpersonal bond of love between the spouses, a legal bond of marriage, and a religious bond of sacrament.
The most fundamental bond is the bond forged by both friendship and unconditional neighbour-love. It is the bond ritualized in both marriage and sacrament. Only if this root is healthy and strong can the bonds of marriage and sacrament flower as lasting bonds of satisfying and stable commitment. When the root friendship-love, through which the spouses give marital life to and draw marital life from one another, is healthy, so too are the marriage and sacrament which draw sustenance and flower from the root.
Chapter Eight COVENANT and SACRAMENT
Covenant
Sinai Covenant – Ex 19 ff
Last Supper – l Cor 11:25
1983 Code: Canon 1055, 1 – marriage covenant
Canon 1057, 2 – matrimonial consent is an act of the will by which a man and a woman by an irrevocable covenant mutually give and accept one another for the purpose of establishing a marriage
Contracts and Covenants
Things – people
Services – persons
Period of time – forever
Broken with material loss – cannot be broken: broken hearts
Secular affairs – Sacred affairs
Market place – Home, Temple, Church
Lawyers – poets
People & state is guarantor – God & God is guarantor
Children – mature adults
Legal reality – Bond of Love
Impersonal – Personal
Limited – Open-ended
Rights & Duties – Relationship
(cf., Christian Marriage, Paul Palmer, TS 33 (1972), 639)
Reflection of God’s Covenant
1. Covenant between God and People: Is 61:10-11, 62:4-5.
2. Covenant between Christ and Church.
3. Covenant of Marriage.
Prophetic Symbol
A sacrament may be seen as a prophetic symbol with which the Church proclaims and makes real and celebrates for believers that presence and action of God which is called grace. In the bible, we see that a prophetic act is an ordinary human action that proclaims something deeper and more sacred (Jer 5.1-6, Ezek 19.1-13). The Church recognises Jesus as the Spouse of Israel. The prophetic act that comes to be interpreted as the origin of Christian is based on the event narrated in (Mk 2:18-20). "Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?" This is a sign of the eschaton, the endless banquet between the Bridegroom and his Spouse, the Church.
First Completion of Prophetic Act: Paschal Mystery (This is my body given for you).
Marriage - Makes visible the attitude of Christ’s fidelity to Church.
The Intermediate Accomplishment of fidelity – Marriage.
Final Completion - Entry of faithful Church into the eternal joy of her Spouse.
So marriage is a two tiered reality: the human tier is the love between husband and wife, the religious tier is the proclamation of the covenant love between Christ and the Church. Christian married love is modelled on and reflects the love of God; it is Hesed, steadfast faithful love
There are two quite distinct prophetic actions in Christian marriage. There is, first, the action ritualised in the wedding ceremony, the action of mutual consent "by which a man and a woman by an irrevocable covenant mutually give and accept one another for the purpose of establishing a marriage" (Canon 1057, 2). There is, secondly, and perhaps more crucially, the action of living that conjugal covenant in an "intimate partnership of married life and love."
Two-Tiered Reality
1. Celebrates intimate conjugal community
2. Celebrates steadfast faithful covenant between Christ & Church Eph 5:21-32
Experiencing the Sacrament
Sexual: The newly married couple is very often filled with gratitude to each other and to God that their sexual experience of each other is both thrilling and fulfilling. In their gratitude they thank God for their bodiliness, for their God-given capacity to be able to express their love for one another so intimately and completely. The invitation is for spouses to use their bodies responsibly and with respect for each other, to be chaste in their sexual relationship. When they love each other this way, they are proclaiming the desired harmony between body & soul, man & woman, parent & child, loved & undesired and they are opposing a vision that favours exploitation, abuse and domination.
Creative: The capacity to be creative is another level on which Christian couples experience their marriage as sacramental. Their love summons them to an expansive care for others. Their call is to nurture and generate a world of care, compassion, reconciliation, justice and peace (1 Tim 5.8).
Loving: A husband and wife are truly grace to each other. This is the core of marriage as a sacrament because that special comprehensive and unconditional love between the marriage partners makes real God’s love in the world.
Ecclesial-Domestic Church: The Church proposes to the couple the mutual love between Christ and the Church as a model for their own love relationship. Christian marriage is meant to be the most basic instance of Christian community. Many writers, including Popes and the Bishops of Vatican II, have spoken of the Christian family as a domestic Church, a place where the love of God and religious faith are learned and celebrated. The Fathers of the African Synod acknowledge that seeing the Church as God’s family is particularly appropriate for Africa. ‘For this image emphasises care for others, solidarity, warmth in human relationships, acceptance, dialogue and trust’ (EA 63)
Spiritual: The fifth level of sacramentality experienced by Christian couples is called the spiritual experience of God’s love. Perhaps the most difficult thing to believe is that one is important enough to be loved by God. Nothing makes this more credible than the discovery of being important to and loved by another human. The bedrock of every friendship is generativity. For a marriage to be genuinely Christian, it must nurture Christian life and communion not only between the spouses and their immediate family, but also within the human community in which they live.
RITUAL
1. Vows: these are promises of fidelity before God, exchanged between the partners as they declare their consent. The mutual consent of the partners, their acceptance of each other with the words 'I do', has been seen by many theologians as the essence of marriage. When the couple exchange the words of the consent, they are declared to be husband and wife. If that moment is lacking or in any way flawed, there is no valid marriage. Before they exchange consent, they are questioned individually about their freedom with which they are undertaking their marriage, about their mutual love and their openness to having children. After their consent, there may be a blessing and exchange of rings.
2. Prayers said over them, possibly including a celebration of the Eucharist, commending their union to God and seeking divine grace for them.
3. Consummation: The sacrament is ratified with the exchange of consent, and is consummated by the conjugal act. For obvious reasons, the sexual act takes place at a later time, when the marriage ceremonies are over. Unless a marriage is consummated by the sexual act, it is considered null, as if it had never taken place at all.
4. Process: Marriage is not just an event that occurs on a given day at a given time, but a process that had already begun before the wedding ceremony and that will continue long after.
5. The characteristics of a friendly agapaic consent are: a. linking each other’s well-being; b. mutual consultation; c. now a coupled-We; d. shared interpersonal identity; f. investment in freedom of coupled-We.
Chapter Nine Commitment and Fidelity
A marriage covenant is a deeply serious commitment. To covenant is to commit oneself radically and solemnly. Together the husband and wife commit themselves mutually to create and sustain a climate of personal openness, acceptance, trust, and honesty that will nurture intimate community and abiding love. Marital responsibilities are certainly not of the kind that can be undertaken lightly
Moreover, we live in a time when long-term commitments, including the commitment to a lifelong monogamous relationship, do not attract many people. The trend toward temporary relationships is strong. The number of unmarried couples living together has greatly increased in recent decades. In the US, a 2000 study found that more than half of newlyweds have lived together, at least briefly, before walking down the aisle. It is also becoming common in many African countries. Co-habitation for convenience and for discernment is a growing world-wide trend.
Beyond question, absolute fidelity is similar to celibacy for the Kingdom, and is just as demanding. The apostles understood this well (Mt 19:10). The obligations in marriage are, indeed, quite frightening, and it is not surprising that people shrink from them. Can we really expect young couples to enter into such a profound marital commitment that calls for mental, emotional, and spiritual maturity? Would it not be more sensible to make only a provisional commitment? ‘If things work out, I stay with this; if not, I look elsewhere’. Many people think this is the common sense approach to relationships; they think that the ideals of Christian marriage have become obsolete.
Forming Character. Before we accept this view, we have to ask whether it is compatible with becoming a truly human person. All of us, in matters small and great, are constantly making promises, committing ourselves, taking on obligations. Such a core of commitments form a unified personality, rather than a bundle of loosely connected and possibly competing instincts, opinions, urges, likes and dislikes. Some commitments are essential to the attainment of a full personhood.
Insecurity: Because they are living together as long as they are happy with each other, and not for life, an atmosphere of insecurity prevails; they can never be fully themselves in the relationship. This results in a slowing down of the personal maturation process and the formation of character, which in turn leads to detrimental effects for the children born in such relationships. (The Church has never accepted co-habitation as a preparation for marriage, because the partners are doing what they will promise not to do when they get married. They are living a contradiction in relationship and an inconsistency in faith. So the Church invites them to move towards a marital situation).
Created in Image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27). Since we are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27), partners in marriage have the ability to be like God in being a community and in living faithfully towards each other
Faithfulness and forgiveness. Faithfulness to a covenant involves the ability to forgive. Since God is always faithful, the God of the covenant is the God of forgiveness. In marriage, faithfulness and forgiveness are always linked. Since couples have the ability to forgive, they can make fidelity a reality in their relationship.
Chapter Ten FAITH and SACRAMENT
Non-Believing Catholics
Sacrament and Contract: The Council of Trent states emphatically: "If anyone says that marriage is not one of the seven sacraments…Let him be anathema." The 1917 Code states equally emphatically: "Christ the Lord raised the marriage contract between baptised persons to the dignity of sacrament. Therefore, there cannot be a valid marriage contract between baptised persons without it being, by that very fact, a sacrament" (Canon 1012, 2). The 1983 Code makes the same statement (Canon 1055, 2).
Faith: In Catholic tradition, only the Church offered sacrament approached in personal faith is a personally accepted sacrament and, therefore, only that marriage approached in Christian faith is Christian sacramental marriage.
Baptised non-Believers: The Catholic tradition holds that the gift of faith is bestowed in baptism. Baptism gives the know-how to faith and to being a believer, but it does not make believers. Before that gift may be attributed to anyone it must be activated freely, consciously, and deliberately into an actual act of faith. It is the personal act of faith that transforms both the human being in a Christian believer and human marriage into sacramental marriage. Sadly, our times have brought to the forefront of Christian consciousness a new phenomenon of countless numbers all over the world who have received the gift of faith in baptism, but who have never made a personal act of faith. They comprise a group of baptised persons; those who though baptised remain all their lives nonbelievers. These baptised nonbelievers ought not to be equated with Catholic faithful in Catholic law.
Church Weddings: Those who marry without Christian faith, be they ever so baptised, whether they marry with or without the prescribed canonical form, marry indeed validly and do not live in concubinage, but they do not marry sacramentally.
Delay: We withhold or delay the Eucharist and all the other sacraments for lack of adequate faith. All the newer rituals warn that the sacraments are not to be celebrated lightly by those of little or of no faith. Delay, at least, is recommended until such people reach a tolerable faith and practice level.
Marriage outside Church: Since the Church has so identified the contract and the sacrament, if it refuses or delays a marriage because of lack of faith; it in effect denies the couple their natural and human right to marry. If the couple is honest about their lack of faith, what option is open to them? Not to marry at all? Marry “outside the Church”? But if they adopt the latter course, the Church will not recognise their marriage. In Church eyes their natural right to marry is thwarted. They have a right and they cannot, according to the Church, exercise it. One has to ask, “Has baptism rendered them totally incapable of intending a permanent union unless it is a sacrament?”
Stages towards Marriage: This in turn might lead the Church, from a pastoral point of view, to permit and recognise several stages towards a full sacramental marriage, much like the various stages of holy orders or the stages of the RCIA.
The 1980 Roman Synod of Bishops urged the development of just such betrothal rites and even of celebrating engagements in the presence of the community.
Autun: In the early 1970s, the diocese of Autun, in France, initiated a radical marriage programme. A couple considering marriage was given a pamphlet which outlined three forms of marriage, and was asked to reflect and choose the form which corresponded best to their situation. The first form listed is civil marriage. The second form listed is welcomed civil marriage, a celebration which takes place, perhaps, at home, in the Church, in the town hall, but always with some sort of Church setting. The third form is sacramental marriage, celebrated by those couples who, in Christian faith, wish their marriage to be an explicit symbol of the covenant union between Christ and his Church.
Not Accepted: Despite the fact that the Autun solution was later banned by the Vatican, it presented a practical and forthright way of dealing with large numbers of baptised non-believers.
Experience Marriage as a Sacrament: It is one thing for the Church to state in the Code of Canon Law that every marriage between baptised Christians is de facto a sacrament; it is another thing for the couple themselves to experience their marriage as a sacrament.
The Way Forward: - Recognition of Consent, Inculturation and Independence of Earthly Affairs: Some theologians think that the time has come for the Catholic Church to assert the inalienable validity of every human marriage constituted by proper consent, including the validity of the marriages of the baptised outside the Tridentine form. For many centuries the Catholic Church taught what it continues to teach today: consent makes marriage. So, an ecclesiastically-witnessed ritual should not be essential for a valid human marriage. Such decisions would seem to be well in line with the proclamation by Vatican II on the independence of earthly affairs. Human marriage is one of those created realities that enjoy its own meanings and values apart from the Church. To acknowledge that simple fact would free marriage to be a truly human reality which, in its very created humanness, can become the basis for the sacrament of covenant marriage.
The Present Situation
1. Tradition: The recent tradition of the Church teaches that the marriage between two baptized persons is a sacrament and the Church leader as a representative of the official Church is expected to hold this position.
2. Love and Faith: While people may not believe intellectually in the Church’s teachings or practice as members of the Church, this does not imply that they do not have faith. Indeed the love they have their spouse, however imperfect it may be, is a sign that they have some faith.
3. Strengthening the Bond: We believe marriage is a gift from God and marital living is graced by God - Mt 19:11. The gift of their marriage continues to be graced by Christ. Christ is present in it, providing the model of steadfast love on which it is based, nurturing the love and faith the spouses have for each other and making the spouses holy by his presence (CCC 1641). When the couple respond to this gift by becoming married, the sacrament of their marriage in itself strengthens their commitment and consecrates them for their marital duties (CCC 1638). Besides, sacramental marriage shows that the couple is open to receive help from God in their relationship, an opening that gives the pastor and the ecclesial community an opportunity to support and care for the marriage. Couples, who receive help, are more likely to grow together in love and understanding. Sacramental marriage, then, may facilitate a greater commitment in the couple to grow in their love for each other and may strengthen their bond of union.
4. Marriage Preparation: Canon Law states that the pastor has a responsibility to provide personal preparation for entering marriage, so that the spouses are disposed to the holiness and the obligations of their new state (1063, 2). Priests are to facilitate the strengthening and nourishing the faith of those about to be married, for the sacrament of marriage presupposes and demands faith.
5. Family of God: Where there are no Christian families, the Church community struggles to exist. The first step towards a Christian family is sacramental marriage. So the pastor has a responsibility to promote sacramental marriage among Christians and to support the Christian families under his care, because they are the basis of the Church he leads.
6. Prophetic Calling: Sacramental marriage, which is graced by Christ and supported by the Christian community, facilitates this prophetic example expected by the spouses.
For these reasons, the Catholic pastor has a responsibility to encourage Catholic couples intending to marry to do so sacramentally.
Invitation for Inculturation
An important way of encouraging couples to marry sacramentally is to ensure that the marriage rite is significant and meaningful for people. This involves work at inculturating the rite in the local traditions and an invitation to create new canonical rites of marriage for peoples of diverse cultures so as to preserve their own authentic marriage customs. In the 1980 Synod, many African bishops demanded a thorough revision of the Christian marriage rite to make it compatible with the customs of Africa. The Praenotanda to the Marriage Ritual encourages such adaptation and inculturation. The creation of new marriage rites would be a remarkable sign that the Catholic Church is becoming a truly world Church, as distinct from an exclusively European one. Pastors, therefore, are encouraged to reflect on ways of adapting the marriage rite so that it is attractive, evocative and sacred for couples.
Chapter Eleven Marriage Preparation
Research shows that marriage preparation is most helpful when it is preceded by adult religious education, when it is presented by a team of clergy and lay people, when it is done in a participative workshop style and when it deals with the six Cs.
1. Communication.
2. Commitment.
3. Conflict and ways of resolving it.
4. Children.
5. Church.
6. Careers.
The Pre-Cana Programme and FOCCUS, facilitating open couple communication, understanding and study, as resources for a marriage preparation course. Information on them can be got from their web sites. Note also the acronym SPICE, signifying, we feel loved when spiritually we pray together, when physically we touch and hold each other, when intellectually we share a project or new learning, when we creatively communicate with each other in written or oral forms, and when we emotionally share our feelings, desires and humour.
Chapter Twelve UNITY & SEXUALITY
Unity
In the human person three levels of being and action may be distinguished, which may be designated as the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual. The physical is the level of biology and physiology; it is the level that humans share with others in the genus animal. The psychological is the level of sense and imagination and memory and understanding and reason and judgement and emotion; it is the level that is specific to the human animal. The spiritual is the level of all that transcends the physical and the psychological, all that reaches to the depths and without to the beyond of the human; it is the level which only the religious animal attains. To become one biblical body, one whole person, a man and a woman must become one on all three levels.
Needs
If spouses are to grow, individually and together, each needs both to esteem himself or herself and to feel esteemed by the other.
Comfort & Challenge
It is precisely because of the difficulties in becoming one body, and therefore adequately sacramental, that Christian marriage is an essentially eschatological symbol. Although it is already a prophetic symbol and sacrament of the covenant union between Christ and his Church, it is not yet the perfect symbol it needs to be. This already-but-not-yet dimension of Christian marriage presents it with both a comfort and a challenge. A comfort to the extent that Christian spouses can claim, in faith and in truth, that their intimate union is both modelled upon and a model of the intimate union between Christ and his Church. A challenge to the extent that they confront constantly their falling short of and their need to be more attuned to their model.
Sexuality
Human: Sexuality is essentially human; there has never been a normal human being who was not sexual.
Spiritualising: There is a danger in modern Catholic theology of a spiritualising approach to sexuality and sexual intercourse in marriage. To transfer human sexuality up to the exclusively spiritual level is just as untrue to human nature as is transferring it down to the exclusively animal level.
One Body: Becoming one person with another human being includes becoming not only one spirit and one mind, but also one body. Married love is agape; the love of the spouse for the spouse's sake, but it is also more than agape. Married love is philia, the love of the spouse as a friend, but it is also more than philia. Married love is eros, the love of the spouse for one's own sake, but it is also more than eros.
Selfish Love: Married love that leads two to become one body is never exclusively selfish love, but it is unquestionably in part selfish love. Married love is loving your neighbour (spouse) as yourself (Mt 22:39).
Eros & Agape: Eros cannot be transformed; it is an essential form of human love. We do better to accept it, to integrate it, and to give it a distinctively human form. That distinctive form appears when the power of eros is harnessed by human wisdom. Eros, by definition, is the love of the spouse for one's own sake. Where eros dominates, I trample others and make them means to my ends. Such an approach produces what it seeks to avoid, emptiness and loneliness. Where wisdom dominates, I recognise that my partner's happiness is the only way that I, too, can be happy. In that wisdom, strangely, eros is not transformed into, but is allied to, agape. It is precisely this alliance of eros and agape that allows married love to persist and to grow when those things that fuel eros, youth, beauty, health, grace, have long since passed away.
Sexual Pleasure: Sexuality, sexual passion, sexual pleasure, eros, derive their sacramental character not from any purpose that human beings might assign to them, but from the simple theological fact that they are from God. They are God's gifts to us, and they are good gifts. For two human animals to become one body-person includes essentially, though not exclusively, becoming one body physically. Physical union is not all there is to becoming one body. Still it has a place in Christian marriage, as prophetic symbol of the covenant uniting humanity and God, who does not shrink from proclaiming his love for his beloved in that most beautiful, and most erotic, of love songs, the Song of Songs.
Song of Songs: This Song has always posed problems for both Jews and Christians, specifically whether it is a poem to divine or human love. For centuries, unwilling to consider that human, erotic love would have any place in the Scriptures, commentators opted for an allegorical reading. The Song of Songs, they explained, was about divine love. But even if it is, God, good communicator that he is, always reveals himself in the language of his hearers. The emergence of the historical-critical approach to reading the Bible led to a growing consensus that the meaning of the Song was its literal meaning. It is about the love of humans, male and female, who in love always seek the bodily presence of the other. This love is celebrated as gift, and as image of the Creator God and of his love for us.
Acceptance & Integration: In response to the view that sex cannot be fully humanised, it does not need to be humanised because it is already fully human, precisely as gifted to us by the God. While human sexual passion can never be fully humanly mastered, because such mastery attains only to the rational, and sexual passion and pleasure have much in them that is non-rational, one fully human way to respond to the non-rational is to accept it joyfully and playfully. Man and woman, husband and wife, do not become fully human by ignoring eros, or by negotiating their way carefully around it, above it or beyond it. They become human only by accepting it and integrating it into the rest of their human and Christian lives. (From Michael G. Lawler, "Theology of Marriage: A Contemporary View," Chapter Four of Secular Marriage, Christian Sacrament. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1985, pp. 56-80).
Chapter Thirteen DIVORCE & RE-MARRIAGE
CIVIL DIVORCE
1. The introduction of divorce in any society abolishes the right to life-long indissoluble marriage by making 'for life' become 'as long as'.
2. Inhibitions: Some spouses, fearing the ever-present threat of divorce, pull their punches out of fear of provoking their partner into leaving.
3. The unity and indissolubility of marriage ensure a greater security and stability in the relationship.
4. The availability of divorce introduces instability and uncertainty into the marriage.
5. The absence of divorce allows people to enter into marriage with a greater sense of commitment, and within marriage they will take their commitment more seriously. Where marriage is permanent couples are more inclined to struggle to make a success of their marriage; with divorce, they are more inclined to give up.
6. The absence of divorce invariably means that individuals are more cautious in selecting a partner because marriage is seen as permanent.
7. It is not simply failed and problematic marriages that are dissolved; divorce also destroys happy marriages.
8. In difficult circumstances, once the option for divorce is taken, spouses are inclined to act consistently and follow through on their decision.
9. Children: Parental divorce is a major disruption in children's lives.
10. Divorce has no basis in human rights.
11. Law: It has been argued that the law cannot make people morally good. However, while you cannot by Act of Parliament make a person morally good, you can by Act of Parliament supply the conditions which facilitate the growth of moral goodness and remove conditions which obstruct it. Moral convictions need the support of law. It is common sense that laxity in the law, e.g. through the introduction of divorce, makes decent living more difficult for all.
12. Divorce, once introduced, gathers pace. Even while society highly prizes both marriage and family life, the universal experience is that divorce legislation results in more people availing of it.
13. The machinery of the State switches sides and actively facilitates people who wish to abandon their pledge of lasting fidelity and who seek to remarry.
14. Good of Society: Because divorce damages society, a prohibition on it should not be seen as lacking in compassion but rather appreciated as an attempt by the State to help promote the stability of marriage and family life and, in a particular way, to protect the welfare of women and children.
15. Government Support: In the short term the government should provide adequate support for the institution of marriage. If society wants to have successful marriages and strong family life then there must be a similar commitment to the legal and social conditions which will encourage these.
16. The individual, rather than the family or the institution of marriage itself, is a starting point in the realm of principle for many proponents of divorce.
17. The provision of a right to remarry rewards infidelity.
18. Divorce indirectly results in serious long-term social disorder.
19. Finance: Divorce is a very expensive activity. Many second families are broken up because of the tension over supporting the first family.
CATHOLICS & MARITAL BREAKDOWN
While many other institutions are open to dissolution of marriage, the tradition in the Catholic Church against divorce is very strong.
The Orthodox Churches, while stressing the indissolubility of marriage in theory, in practice allow for solubility and second marriages for the greater good.
Sacrament and Love: If the marriage no longer embodied and expressed that kind of love, it would in fact be no longer sacramental, and by the same token it would be liable to end in divorce.
Ethical Demand: Again others point out that indissolubility as a sign and a precept is an ethical requirement (the person should not put asunder) rather than a statement of fact (the person cannot put asunder).
Historical Research calls into question the present juridical system.
Marriage is a Living Relationship, not a Contract.
Reality of Divorce: The theological justification for the permanence of the marriage bond is weakened in the shift from scholastic to personalist philosophy and in the view that the marriage is not a legally binding contract but a living relationship between two people. The practical justification for the impossibility of divorce is questioned by the fact that the prohibition no longer deters Catholics from obtaining divorces but rather prevents them from remaining Catholics.
Pauline and Petrine Privileges: There is a tradition that in special cases the Church has granted divorces. The Pauline Privilege, then, permits divorce and second marriage to a person who receives baptism when the non-Christian partner is unwilling to live with the baptised person or to live peacefully without offence to the Creator, unless the baptised partner has, after the reception of baptism, given the other just cause to leave (Canon 1143). Moreover, the Pope may dissolve certain natural marriages to enable a new convert to remarry and even marriages between non-Catholics to enable a divorced non Catholic marry a Catholic. These are clearly expansions of the Pauline privilege and are allowed in virtue of what is called the Petrine privilege. This privilege, by custom and not by law, gives permission to the Pope to dissolve natural marriages in special circumstances and even sometimes in more extensive situations. Some think that with the papal prerogative, it would seem feasible to permit divorce in exceptionally serious situations.
Annulment: Reluctance and Irksome System: Most legally divorced Catholics are unwilling to put themselves through the equivalent of another divorce trial in an ecclesiastical court. Some canonists, a minority, have questioned the value and relevance of the whole ecclesiastical judicial system which researches and tries marriage cases, and have recommended that it be dismantled.
The Church maintains marriage is indissoluble by divine law. Jesus: “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery, and the man who marries a woman divorced by her husband commits adultery” (Lk 16:18). Just as Christ always remains faithful to the Church, spouses are always to remain faithful to each other.
Separation: When one spouse is unfaithful or causes grave danger of soul or body to the other or to the children or makes the common life unduly difficult, then the other spouse has a case for separation (Can 1151-1155).
Annulment: Many divorced and remarried Catholics who want to be reinstated into full membership in the Church try in increasing numbers to have their first marriage officially annulled.
Preparation and Support: Catholic dioceses offer marriage preparation courses for engaged couples; priests are expected to counsel them about the duties and responsibilities of marriage as well as help them prepare their wedding liturgy and strengthen their faith (Can 1063, FC 66). The Christian Family Movement, Marriage Encounter (George & Salome Mwangi, Kenyan ME Coordinating Couple, package@wananchi.com), Retrouvaille, which gives assistance to marriages in difficulties (Tablet, 12 August 2006, p. 17), and similar organisations offer group support for maintaining married and family life.
Compassion: The Church has always tried to offer support and compassion to those whose marriages have failed, as she counsels the parties to live a single lifestyle as long as their spouse is still living. Unfortunately the Church’s efforts to encourage permanence and to discourage divorce have often led to a very negative attitude toward those who have experienced a divorce. This has caused many of the divorced and separated to feel rejected by the Church community, precisely at a time when they greatly need the support of the community.
Permanent Commitment: For the past eight hundred years or so the Catholic Church has vigorously maintained that a validly contracted marriage is indissoluble not only by Church law but also by divine law. The future of Christian marriage is bound up with the future of Christianity itself.
Chapter Thirteen Polygamy
Bibliography: Cairncross, John (1974). After Polygamy Was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-7730-0. Hillman, Eugene. Polygamy Reconsidered: African Plural Marriage and the Christian Churches. New York: Orbis Books. ISBN 0-88344-391-0. Evangelizing Polygamous Families, Peter M Kanyandago, Amecea Gaba Pubs, Eldoret, No 116-118.
Polygamy exists in three specific forms, polygyny (one man having multiple wives), polyandry (one woman having multiple husbands), or group marriage (some combination of polygyny and polyandry).
Judaism
Scriptural evidence indicates that polygamy among the ancient Hebrews, though not extremely common, was not particularly unusual and was certainly not prohibited or discouraged. The Hebrew Scriptures document approximately forty polygamists, including such prominent figures as Abraham, Moses, Jacob, Esau, and David, with little or no further remark on their polygamy as such. Exodus 21:10, Deuteronomy 21:15-17, Deuteronomy 17:17, Deuteronomy 25:5-10. At present, Judaism has essentially outlawed polygamy.
Christianity
Augustine refrained from judging the patriarchs, but did not deduce from their practice the ongoing acceptability of polygamy. Martin Luther granted Philip of Hesse, who, for many years, had been living "constantly in a state of adultery and fornication," a dispensation to take a second wife. In response the Council of Trent: “If anyone says that it is lawful for Christians to have several wives at the same time and that this is not forbidden by divine law (Mt 19:9ff), anathema sit” (CF 1809, p. 769). The Church asserts that "polygamy is not in accord with the moral law. [Conjugal] communion is radically contradicted by polygamy; this, in fact, directly negates the plan of God which was revealed from the beginning, because it is contrary to the equal personal dignity of men and women who in matrimony give themselves with a love that is total and therefore unique and exclusive." (CCC 2387, FC 19). Moreover, the Church states: “Polygamy is incompatible with the unity of marriage” (CCC 1664). Note also CCC 1645, GS 49, and GS 47. The Catholic Church cannot accept polygamous marriages because she values the unique and exclusive communion of the partners in marriage, the total love of the partners for each other, the equal personal dignity of men and women, and the unity of marriage. Sociologists claim that polygyny discriminates both against women and against less privileged men, since some men have many wives while many younger, poorer men have none. Others see polygyny as an extension of social, political and economic power into sexual relationships.
In Africa, there has often been a tension between the Churches' insistence on monogamy and traditional polygamy. In recent times there have been moves for accommodation in some non-Catholic churches.
Pastoral Care
1. Towards polygamous family
Follow diocesan guidelines.
Admit them into the catechumenate.
Show explicit care.
Be open to conversion and administering the sacraments at the time of death.
In cases of conversion, try to ensure that the other wives and their children are maintained.
Dialogue with the local Community.
2. Towards a baptised married man who takes a second wife.
Follow diocesan guidelines.
Show understanding.
Be caring to the first wife.
Be open to helping a practicing Catholic husband and second wife.
Dialogue with the local Community.
Chapter Fourteen CONCLUSION
Basis: Jn 13:34-35. Institution: Mt 19:3-6. Practice: Eph 5:22-27. Prophetic Act: Mk 2:18-20.
Definition: Marriage is a community of life and love, founded in a mutual and irrevocable covenant, by which a Christian man and a Christian woman give and accept one another for the purpose of establishing an intimate partnership of their whole life. Marriage is a sacrament when the couple want their life and love to reflect the relationship between Christ and the Church.
Vision to Reality:
There is a great need to make the vision of a true Christian marriage become reality in the lives of those who are married and those who are preparing to enter marriage. The work is really more the responsibility of the married than of the clergy. This vision of marriage must be taught in the home and exemplified by married couples if it is to grasp the imagination and the hearts of the community. Words and formal teaching are important, but example is still the best teacher. May the Lord give to all married Christians the courage and depth of love necessary to be faithful to their commitment and to be effective sacraments of God’s love for all people.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Marriage Part 1
THE SACRAMENT OF MARRIAGE
Bibliography
Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, Paulines, Nairobi, 1981.
Pontifical Council for the Family, Preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage, Paulines, Nairobi, 1996.
Benezeri Kisembo, Laurenti Magesa & Aylward Shorter, African Christian Marriage, Paulines, Nairobi, 1997.
John Burke, Catholic Marriage, Paulines, Nairobi, 2006.
John Burke, Marriage Annulment, Paulines, Nairobi, 2007.
Mary Kibera, Love and Conflict in Marriage, Paulines, Nairobi, 2007.
Michael Lawler, Marriage and the Catholic Church, Collegeville, Liturgical, 2002.
Theodore Mackin, The Marital Sacrament. New York: Paulist Press, 1989.
James & Evelyn Whitehead, Marrying Well: Stages on the Journey of Christian Marriage. New York: Doubleday, 1984
Mercy Oduyoye & Musimbi Kanyoro, The Will to Arise, (esp. articles by Musimbi Kanyoro & Anna Nasimiyu Wasike and other articles on marriage), New York, Orbis, 1992.
William Blum, Monogamy Reconsidered, Nairobi, Gaba Publications, 1989
Chapter One OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis
· Sacredness - rooted in the creation narrative – Gen 2:18-24.
· Preservation of husband’s clan
· Children are regarded as a blessing and a gift from God.
Family Affair
· Generally monogamous.
· Polygamy tolerated.
· Adultery forbidden by the Torah.
· Women had few legal rights and were seen as the property of their fathers or husbands. Even the Ten Commandments placed coveting a neighbour’s wife on the same footing as coveting his goods (Ex 20:17).
Monogamy
Prophets present the faithful love between husband and wife as ideal and they see Yahweh’s faithful love for Israel in this context.
Hosea
Waiting for Gomer, as Yahweh waits for Israel.
Perception that husband’s love for wife is image of Yahweh’s love for Israel.
Other Prophets
Ezekiel 16: Yahweh’s love for Israel is like of a husband who loves his wife but is deserted by her.
Song of Songs: Extols ecstasy of love
Tobit 6-8: The perfect marriage is one of love between husband and wife.
Sir 25-26: Dangers and Rewards of Domestic Life.
Proverbs 5-7, 31: The virtues of the perfect wife.
Divorce
Accepted
Adultery: Dt 20:22-24.
Only husband has right to it.
Remarriage accepted, except for wife to her first husband
Dt 24:1-4 – ‘for something indecent’
Shammai: Adultery. Hillel: Displeasure of husband.
Faithful God
Yahweh Significance: Just as Yahweh loves Israel, husbands are to love their wives. It gives richer significance to marriage; personal aspect stressed, fidelity, woman respected and loved as person.
Chapter Two JESUS CHRIST
Kingdom of God
Everything seen in light of the Kingdom of God
Mk 12:25 – no marrying in Heaven.
Lk 14:20, 17:27, Mt 24:38-39 – Concerns of marriage superseded by Second Coming.
Divorce
Divorce and Remarriage = Adultery (Mt 5:31-32, 19:3-12, Lk 16:18, Mk 10:1-12).
Permanent and Indissoluble Marriage.
Porneias
‘Except on the grounds of porneias, unchastity,’ Mt 5:32.
· Softening of Jesus
· Separation without remarriage for adultery
· Generally accepted as referring to an incestuous union, which was forbidden (Lev 18:6-18) and would nullify the marriage (Acts 15:20, 29.
Jesus gives New Significance to Marriage - Eph 5.32
Chapter Three NEW TESTAMENT
Attitude: Eschaton expected, so marriage seen as provisional. Paul prefers celibacy, giving one a focus on preparation for the end-time. He advised people not to make changes.
Missionary Ideal Affirmed: Leave all for Kingdom of God.
Marriage never condemned.
Messianic Period described as a Wedding Feast
Slaves free to marry citizens.
Divorce & Infidelity Rejected.
Ephesians 5:21-33: Married Christians are to love in a way that reflects the covenant between Christ and the Church. Ephs 5:32 – “This mystery has many implications; but I am saying that it applies to Christ and the Church.”
Mystery – Sacrament.
I Corinthians 7 – Contract: The exchange of mutual rights and obligations. Equal rights for men and women.
Pauline Privilege: Marriage with a non-Christian causing trouble, then the Christian could obtain a divorce and be allowed to remarry.
Pastoral Epistles – Household Codes: Church leaders are to be successful in marriage and family life and be faithful to their wives.
Chapter Four EARLY DEVELOPMENT
Patristic Period
Civil Weddings. For first three centuries, marriage was a family affair.
Church Blessings were developed as time went on.
Pope Nicholas I in 866: Marriage by mutual consent was accepted as valid.
For first 1200 years, no Church ceremony. With Trent, 1563, the presence of a priest was demanded.
Three Severe Pressures
1. Gnosticism: The body and sexuality are evil. The only way to live ‘spiritually’ was to be celibate.
2. Bible: Sex is really ‘Plan B’, the first act recorded after the Fall. The Fathers sensed that humans do not control their sexuality; it has an unruliness and an irrational energy of its own.
3. New Testament: Jesus was celibate and his disciples left everything to follow him. In heaven, there is no marriage. Paul spoke of marriage as medicinal.
Procreation justified sex and marriage. Society and the Church needed children. Besides God commanded us to increase and fill the earth, Gen 1:28, and infertility was seen as a curse. Paul says a woman will be saved through child-bearing, I Tim 2:15.
Augustine
Marriage – good: Sex – ambiguous if not evil, an unfortunate effect of original sin.
The Values of Marriage: Fidelity, Offspring, Sacrament.
Control, Sacrament, Ceremony, Contract & Consent 500-1400
Control – Pastor takes over marriage registration with the barbarian invasions.
Movement towards Sacrament
The Doubts.
Marriage good – Sexuality suspicious. Marriage was often viewed negatively as a remedy against the desires of the flesh rather than positively as a way to become holy.
Finance
Pre-Christian Human Reality
The Energies
Renewal of Augustinian Thinking
Spiritual Renewal
Albigensian Heresy
So Peter Lombard included marriage as a sacrament in his influential list. The Council of Verona (1184) confirms this and justifies it as a sacrament on the basis of Paul’s teaching that it is a living sign of Jesus’ Covenant with Church. The grace of the sacrament assist people grow in Holiness and fulfil their Marital Duties. Marriage was declared indissoluble to reflect Jesus’ faithful union with the Church.
Development of Wedding Ceremony in 12th Century
Contract: The exchange of rights for procreative acts.
Consent: Roman Mutual Consent or European Family Arrangements & Marriage Consummated with Intercourse?
· Popes: Mutual Consent & Consummated with Intercourse.
Chapter Five COUNCIL OF TRENT
Council of Florence, 1439, stressed the Triple Good of Marriage:
Children
Faithfulness
Indissolubility
Reformers
Marriage is a secular reality and is a context for holiness.
They Rejected the Church’s juridical role.
Council of Trent, 1563
Affirmed Marriage as a sacrament.
Defended the Church’s role.
Tametsi deals with Clandestine Marriages, stating that each marriage must take place in the presence of a priest and two witnesses. Canonical Form.
The Ministers are The Couple.
The Role of Priest is debated.
Other Christian Communities developed Wedding Ceremonies and in France, Civil Weddings become Mandatory in the 1792.
So Tridentine Law applied only to Catholics.
‘There can be no Marriage between Catholics which is not a Sacrament’ – Pius IX.
1917 Code defined marriage in contractual terms as the mutual exchange of rights over one another’s body for acts that of themselves suitable for the generation of children.
Casti Connubii, 1930, of Pius XI, stresses institutional aspect but brings out many personal elements.
Chapter Six RECENT TIMES
Changes in Marriage
Social duty → Individual right
Compliance to Parents → Personal love
Love after wedding → Love before it
Extended family → Nuclear family
Basic unit of society → One social unit among many
Personalist Influence
Primary purpose – Personal Fulfilment and Mutual Growth of Spouses
Marriage is seen as a Community of Persons
Roman Reaction
1944: Holy Office says Marriage is Primarily a Contract.
Pope Pius XII sees the Fulfilment of personal needs as Secondary.
Second Vatican Council
Gaudium et Spes 48-50 (1965)
Lumen Gentium 11 (1964)
Covenant: Marriage is rooted in the conjugal covenant of irrevocable personal consent GS 48. The Council did not use the traditional term ‘contract’, and caused the 1983 Code to see marriage more as a covenant.
Marriage is an Interpersonal Communion, a sharing of life between two people who love each other, GS 12.
Sexuality and Procreation. Sexual intimacy is perceived in the context of the total marital relationship and procreation is the natural development of two people who love each other, GS 50. The Council turns away from the language of primary and secondary ends.
Consummation: Not just a biological act, but the intimate communion of married life and love, GS 48.
Sacrament: Because marriage is such a sacred and noble calling the spouses have a special sacrament in which they are strengthened to love each other as Jesus loves the Church, GS 48. Marriage is a Path to Holiness, LG 11.
Faith Commitment: Marriage is a union between faithful Christians.
Ecclesial. The Family is the Domestic Church, LG 11.
Indissoluble, GS 48.
Tribunals Challenged by the new perception of marriage as an intimate partnership of life and love.
Humanae Vitae (1968).
Here Pope Paul VI presents a very enlightened vision on marriage, never using the word ‘contract’, and giving prominence to marital love, mutual gifting and responsible parenthood.
Familiaris Consortio (1981)
Pope John Paul II sees celibacy/virginity and marriage as two ways of expressing and living the one mystery of the covenant of God with us. For him, the family as the first vital cell must be the prime concern of the whole of society.
Recent Thinking
Recent theology continues to move away from a legalistic understanding of marriage to a more person centred theory and practice.
Bibliography
Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, Paulines, Nairobi, 1981.
Pontifical Council for the Family, Preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage, Paulines, Nairobi, 1996.
Benezeri Kisembo, Laurenti Magesa & Aylward Shorter, African Christian Marriage, Paulines, Nairobi, 1997.
John Burke, Catholic Marriage, Paulines, Nairobi, 2006.
John Burke, Marriage Annulment, Paulines, Nairobi, 2007.
Mary Kibera, Love and Conflict in Marriage, Paulines, Nairobi, 2007.
Michael Lawler, Marriage and the Catholic Church, Collegeville, Liturgical, 2002.
Theodore Mackin, The Marital Sacrament. New York: Paulist Press, 1989.
James & Evelyn Whitehead, Marrying Well: Stages on the Journey of Christian Marriage. New York: Doubleday, 1984
Mercy Oduyoye & Musimbi Kanyoro, The Will to Arise, (esp. articles by Musimbi Kanyoro & Anna Nasimiyu Wasike and other articles on marriage), New York, Orbis, 1992.
William Blum, Monogamy Reconsidered, Nairobi, Gaba Publications, 1989
Chapter One OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis
· Sacredness - rooted in the creation narrative – Gen 2:18-24.
· Preservation of husband’s clan
· Children are regarded as a blessing and a gift from God.
Family Affair
· Generally monogamous.
· Polygamy tolerated.
· Adultery forbidden by the Torah.
· Women had few legal rights and were seen as the property of their fathers or husbands. Even the Ten Commandments placed coveting a neighbour’s wife on the same footing as coveting his goods (Ex 20:17).
Monogamy
Prophets present the faithful love between husband and wife as ideal and they see Yahweh’s faithful love for Israel in this context.
Hosea
Waiting for Gomer, as Yahweh waits for Israel.
Perception that husband’s love for wife is image of Yahweh’s love for Israel.
Other Prophets
Ezekiel 16: Yahweh’s love for Israel is like of a husband who loves his wife but is deserted by her.
Song of Songs: Extols ecstasy of love
Tobit 6-8: The perfect marriage is one of love between husband and wife.
Sir 25-26: Dangers and Rewards of Domestic Life.
Proverbs 5-7, 31: The virtues of the perfect wife.
Divorce
Accepted
Adultery: Dt 20:22-24.
Only husband has right to it.
Remarriage accepted, except for wife to her first husband
Dt 24:1-4 – ‘for something indecent’
Shammai: Adultery. Hillel: Displeasure of husband.
Faithful God
Yahweh Significance: Just as Yahweh loves Israel, husbands are to love their wives. It gives richer significance to marriage; personal aspect stressed, fidelity, woman respected and loved as person.
Chapter Two JESUS CHRIST
Kingdom of God
Everything seen in light of the Kingdom of God
Mk 12:25 – no marrying in Heaven.
Lk 14:20, 17:27, Mt 24:38-39 – Concerns of marriage superseded by Second Coming.
Divorce
Divorce and Remarriage = Adultery (Mt 5:31-32, 19:3-12, Lk 16:18, Mk 10:1-12).
Permanent and Indissoluble Marriage.
Porneias
‘Except on the grounds of porneias, unchastity,’ Mt 5:32.
· Softening of Jesus
· Separation without remarriage for adultery
· Generally accepted as referring to an incestuous union, which was forbidden (Lev 18:6-18) and would nullify the marriage (Acts 15:20, 29.
Jesus gives New Significance to Marriage - Eph 5.32
Chapter Three NEW TESTAMENT
Attitude: Eschaton expected, so marriage seen as provisional. Paul prefers celibacy, giving one a focus on preparation for the end-time. He advised people not to make changes.
Missionary Ideal Affirmed: Leave all for Kingdom of God.
Marriage never condemned.
Messianic Period described as a Wedding Feast
Slaves free to marry citizens.
Divorce & Infidelity Rejected.
Ephesians 5:21-33: Married Christians are to love in a way that reflects the covenant between Christ and the Church. Ephs 5:32 – “This mystery has many implications; but I am saying that it applies to Christ and the Church.”
Mystery – Sacrament.
I Corinthians 7 – Contract: The exchange of mutual rights and obligations. Equal rights for men and women.
Pauline Privilege: Marriage with a non-Christian causing trouble, then the Christian could obtain a divorce and be allowed to remarry.
Pastoral Epistles – Household Codes: Church leaders are to be successful in marriage and family life and be faithful to their wives.
Chapter Four EARLY DEVELOPMENT
Patristic Period
Civil Weddings. For first three centuries, marriage was a family affair.
Church Blessings were developed as time went on.
Pope Nicholas I in 866: Marriage by mutual consent was accepted as valid.
For first 1200 years, no Church ceremony. With Trent, 1563, the presence of a priest was demanded.
Three Severe Pressures
1. Gnosticism: The body and sexuality are evil. The only way to live ‘spiritually’ was to be celibate.
2. Bible: Sex is really ‘Plan B’, the first act recorded after the Fall. The Fathers sensed that humans do not control their sexuality; it has an unruliness and an irrational energy of its own.
3. New Testament: Jesus was celibate and his disciples left everything to follow him. In heaven, there is no marriage. Paul spoke of marriage as medicinal.
Procreation justified sex and marriage. Society and the Church needed children. Besides God commanded us to increase and fill the earth, Gen 1:28, and infertility was seen as a curse. Paul says a woman will be saved through child-bearing, I Tim 2:15.
Augustine
Marriage – good: Sex – ambiguous if not evil, an unfortunate effect of original sin.
The Values of Marriage: Fidelity, Offspring, Sacrament.
Control, Sacrament, Ceremony, Contract & Consent 500-1400
Control – Pastor takes over marriage registration with the barbarian invasions.
Movement towards Sacrament
The Doubts.
Marriage good – Sexuality suspicious. Marriage was often viewed negatively as a remedy against the desires of the flesh rather than positively as a way to become holy.
Finance
Pre-Christian Human Reality
The Energies
Renewal of Augustinian Thinking
Spiritual Renewal
Albigensian Heresy
So Peter Lombard included marriage as a sacrament in his influential list. The Council of Verona (1184) confirms this and justifies it as a sacrament on the basis of Paul’s teaching that it is a living sign of Jesus’ Covenant with Church. The grace of the sacrament assist people grow in Holiness and fulfil their Marital Duties. Marriage was declared indissoluble to reflect Jesus’ faithful union with the Church.
Development of Wedding Ceremony in 12th Century
Contract: The exchange of rights for procreative acts.
Consent: Roman Mutual Consent or European Family Arrangements & Marriage Consummated with Intercourse?
· Popes: Mutual Consent & Consummated with Intercourse.
Chapter Five COUNCIL OF TRENT
Council of Florence, 1439, stressed the Triple Good of Marriage:
Children
Faithfulness
Indissolubility
Reformers
Marriage is a secular reality and is a context for holiness.
They Rejected the Church’s juridical role.
Council of Trent, 1563
Affirmed Marriage as a sacrament.
Defended the Church’s role.
Tametsi deals with Clandestine Marriages, stating that each marriage must take place in the presence of a priest and two witnesses. Canonical Form.
The Ministers are The Couple.
The Role of Priest is debated.
Other Christian Communities developed Wedding Ceremonies and in France, Civil Weddings become Mandatory in the 1792.
So Tridentine Law applied only to Catholics.
‘There can be no Marriage between Catholics which is not a Sacrament’ – Pius IX.
1917 Code defined marriage in contractual terms as the mutual exchange of rights over one another’s body for acts that of themselves suitable for the generation of children.
Casti Connubii, 1930, of Pius XI, stresses institutional aspect but brings out many personal elements.
Chapter Six RECENT TIMES
Changes in Marriage
Social duty → Individual right
Compliance to Parents → Personal love
Love after wedding → Love before it
Extended family → Nuclear family
Basic unit of society → One social unit among many
Personalist Influence
Primary purpose – Personal Fulfilment and Mutual Growth of Spouses
Marriage is seen as a Community of Persons
Roman Reaction
1944: Holy Office says Marriage is Primarily a Contract.
Pope Pius XII sees the Fulfilment of personal needs as Secondary.
Second Vatican Council
Gaudium et Spes 48-50 (1965)
Lumen Gentium 11 (1964)
Covenant: Marriage is rooted in the conjugal covenant of irrevocable personal consent GS 48. The Council did not use the traditional term ‘contract’, and caused the 1983 Code to see marriage more as a covenant.
Marriage is an Interpersonal Communion, a sharing of life between two people who love each other, GS 12.
Sexuality and Procreation. Sexual intimacy is perceived in the context of the total marital relationship and procreation is the natural development of two people who love each other, GS 50. The Council turns away from the language of primary and secondary ends.
Consummation: Not just a biological act, but the intimate communion of married life and love, GS 48.
Sacrament: Because marriage is such a sacred and noble calling the spouses have a special sacrament in which they are strengthened to love each other as Jesus loves the Church, GS 48. Marriage is a Path to Holiness, LG 11.
Faith Commitment: Marriage is a union between faithful Christians.
Ecclesial. The Family is the Domestic Church, LG 11.
Indissoluble, GS 48.
Tribunals Challenged by the new perception of marriage as an intimate partnership of life and love.
Humanae Vitae (1968).
Here Pope Paul VI presents a very enlightened vision on marriage, never using the word ‘contract’, and giving prominence to marital love, mutual gifting and responsible parenthood.
Familiaris Consortio (1981)
Pope John Paul II sees celibacy/virginity and marriage as two ways of expressing and living the one mystery of the covenant of God with us. For him, the family as the first vital cell must be the prime concern of the whole of society.
Recent Thinking
Recent theology continues to move away from a legalistic understanding of marriage to a more person centred theory and practice.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Examination Part A Orders March 2009
SACRAMENTOLOGY III
In the exam three questions will be chosen from the following six and you will be requested to answer one question.
1 Discuss five main characteristics in the ministry of Jesus.
2 Explore the development of ministry in the NT.
3 What contributions did Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Gregory VII make to the development of ordained ministry? Explain the derivation of the following words: presbyter, acolyte, mystagogue, and cleric. What is the principal function of each of them?
4 Discuss what Vatican II wrote about bishops. What were the consequences of the Council in relation to ministry.
5 Explore the main activities of the priest in relation to the community.
6 Write about the priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood, describing the relationship between them and the ways in which they participate in the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
In the exam three questions will be chosen from the following six and you will be requested to answer one question.
1 Discuss five main characteristics in the ministry of Jesus.
2 Explore the development of ministry in the NT.
3 What contributions did Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Gregory VII make to the development of ordained ministry? Explain the derivation of the following words: presbyter, acolyte, mystagogue, and cleric. What is the principal function of each of them?
4 Discuss what Vatican II wrote about bishops. What were the consequences of the Council in relation to ministry.
5 Explore the main activities of the priest in relation to the community.
6 Write about the priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood, describing the relationship between them and the ways in which they participate in the priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Slide Show Orders 2009
Orders
Introduction
Jesus Christ: The only mediator between God and humanity (I Tim 2.5)
Possesses a unique and absolute priesthood
Fulfils, Surpasses & Abolishes the Old Testament Priesthood (Hebrews).
He exercised his priesthood as Prophet by revealing the Father,asShepherd by gathering God’s scattered people, and as Priest by his self-offering on the cross in the Paschal Mystery.
The Church is established by Him as a ‘Kingdom of Priests’ (I Pet 2:9). All Christians share in Christ’s priesthood.
However, Christ entrusted a special function to the apostles. They passed on their ministry to their successors, who in turn shared it with others in various degrees through the Sacrament of Order.
The ministerial priesthood represents Christ’s function as Head in the Church and the Sacrament of Order is intimately linked with the other sacraments and impinges directly on the life and the nature of the Church.
Unique & Absolute Priesthood of Christ - Common Priesthood of the Faithful - Ministerial Priesthood
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Donald Cozzins,The Changing Face of the Priesthood, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 2000.
Jean Galot, Theology of the Priesthood, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1986.Kenan B Osborne, Orders and Ministry, Orbis, New York, 2006.
Len Sperry, Sex, Priestly Ministry, & the Church, Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2003.
The Documents of Vatican II: Lumen Gentium, Presbyterorum Ordinis.
Congregation for the Clergy: The Priest and the 3rd Christian Millennium, 1999,
The Priest, Pastor and Leader 2002
Class Requirements. Participation in Class. Reading related material. Mid term exam on Orders: 30 Marks. End of Semester Exam on Marriage + One question on Orders: 50 Marks.
http://sacramentology2009.blogspot.com
Chapter One
THE OLD TESTAMENT
Early Israel
No distinct priesthood – Head of clan functions as priest.
After Exodus
Clan of Aaron and the tribe of Levi (Ex 28-29; 32:25-29).Priests to lead holy and exemplary lives (Lev 19:2; 21:8).
Whole nation was considered a “kingdom of priests”, a chosen people, called to holiness.(Lev 19, 21).
Discerning will of God (1 Sam 14:41).Teaching and interpreting the Mosaic Law, the Torah (Dt 33:10).Offering Sacrifices (Dt 33:10).Priest - Intermediary
Prophets replace priests as spokespeople for God.Scribes and rabbis assume tasks of preserving and teaching the traditions of Judaism.
Priests - Temple Ministry.EldersGroups of elders organised and governed the Jewish communities.
Chapter Two
JESUS CHRIST
Pattern for Ministry
1. Call from God:Lk 4:16-22. Jn 4.34 – My food is to do the will of the one who sent me.
2. Servant The Son of man came not to be served but to serve, & to give his life as a ransom for many – Mk 10:45. Paul urges the same notion of service in Phil 2:5-8.
Jesus is remembered by his disciples in the washing of feet as giving them an example to serve others (Jn 13:12-17). A Christian in any ministry is a servant.
3. Priest Jesus loved us to the very end, that he gave his life for us; he offered himself as a sacrifice so that we may have life.
Jesus was a priestly person because he acted as mediator for those who believed in him interceding for them with the Father and because he offered his life for all.
Ministry in the pattern of Jesus is bound to demand self-giving and sacrifice. Note Mk 10.45 (ransom for many), Jn 10.15 (laying down his life), Ph 1.29 (suffer for his sake).
4. Shepherd 'I am the good shepherd; I know my own..., I lay down my life for the sheep' (Jn 10:14-15). His attitude of shepherding is seen especially in his leadership & compassionate care.
As a leader, he gathered a group of disciples and formed them into an intimate community through his preaching and table fellowship (Mt 10) and he spoke out for justice for poor people, seeing justice as a higher goal than stability.
5. Prophet Jesus was a prophet, proclaiming the will and message of Yahweh for his people.
He taught and interpreted the scriptures with an impressive authority: 'They were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one that had authority’ (Mk 1:22).
He revised the Law of Moses (Mt 5.21-22).He criticised the religious leaders (Mt 23.27). He cast the money changers out of the Temple (Mk 12.15-17).
Transmission of Ministry
The Call of the Twelve Disciples (Mk 3:13-19, Mt 10.1-4, Lk 6.13-16).
Jesus chose 'those he wanted' (Mk 3.13)
The Apostles: The leaders of the early Christian community.
Peter (Mt 16.18, Lk 22.32, Jn 21.15-19). Exercises Primacy (Acts 1.15, 2.14, 37, 3.6)
The Seventy-Two (Lk 10.1-12)
The Mandate and the Holy Spirit – Jn 20:21-22.
Chapter Three
NEW TESTAMENT
The Twelve
Elders in a Jewish Christian Community, continuing ministry of Jesus.
Peter, James and Consensus Leadership.
Twelve: Representing the New Israel and Universality of Church.So need to complete group & continue ministry of 12 leads to the Election of Matthias (Acts 1:15-26).
The retention of apostolic ministry must be regarded as the essence of early Christianity. So, it is a question not of whether there was a transmission of the apostolic authority to the episcopate of the 2nd Century, but only when and how it took place.
The Church is Apostolic because she has kept the connection with the original Apostles and because her faith is based on the faith of the Apostles. Apostolic Succession: The link of Bishops with the Apostles and Fidelity to Apostolic Faith.
Acts: Chapter Six
Development of ministry: Seven men chosen for ministry.
1. Sense need. 2. Propose solution. 3. Gain community approval.4. Let community implement.5. Community present plans.6. Confirm them. 7. Word spreads.
Missionary Apostles Besides the Twelve, there were other “apostles”, bringing the words of Jesus Christ to the world.
Paul claims to be an apostle (Rom11.13, I Cor 15.9) & uses the term for Silvanus, Timothy (I Th 2.7) & Barnabas (I Cor 9.5); it seems that after a certain development the name of apostle was reserved in a privileged way for the restricted circle of the Twelve.
Flexible Structures & Variety of Ministries
The disappearance of the twelve, the seventy-two and the seven meant that no structure was carved in stone.
Each makes his or her contribution to the progress of the whole. Each utilise his/her charisms, so that the community is built & grows in love. The Spirit is given to each for the good of all.
Apostles and disciples are gradually being replaced by apostles, prophets & teachers (I Cor 12.28)
Presbyters
The Elders, the presbyteroi,derived from Judaism’s traditional category, were men of distinction appointed by the laying on of hands to oversee local affairs.
Note I Peter 5.2 and Acts 20.17-36. Presbyteros does not imply a liturgical functionary. Elders exercise the presidency, preach and teach (I Tim 5.17) and anoint the sick oil (Jms 5.14).
Titles: The names of activities became titles in a more organised Church.Apostoloi means “emissaries”.Deacon is from diakonia, meaning “ministry” or “service”. The titles bishops & priests come from the activities of overseeing, episkopoi, and being elders, presbyteroi, respectively.
The Pastoral EpistlesWords for Elder & Episkopos interchangeable – Acts 14.23. Later Episcopos: Designates the presiding elder or council president.
To perform their administrative task well, supervisors and elders were supposed to have the same qualities as a good head of a family (I Tim 3:1-7, Tit 1:6-9).
Deacons and deaconesses served the internal needs of the community – I Tim 3:8-13.Inducted into leadership with approval of community by being prayed over and laying on of hands – Acts 6.1-6,, 13.1-3, I Tim 4.14, 5.22
Apostles & Disciples → apostles, prophets, & teachers → presbyter-bishops & deacons.
The structured leadership of a supervising committee of presbyter-bishops assisted by deacons evolved.
Priesthood
Nowhere in the NT is the word priest used of a Christian individual, even of any of the apostles.
1. Pagan Priesthood 2. Temple Priests 3. Legacy from Jesus
High Priest of the order of Melchisedek – Heb 5.6, 6.20, 7.1, 10, 15. Melchisedek, Gen 14.17-20 – eternal priesthood, superior to levitical priesthood, King of Jerusalem, offers bread & wine.Ps 110.4 represents him as a figure of the Messiah.
In a spiritual sense all believers were part of a priestly people called to honour Godby praise and self-sacrifice, (I Pet 1:2; 2:10, Rev 1:6; 5:10; 20:6).
Source of Sacrament: Heb 5 (Jesus the Compassionate High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek). Foundation: Lk 6:12-16 (Choice of 12). Institution: Lk 22:19 (Do this in memory of me), Lk 9:1-6 (Mission of 12), Jn 20:21-22 (Mandate & Spirit). Practice: 2 Tim 1:6 (Fan into a flame the gift God gave you, when I laid my hands on you).
Chapter Four
EARLY DEVELOPMENT
The Second Century
Early Christianity very seculardidn't look like a religion no temples, no altars, no priestsLeaders – overseers, elders, servants
Monarchical Episcopate: Around 110 AD we find evidence for the so-called monarchical episcopate, a local Church presided over by one bishop, in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch.
He presents the bishop as the one in charge with deacons as his assistants and presbyters as his advisors and as having responsibility for one parish towns. Slow evolution – Rome ruled by presbyterate with presiding elder.
Pope – Papa, Greek for Father.In East, Reserved for Bishop of Alexandria. In West, Used for important bishops. By 11th Century it comes to be limited to the Bishop of Rome
Presbyters also served as overseers (I Pet 5.1-3).Presbyter-Bishops and Monarchical Bishops seen as 'successors of the Apostles', but not successors in the sense that they were duly appointed and ordained by an Apostle.
Bishop’s emergence: Apostles died + Persecution + No Second Coming + Internal strife & Heresies => Need for a firm, solid, stable leadership.
Clement of Rome, 96,clear line of authority.Didache called for appointment of bishops & deacons.
The tripartite ministry of bishop, presbyter, and deacon emerges and becomes universal in the Church by the end of the second century.
Other Ministries: “Subdeacons” helped the deacons in their practical ministries.
“Exorcists” assisted at rituals of initiation and repentance, “lectors” were appointed to read the scriptures loud & clear during worship, “porters” were assigned janitorial and guard duties, “acolytes” accompanied the bishop and acted as secretaries and messengers.
President. The one who presides over the community presides over the Eucharist. One is ordained to gather, build, and celebrate the Christian community, and flowing from this to preside at that community’s Eucharist. This principle was so strong in the early Church that the Council of Chalcedon in 451 forbade the ordination of anyone unless a local community was assigned to him. One is not ordained to preside at the Eucharist and then, as a side effect, to preside over the community. What seems to have been the operative principle was that whoever was recognised as the community’s leader was accepted as the presider at Eucharist, whether that was an apostle, a prophet, a teacher, or a bishop. This principle reminds us that the early Church saw no separation between its worship and its daily life. Worship was the expression of the Church’s life, and so the leader of the community was the leader of worship. By the second century two roles that were probably once separated are joined together: the role of the presbyter-bishop and the role of the presiding minister of the Eucharist. Presiding eventually became the exclusive privilege of bishops and presbyters. Significantly, not until the year 1208 is there an official declaration that priestly ordination is necessary to celebrate the Eucharist (Pope Innocent III) (CF, n. 1703, p. 720).
Third To Tenth Centuries
Order & Ordination.
In the Greco-Roman political & social world, there were indeed well-defined orders, the order of senators, the order of decurions, & the order of knights.
In the view of Christians, the term "order" indicated the exact opposite of service. Order indicated power and prestige; service, however, reflected Jesus himself.
Hippolytus (d. 235)The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus sketches a picture of the third-century Church and contains a detailed description of an ordination liturgy.
For centuries the approval of two groups was required for this ordination: the community & the pastoral group he was joining. 'Let him be ordained as bishop who has been chosen by all the people' – Apostolic Tradition. 'He who has to preside over all must be elected by all' – Pope Leo.
In Early Church, an avoidance of priestly language. Now Eucharist linked to sacrifice of Jesus, Jesus seen as great high priest, community as priestly people and highly sacral culture leads to bishop be seen as a priest, especially in Didache, & writings of Clement, Ignatius & Hippolytus.
Cyprian (210-258), Bishop of Carthage.
Cyprian repeatedly calls the bishop a high priest and applies the priestly language of the OT to the Church order of his day.
These presbyters took over the eucharistic presidency in the outlying districts.
More Development
Moreover, the diaconate as a separate ministry was gradually disappearing. Bishops needed assistants who could officiate at the liturgy & deacons were not empowered to do this.
The humble origin of the priest as basically an inferior cleric from the countryside remained intact throughout the centuries. Priests remained largely uneducated & from a lower social strata than the bishops, who were educated, often aristocratic & from the ruling class.
The clergy gradually took over the various ministries that had been relatively autonomous in earlier decades, absorbing them all into “the pastoral office,” which was possessed fully only by the bishops.
Finally, these bishops, presbyters and deacons, came to be viewed as “sacred.” Ordination made these ministers members of a distinct “order” within the Church.
Celibacy & Clerical Dress
If the Christian priesthood were a newer & greater priesthood than that of the Jewish priests & Levites, then it seemed logical that Christian clerics would be called to a greater holiness than the priests of the old covenant.
In the 5th Century clerics took to wearing a long robe as a sign of their status in society rather than the short tunic that was worn by ordinary people. (The priest should always conform to the clerical garb since it is a sign of his limitless dedication to the faithful in his service to Jesus – The Priest & 3rd M, Ch 4, No 3)
The Middle Ages
Most Christians in the early Middle Ages were probably served by married clergy, and they were probably unaware of the canons which forbade priests to have intercourse with their wives.
The eleventh century was an important period of reform. With Gregory VII in 1073, celibacy became a condition for entering the presbyteral ministry. The monk became an ideal.
The Lateran Councils
The First Lateran Council prohibited those in holy orders from marrying at all & ordered all married priests to renounce their wives & do penance.
The Fourth Lateran Council asserted that no one could preside at the Eucharist except a priest or bishop who had been validly ordained.
Priests and people: ‘ex opere operato sacraments’.Priests: Poorly educated, low credibility, great burden.
Popes, Cardinals, Bishops:Princes - eager to increase wealth & maintain power.
Council of Florence, 1439Ordination a sacrament, whose matter is the handing over of symbol of order conferred & whose form relates to the power linked to the order.
Chapter Five
THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
The Reformers
Reacting excessively against a one-sided stress on the ministerial priesthood which did not do full justice to the common priesthood of all (I Pet 2:5) and the increasing alienation of the clergy from the rest of the Church, the Reformers were led to deny the existence of a Sacrament of Order instituted by Christ, and considered the ministry as a function delegated by the Christian community to some of its members. They stressed the priesthood of all believers. Since the Eucharist is not a sacrifice (Calvary cannot, and need not, be repeated), there is no need for a cultic priesthood in the Church. They discounted the notion that authority in the Church was funnelled from Christ through the pope to the bishops to the priests, and they rejected the claim that this was divinely ordained. They found little evidence in the Scriptures that ranks of holy orders existed in the early Church, and they objected to the way that men were ordained to ministries (such as the diaconate) that they never really performed. They observed that the law of celibacy was more often a cause of scandal than edification in the Church, and since they abandoned the idea of the Eucharist as a priestly sacrifice they saw no grounds for applying the OT rules of ritual purity to Christian ministers.
In place of the priestly ministry of cult and ritual, the reformers substituted a pastoral ministry of preaching and teaching, because they conceived salvation as coming through conversion and faith in God’s word. So Christians had a right to hear the scriptures and ministers had a duty to explain them. In a way, then, the Bible was introduced as a verbal sacrament replacing the ritual sacraments of traditional Christianity. Through it, the Holy Spirit entered one’s heart and enlightened one’s mind. Preaching itself was expected to be sacramentally inspiring and uplifting. Explaining God’s teachings was a means of deepening faith and commitment, and exhorting people to follow his commandments was supposed to be an effective protection against sin.
Protestants did not do away with sacramental ordination but they changed the form and meaning of ordination to fit their new interpretation of ministry. They recognised the need for some sort of ceremonial initiation into the ministry and for a ritual to express and symbolise the meaning of the office and service.
So, the Reformers were led to deny the existence of a Sacrament of Order instituted by Christ, and considered the ministry as a function delegated by the Christian community to some of its members.
They observed that the law of celibacy was more often a cause of scandal than edification in the Church, and since they abandoned the idea of the Eucharist as a priestly sacrifice they saw no grounds for applying the OT rules of ritual purity to Christian ministers.
Explaining God’s teachings was a means of deepening faith and commitment, and exhorting people to follow his commandments was supposed to be an effective protection against sin.
Protestants did not do away with sacramental ordination but they changed the form and meaning of ordination to fit their new interpretation of ministry.
Lutherans – Priests and Bishops
Presbyterians – Elders with authority over clusters of Churches.
Congregationalists – Their elders + Scripture & the Spirit.
Anglicans – Episcopalian but defect of intention (transubstantiation) & form (Edwardine Ordinal)
The Council of TrentTrent rejected these views of the Reformers, declaring that the ordained priesthood, separate from and superior to the priesthood of all believers, is conferred through one of the seven sacraments,
In the succeeding period, the ideal priestly life-style was portrayed as a very monastic one, even when priests had to live alone in country parishes and was seen as one that revolved around the mass and the sacraments.
Chapter Six
RECENT TIMES
Pope Pius XII Episcopalis Consecrationis, 1944
Second Vatican Council
The ministerial priesthood in the context of the Church.Christ’s unique priesthood is communicated by Him to the Church & is shared by the entire people of God (LG 10-13).
It consists of three degrees: the episcopate conferred on the bishops as successors of the apostles (LG 20-27), the presbyterate (LG 28) and the diaconate (LG 29).
Bishops “enjoy the fullness of the sacrament of orders,” whereas priests and deacons are dependent upon them in the exercise of authority (CD 15).
Collaborators with the bishop, constitute a college with him (LG 28; CD 29-30) and are his helpers and counsellors (PC 7). Make the bishop present in the local congregations entrusted to their care (LG 28).
Deacons are ordained for service and ministry to the People of God (CD 15). Council recommends the restoration of the permanent diaconate in the Church (LG 29).
Consecration and Mission are integrated (PO 3).Christ is at once Teacher, Priest and Shepherd.
The same three functions are indissolubly linked in the ministerial priesthood and exercised in various degrees by bishops, presbyters and deacons.
Priesthood of the Baptised
The Council puts new emphasis on the Church as being the entire people, encourages the “universal call to holiness,” reversing the previous view that only those with a special vocation are called to holiness
So the Council opens the door to fuller participation of lay people in the activity of the Church’s life.
Change of Emphasis
Vatican II depicts the priest as a proclaimer of the gospel of God and builder of Christian community.
Revision of RitesThe Council ordered that the ceremonies and the texts of the ordination rites be revised.
Reform of Structure
In 1972, Pope Paul VI reformed the structure of ministry in the Church.
Lector and acolyte were no longer considered ordained ministries, but rather lay ministries into which people could be installed by the bishop.
Consequences of the Council
For many who had been ordained to the old minor orders, it came as a bit of a shock that those orders could simply be suppressed by decree.
Still this historical overview shows that the Church can and must shape her ministries according to contemporary needs of the Church community.
A growing awareness of the community base of ordained ministry.
Diversity: The restoration of the diaconate and a virtual explosion of lay ministries.
Bishops – Pastors.
Priests – Preachers and Community Builders.Priests – Loss of Identity
Chapter Seven
Ordained Ministry & Priesthood of the Faithful In virtue of their baptism, all the faithful participate in the priesthood of Christ.
In NT times, there seems to have been a special stress on offering ones life as a sacrifice for those who have not yet heard of Christ, so that they could see Christian dedication as an invitation to believe.
And so, worshipping everywhere by their holy actions, the laity consecrates the world itself to God” (LG 34). Their loving acts of ministry, generosity, justice, and compassion are the visible expression of the living Christ, animating his mystical body.
The CCC asserts that: “While common priesthood of the faithful is exercised by the unfolding of baptismal grace – a life of faith, hope and charity, a life according to the spirit – the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood” (1547).
We have been so cautioned to remember that the priesthood of the faithful & the ministerial priesthood “differ essentially & not only in degree” (LG10) that we have tended to lose the missionary focus of the Church & deprive the faithful of any awareness of their priestly identity.
Two key texts can help us in our understanding of this relationship, namely, Gen 2:7 and Ezek 37. The images of body, shape and bones represent the ministerial priesthood, while the images of breath and flesh signify the common priesthood.
Priesthood in the Church OrdainedPriest Presiding & Administering the Sacraments, Prayer
Faithful Priest Romans 12:1 – Offering their lives as living sacrifices, Participating in the Sacraments, Prayer
Prophet Ordained – Preaching, Teaching Faithful – Example, Witness, Reading the Signs of the Times
King Ordained – Pastor, Leader Faithful – Compassion, Work, Engagement in the World
Vobis sum episcopus, vobiscum Christianus – St Augustine. Pope John Paul II warns against the clericalisation of lay elites (Chistifideles Laici, 23)
He is concerned that the talent and enthusiasms of the most gifted lay faithful are drawn into liturgical ministries. He fears that this may be to the detriment of their lay witness and committed political action in the world.
Chapter Eight
CHARACTER & PERSONAL IDENTITY
CHARACTER: Jesus is said to be the 'express image of God's person’, the 'very stamp of his nature' (Heb 1:3).
Then we can say he has a priestly character that is effective in his personal life and is truly indelible.
PERSONAL IDENTITY:Disciple – Call & Total Response, Cross, HopeApostle – Sent.
Chapter Nine
Community
Priesthood is essentially related to the community.
A Presence in the Community
Model of Human Authenticity.
B. Active in the Community
Preacher, Prophet, Herald of God’s Kingdom, Evangeliser, Proclaimer of God’s word and justice.
Leader:
Public Figure representing the Church. Administrator.
Forms, Organises and builds up the Christian community (requires gift of discernment, dialogue ability, & leadership to stabilise)
Connects
President of Eucharist – he effects the Church’s most powerful expression of unity. Mystagogue.
Servant – Pastor and Agent for Development, Care for the Earth, Justice and Peace.
Definition: Ordination, then, can be defined as a “recognition of the gift of leadership, and at the same time a sacramental commissioning that empowers priests to govern the community in the name of Christ.”
Chapter Ten
Characteristics of Leadership
Courage — I Tim 1:6-7.
No resentment – ‘There is no limit to what you can achieve provided you don't mind who gets the credit.’
Passionate
Openness
Service
Confidence
Inner Authority
Transparency
Presence
Self-awarenessSpirituality
(From ‘Courageous Conversations’ by Daniel O’Leary, Furrow, Feb 2006, Vol 57, No 2).
Chapter Eleven
CELIBACY
The image of the Church official in Apostolic times is that of a married person, who is a good parent.
The Encratic Influence.
Elvira, c295-302 - Imposes celibacy on bishops, priests and deacons, but has not universal application.
Nicaea, 325 - Forbids marriage after receiving orders.
Popes Innocent I in 401 & Pope Leo I, 440-461, allow married priests to live with their wives ‘as brothers and sisters’.
Trullo, 692 - Forbids marriage after receiving orders.
Pope Nicholas II forbade the faithful from attending Mass said by a priest who was not celibate in 1059.
With Gregory VII in 1073, celibacy became a condition for entering the presbyteral ministry.
The First Lateran Council (1123) prohibited those in holy orders from marrying and ordered all married priests to renounce their wives and do penance.
Candidates for the priesthood who were already married might not receive any higher orders unless they severed all relations with their wives.Trent confirms the discipline.
Motives for the Law.
Divine Intimacy
Cultic Purity
Attraction of the Kingdom (Mt 19.12)
Social Motives
Evangelically Inspired
Pope Paul VI: Christ, Church & Eschaton
Pope John Paul II: Freedom for Service & Sign of Fidelity
Conclusion Richard Sipe says: ‘Celibacy is a freely chosen dynamic state, usually vowed, that involves an honest and sustained attempt to live without direct sexual gratification in order to serve others productively for a spiritual motive’.
Therefore, she permits only those who feel themselves called to celibacy to enter the ranks of her ministerial priesthood.
Chapter 12
Inter Insigniores
Reasons for not ordaining women as priests.
1. Jesus Christ did not call any woman to be part of the twelve apostles.
2. The Apostles did not include any women in the apostolic group.
3. From the earliest centuries, the constant practice of the Church has been not to ordain women to the priesthood.
4. No natural resemblance to act in the name of Jesus.
5. Not a human rights issue.
6. Church has not got the authority.
Reasons given for showing that women can minister as priests.
1. Jesus liberates women.
2. During the Last Supper, Jesus empowered women to preside at the Eucharist.
3. Church is called to be Liberated from Prejudice.
4. Affirmed in latent tradition.
5. Women were Ordained as Deacons.
6. Supported by developments in other Christian Churches.
7. Called by the Holy Spirit
SUMMARY Basis of Sacrament: Heb 5 (Jesus the compassionate High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek).
Institution: Lk 22:19 (Do this in memory of me).
Practice: 2 Tim 1:6 (Fan into a flame the gift God gave you, when I laid my hands on you).
Prophetic Act: Lk 6:12-16 (Choice of 12); 9:1-6 (Mission of 12).
Doctrine: The sacrament of Order was instituted by Christ and is conferred through the imposition of hands and the prayer of ordination.
The minister of the sacrament is the bishop. The sacrament confers the Holy Spirit & grace for the exercise of the ministry. It imprints a sacramental character which conforms the recipient to Christ the Priest. Some ministries can be conferred on lay people by installation.
TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A PRIEST’S LIFE PATTERNHow I live as a priest is more important than what I do as a priest.What Christ does through me is more important that what I do by myself.
It is more important for me to live in union with the presbyterium than to be alone and absorbed in my work.The ministry of prayer and the word is more important than serving at tables.
It is more important to work united with my fellow workers than to do the maximum number of jobs all by myself.
It is more important to concentrate on a few points and to influence others than to be hurried and incomplete in everything.
Joint action is more important than isolated action, no matter how perfect.The cross is more important than efficiency; it is more fruitful.
Openness to the whole (community, diocese, Church throughout the world) is more important than a particular interest, no matter how important that may be.
It is more important that the faith be witnessed to all than that all ‘traditional’ demands be satisfied. (From ‘The meaning of Christian Priesthood’ by Gisbert Greshake).
Introduction
Jesus Christ: The only mediator between God and humanity (I Tim 2.5)
Possesses a unique and absolute priesthood
Fulfils, Surpasses & Abolishes the Old Testament Priesthood (Hebrews).
He exercised his priesthood as Prophet by revealing the Father,asShepherd by gathering God’s scattered people, and as Priest by his self-offering on the cross in the Paschal Mystery.
The Church is established by Him as a ‘Kingdom of Priests’ (I Pet 2:9). All Christians share in Christ’s priesthood.
However, Christ entrusted a special function to the apostles. They passed on their ministry to their successors, who in turn shared it with others in various degrees through the Sacrament of Order.
The ministerial priesthood represents Christ’s function as Head in the Church and the Sacrament of Order is intimately linked with the other sacraments and impinges directly on the life and the nature of the Church.
Unique & Absolute Priesthood of Christ - Common Priesthood of the Faithful - Ministerial Priesthood
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Donald Cozzins,The Changing Face of the Priesthood, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 2000.
Jean Galot, Theology of the Priesthood, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1986.Kenan B Osborne, Orders and Ministry, Orbis, New York, 2006.
Len Sperry, Sex, Priestly Ministry, & the Church, Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2003.
The Documents of Vatican II: Lumen Gentium, Presbyterorum Ordinis.
Congregation for the Clergy: The Priest and the 3rd Christian Millennium, 1999,
The Priest, Pastor and Leader 2002
Class Requirements. Participation in Class. Reading related material. Mid term exam on Orders: 30 Marks. End of Semester Exam on Marriage + One question on Orders: 50 Marks.
http://sacramentology2009.blogspot.com
Chapter One
THE OLD TESTAMENT
Early Israel
No distinct priesthood – Head of clan functions as priest.
After Exodus
Clan of Aaron and the tribe of Levi (Ex 28-29; 32:25-29).Priests to lead holy and exemplary lives (Lev 19:2; 21:8).
Whole nation was considered a “kingdom of priests”, a chosen people, called to holiness.(Lev 19, 21).
Discerning will of God (1 Sam 14:41).Teaching and interpreting the Mosaic Law, the Torah (Dt 33:10).Offering Sacrifices (Dt 33:10).Priest - Intermediary
Prophets replace priests as spokespeople for God.Scribes and rabbis assume tasks of preserving and teaching the traditions of Judaism.
Priests - Temple Ministry.EldersGroups of elders organised and governed the Jewish communities.
Chapter Two
JESUS CHRIST
Pattern for Ministry
1. Call from God:Lk 4:16-22. Jn 4.34 – My food is to do the will of the one who sent me.
2. Servant The Son of man came not to be served but to serve, & to give his life as a ransom for many – Mk 10:45. Paul urges the same notion of service in Phil 2:5-8.
Jesus is remembered by his disciples in the washing of feet as giving them an example to serve others (Jn 13:12-17). A Christian in any ministry is a servant.
3. Priest Jesus loved us to the very end, that he gave his life for us; he offered himself as a sacrifice so that we may have life.
Jesus was a priestly person because he acted as mediator for those who believed in him interceding for them with the Father and because he offered his life for all.
Ministry in the pattern of Jesus is bound to demand self-giving and sacrifice. Note Mk 10.45 (ransom for many), Jn 10.15 (laying down his life), Ph 1.29 (suffer for his sake).
4. Shepherd 'I am the good shepherd; I know my own..., I lay down my life for the sheep' (Jn 10:14-15). His attitude of shepherding is seen especially in his leadership & compassionate care.
As a leader, he gathered a group of disciples and formed them into an intimate community through his preaching and table fellowship (Mt 10) and he spoke out for justice for poor people, seeing justice as a higher goal than stability.
5. Prophet Jesus was a prophet, proclaiming the will and message of Yahweh for his people.
He taught and interpreted the scriptures with an impressive authority: 'They were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one that had authority’ (Mk 1:22).
He revised the Law of Moses (Mt 5.21-22).He criticised the religious leaders (Mt 23.27). He cast the money changers out of the Temple (Mk 12.15-17).
Transmission of Ministry
The Call of the Twelve Disciples (Mk 3:13-19, Mt 10.1-4, Lk 6.13-16).
Jesus chose 'those he wanted' (Mk 3.13)
The Apostles: The leaders of the early Christian community.
Peter (Mt 16.18, Lk 22.32, Jn 21.15-19). Exercises Primacy (Acts 1.15, 2.14, 37, 3.6)
The Seventy-Two (Lk 10.1-12)
The Mandate and the Holy Spirit – Jn 20:21-22.
Chapter Three
NEW TESTAMENT
The Twelve
Elders in a Jewish Christian Community, continuing ministry of Jesus.
Peter, James and Consensus Leadership.
Twelve: Representing the New Israel and Universality of Church.So need to complete group & continue ministry of 12 leads to the Election of Matthias (Acts 1:15-26).
The retention of apostolic ministry must be regarded as the essence of early Christianity. So, it is a question not of whether there was a transmission of the apostolic authority to the episcopate of the 2nd Century, but only when and how it took place.
The Church is Apostolic because she has kept the connection with the original Apostles and because her faith is based on the faith of the Apostles. Apostolic Succession: The link of Bishops with the Apostles and Fidelity to Apostolic Faith.
Acts: Chapter Six
Development of ministry: Seven men chosen for ministry.
1. Sense need. 2. Propose solution. 3. Gain community approval.4. Let community implement.5. Community present plans.6. Confirm them. 7. Word spreads.
Missionary Apostles Besides the Twelve, there were other “apostles”, bringing the words of Jesus Christ to the world.
Paul claims to be an apostle (Rom11.13, I Cor 15.9) & uses the term for Silvanus, Timothy (I Th 2.7) & Barnabas (I Cor 9.5); it seems that after a certain development the name of apostle was reserved in a privileged way for the restricted circle of the Twelve.
Flexible Structures & Variety of Ministries
The disappearance of the twelve, the seventy-two and the seven meant that no structure was carved in stone.
Each makes his or her contribution to the progress of the whole. Each utilise his/her charisms, so that the community is built & grows in love. The Spirit is given to each for the good of all.
Apostles and disciples are gradually being replaced by apostles, prophets & teachers (I Cor 12.28)
Presbyters
The Elders, the presbyteroi,derived from Judaism’s traditional category, were men of distinction appointed by the laying on of hands to oversee local affairs.
Note I Peter 5.2 and Acts 20.17-36. Presbyteros does not imply a liturgical functionary. Elders exercise the presidency, preach and teach (I Tim 5.17) and anoint the sick oil (Jms 5.14).
Titles: The names of activities became titles in a more organised Church.Apostoloi means “emissaries”.Deacon is from diakonia, meaning “ministry” or “service”. The titles bishops & priests come from the activities of overseeing, episkopoi, and being elders, presbyteroi, respectively.
The Pastoral EpistlesWords for Elder & Episkopos interchangeable – Acts 14.23. Later Episcopos: Designates the presiding elder or council president.
To perform their administrative task well, supervisors and elders were supposed to have the same qualities as a good head of a family (I Tim 3:1-7, Tit 1:6-9).
Deacons and deaconesses served the internal needs of the community – I Tim 3:8-13.Inducted into leadership with approval of community by being prayed over and laying on of hands – Acts 6.1-6,, 13.1-3, I Tim 4.14, 5.22
Apostles & Disciples → apostles, prophets, & teachers → presbyter-bishops & deacons.
The structured leadership of a supervising committee of presbyter-bishops assisted by deacons evolved.
Priesthood
Nowhere in the NT is the word priest used of a Christian individual, even of any of the apostles.
1. Pagan Priesthood 2. Temple Priests 3. Legacy from Jesus
High Priest of the order of Melchisedek – Heb 5.6, 6.20, 7.1, 10, 15. Melchisedek, Gen 14.17-20 – eternal priesthood, superior to levitical priesthood, King of Jerusalem, offers bread & wine.Ps 110.4 represents him as a figure of the Messiah.
In a spiritual sense all believers were part of a priestly people called to honour Godby praise and self-sacrifice, (I Pet 1:2; 2:10, Rev 1:6; 5:10; 20:6).
Source of Sacrament: Heb 5 (Jesus the Compassionate High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek). Foundation: Lk 6:12-16 (Choice of 12). Institution: Lk 22:19 (Do this in memory of me), Lk 9:1-6 (Mission of 12), Jn 20:21-22 (Mandate & Spirit). Practice: 2 Tim 1:6 (Fan into a flame the gift God gave you, when I laid my hands on you).
Chapter Four
EARLY DEVELOPMENT
The Second Century
Early Christianity very seculardidn't look like a religion no temples, no altars, no priestsLeaders – overseers, elders, servants
Monarchical Episcopate: Around 110 AD we find evidence for the so-called monarchical episcopate, a local Church presided over by one bishop, in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch.
He presents the bishop as the one in charge with deacons as his assistants and presbyters as his advisors and as having responsibility for one parish towns. Slow evolution – Rome ruled by presbyterate with presiding elder.
Pope – Papa, Greek for Father.In East, Reserved for Bishop of Alexandria. In West, Used for important bishops. By 11th Century it comes to be limited to the Bishop of Rome
Presbyters also served as overseers (I Pet 5.1-3).Presbyter-Bishops and Monarchical Bishops seen as 'successors of the Apostles', but not successors in the sense that they were duly appointed and ordained by an Apostle.
Bishop’s emergence: Apostles died + Persecution + No Second Coming + Internal strife & Heresies => Need for a firm, solid, stable leadership.
Clement of Rome, 96,clear line of authority.Didache called for appointment of bishops & deacons.
The tripartite ministry of bishop, presbyter, and deacon emerges and becomes universal in the Church by the end of the second century.
Other Ministries: “Subdeacons” helped the deacons in their practical ministries.
“Exorcists” assisted at rituals of initiation and repentance, “lectors” were appointed to read the scriptures loud & clear during worship, “porters” were assigned janitorial and guard duties, “acolytes” accompanied the bishop and acted as secretaries and messengers.
President. The one who presides over the community presides over the Eucharist. One is ordained to gather, build, and celebrate the Christian community, and flowing from this to preside at that community’s Eucharist. This principle was so strong in the early Church that the Council of Chalcedon in 451 forbade the ordination of anyone unless a local community was assigned to him. One is not ordained to preside at the Eucharist and then, as a side effect, to preside over the community. What seems to have been the operative principle was that whoever was recognised as the community’s leader was accepted as the presider at Eucharist, whether that was an apostle, a prophet, a teacher, or a bishop. This principle reminds us that the early Church saw no separation between its worship and its daily life. Worship was the expression of the Church’s life, and so the leader of the community was the leader of worship. By the second century two roles that were probably once separated are joined together: the role of the presbyter-bishop and the role of the presiding minister of the Eucharist. Presiding eventually became the exclusive privilege of bishops and presbyters. Significantly, not until the year 1208 is there an official declaration that priestly ordination is necessary to celebrate the Eucharist (Pope Innocent III) (CF, n. 1703, p. 720).
Third To Tenth Centuries
Order & Ordination.
In the Greco-Roman political & social world, there were indeed well-defined orders, the order of senators, the order of decurions, & the order of knights.
In the view of Christians, the term "order" indicated the exact opposite of service. Order indicated power and prestige; service, however, reflected Jesus himself.
Hippolytus (d. 235)The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus sketches a picture of the third-century Church and contains a detailed description of an ordination liturgy.
For centuries the approval of two groups was required for this ordination: the community & the pastoral group he was joining. 'Let him be ordained as bishop who has been chosen by all the people' – Apostolic Tradition. 'He who has to preside over all must be elected by all' – Pope Leo.
In Early Church, an avoidance of priestly language. Now Eucharist linked to sacrifice of Jesus, Jesus seen as great high priest, community as priestly people and highly sacral culture leads to bishop be seen as a priest, especially in Didache, & writings of Clement, Ignatius & Hippolytus.
Cyprian (210-258), Bishop of Carthage.
Cyprian repeatedly calls the bishop a high priest and applies the priestly language of the OT to the Church order of his day.
These presbyters took over the eucharistic presidency in the outlying districts.
More Development
Moreover, the diaconate as a separate ministry was gradually disappearing. Bishops needed assistants who could officiate at the liturgy & deacons were not empowered to do this.
The humble origin of the priest as basically an inferior cleric from the countryside remained intact throughout the centuries. Priests remained largely uneducated & from a lower social strata than the bishops, who were educated, often aristocratic & from the ruling class.
The clergy gradually took over the various ministries that had been relatively autonomous in earlier decades, absorbing them all into “the pastoral office,” which was possessed fully only by the bishops.
Finally, these bishops, presbyters and deacons, came to be viewed as “sacred.” Ordination made these ministers members of a distinct “order” within the Church.
Celibacy & Clerical Dress
If the Christian priesthood were a newer & greater priesthood than that of the Jewish priests & Levites, then it seemed logical that Christian clerics would be called to a greater holiness than the priests of the old covenant.
In the 5th Century clerics took to wearing a long robe as a sign of their status in society rather than the short tunic that was worn by ordinary people. (The priest should always conform to the clerical garb since it is a sign of his limitless dedication to the faithful in his service to Jesus – The Priest & 3rd M, Ch 4, No 3)
The Middle Ages
Most Christians in the early Middle Ages were probably served by married clergy, and they were probably unaware of the canons which forbade priests to have intercourse with their wives.
The eleventh century was an important period of reform. With Gregory VII in 1073, celibacy became a condition for entering the presbyteral ministry. The monk became an ideal.
The Lateran Councils
The First Lateran Council prohibited those in holy orders from marrying at all & ordered all married priests to renounce their wives & do penance.
The Fourth Lateran Council asserted that no one could preside at the Eucharist except a priest or bishop who had been validly ordained.
Priests and people: ‘ex opere operato sacraments’.Priests: Poorly educated, low credibility, great burden.
Popes, Cardinals, Bishops:Princes - eager to increase wealth & maintain power.
Council of Florence, 1439Ordination a sacrament, whose matter is the handing over of symbol of order conferred & whose form relates to the power linked to the order.
Chapter Five
THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
The Reformers
Reacting excessively against a one-sided stress on the ministerial priesthood which did not do full justice to the common priesthood of all (I Pet 2:5) and the increasing alienation of the clergy from the rest of the Church, the Reformers were led to deny the existence of a Sacrament of Order instituted by Christ, and considered the ministry as a function delegated by the Christian community to some of its members. They stressed the priesthood of all believers. Since the Eucharist is not a sacrifice (Calvary cannot, and need not, be repeated), there is no need for a cultic priesthood in the Church. They discounted the notion that authority in the Church was funnelled from Christ through the pope to the bishops to the priests, and they rejected the claim that this was divinely ordained. They found little evidence in the Scriptures that ranks of holy orders existed in the early Church, and they objected to the way that men were ordained to ministries (such as the diaconate) that they never really performed. They observed that the law of celibacy was more often a cause of scandal than edification in the Church, and since they abandoned the idea of the Eucharist as a priestly sacrifice they saw no grounds for applying the OT rules of ritual purity to Christian ministers.
In place of the priestly ministry of cult and ritual, the reformers substituted a pastoral ministry of preaching and teaching, because they conceived salvation as coming through conversion and faith in God’s word. So Christians had a right to hear the scriptures and ministers had a duty to explain them. In a way, then, the Bible was introduced as a verbal sacrament replacing the ritual sacraments of traditional Christianity. Through it, the Holy Spirit entered one’s heart and enlightened one’s mind. Preaching itself was expected to be sacramentally inspiring and uplifting. Explaining God’s teachings was a means of deepening faith and commitment, and exhorting people to follow his commandments was supposed to be an effective protection against sin.
Protestants did not do away with sacramental ordination but they changed the form and meaning of ordination to fit their new interpretation of ministry. They recognised the need for some sort of ceremonial initiation into the ministry and for a ritual to express and symbolise the meaning of the office and service.
So, the Reformers were led to deny the existence of a Sacrament of Order instituted by Christ, and considered the ministry as a function delegated by the Christian community to some of its members.
They observed that the law of celibacy was more often a cause of scandal than edification in the Church, and since they abandoned the idea of the Eucharist as a priestly sacrifice they saw no grounds for applying the OT rules of ritual purity to Christian ministers.
Explaining God’s teachings was a means of deepening faith and commitment, and exhorting people to follow his commandments was supposed to be an effective protection against sin.
Protestants did not do away with sacramental ordination but they changed the form and meaning of ordination to fit their new interpretation of ministry.
Lutherans – Priests and Bishops
Presbyterians – Elders with authority over clusters of Churches.
Congregationalists – Their elders + Scripture & the Spirit.
Anglicans – Episcopalian but defect of intention (transubstantiation) & form (Edwardine Ordinal)
The Council of TrentTrent rejected these views of the Reformers, declaring that the ordained priesthood, separate from and superior to the priesthood of all believers, is conferred through one of the seven sacraments,
In the succeeding period, the ideal priestly life-style was portrayed as a very monastic one, even when priests had to live alone in country parishes and was seen as one that revolved around the mass and the sacraments.
Chapter Six
RECENT TIMES
Pope Pius XII Episcopalis Consecrationis, 1944
Second Vatican Council
The ministerial priesthood in the context of the Church.Christ’s unique priesthood is communicated by Him to the Church & is shared by the entire people of God (LG 10-13).
It consists of three degrees: the episcopate conferred on the bishops as successors of the apostles (LG 20-27), the presbyterate (LG 28) and the diaconate (LG 29).
Bishops “enjoy the fullness of the sacrament of orders,” whereas priests and deacons are dependent upon them in the exercise of authority (CD 15).
Collaborators with the bishop, constitute a college with him (LG 28; CD 29-30) and are his helpers and counsellors (PC 7). Make the bishop present in the local congregations entrusted to their care (LG 28).
Deacons are ordained for service and ministry to the People of God (CD 15). Council recommends the restoration of the permanent diaconate in the Church (LG 29).
Consecration and Mission are integrated (PO 3).Christ is at once Teacher, Priest and Shepherd.
The same three functions are indissolubly linked in the ministerial priesthood and exercised in various degrees by bishops, presbyters and deacons.
Priesthood of the Baptised
The Council puts new emphasis on the Church as being the entire people, encourages the “universal call to holiness,” reversing the previous view that only those with a special vocation are called to holiness
So the Council opens the door to fuller participation of lay people in the activity of the Church’s life.
Change of Emphasis
Vatican II depicts the priest as a proclaimer of the gospel of God and builder of Christian community.
Revision of RitesThe Council ordered that the ceremonies and the texts of the ordination rites be revised.
Reform of Structure
In 1972, Pope Paul VI reformed the structure of ministry in the Church.
Lector and acolyte were no longer considered ordained ministries, but rather lay ministries into which people could be installed by the bishop.
Consequences of the Council
For many who had been ordained to the old minor orders, it came as a bit of a shock that those orders could simply be suppressed by decree.
Still this historical overview shows that the Church can and must shape her ministries according to contemporary needs of the Church community.
A growing awareness of the community base of ordained ministry.
Diversity: The restoration of the diaconate and a virtual explosion of lay ministries.
Bishops – Pastors.
Priests – Preachers and Community Builders.Priests – Loss of Identity
Chapter Seven
Ordained Ministry & Priesthood of the Faithful In virtue of their baptism, all the faithful participate in the priesthood of Christ.
In NT times, there seems to have been a special stress on offering ones life as a sacrifice for those who have not yet heard of Christ, so that they could see Christian dedication as an invitation to believe.
And so, worshipping everywhere by their holy actions, the laity consecrates the world itself to God” (LG 34). Their loving acts of ministry, generosity, justice, and compassion are the visible expression of the living Christ, animating his mystical body.
The CCC asserts that: “While common priesthood of the faithful is exercised by the unfolding of baptismal grace – a life of faith, hope and charity, a life according to the spirit – the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood” (1547).
We have been so cautioned to remember that the priesthood of the faithful & the ministerial priesthood “differ essentially & not only in degree” (LG10) that we have tended to lose the missionary focus of the Church & deprive the faithful of any awareness of their priestly identity.
Two key texts can help us in our understanding of this relationship, namely, Gen 2:7 and Ezek 37. The images of body, shape and bones represent the ministerial priesthood, while the images of breath and flesh signify the common priesthood.
Priesthood in the Church OrdainedPriest Presiding & Administering the Sacraments, Prayer
Faithful Priest Romans 12:1 – Offering their lives as living sacrifices, Participating in the Sacraments, Prayer
Prophet Ordained – Preaching, Teaching Faithful – Example, Witness, Reading the Signs of the Times
King Ordained – Pastor, Leader Faithful – Compassion, Work, Engagement in the World
Vobis sum episcopus, vobiscum Christianus – St Augustine. Pope John Paul II warns against the clericalisation of lay elites (Chistifideles Laici, 23)
He is concerned that the talent and enthusiasms of the most gifted lay faithful are drawn into liturgical ministries. He fears that this may be to the detriment of their lay witness and committed political action in the world.
Chapter Eight
CHARACTER & PERSONAL IDENTITY
CHARACTER: Jesus is said to be the 'express image of God's person’, the 'very stamp of his nature' (Heb 1:3).
Then we can say he has a priestly character that is effective in his personal life and is truly indelible.
PERSONAL IDENTITY:Disciple – Call & Total Response, Cross, HopeApostle – Sent.
Chapter Nine
Community
Priesthood is essentially related to the community.
A Presence in the Community
Model of Human Authenticity.
B. Active in the Community
Preacher, Prophet, Herald of God’s Kingdom, Evangeliser, Proclaimer of God’s word and justice.
Leader:
Public Figure representing the Church. Administrator.
Forms, Organises and builds up the Christian community (requires gift of discernment, dialogue ability, & leadership to stabilise)
Connects
President of Eucharist – he effects the Church’s most powerful expression of unity. Mystagogue.
Servant – Pastor and Agent for Development, Care for the Earth, Justice and Peace.
Definition: Ordination, then, can be defined as a “recognition of the gift of leadership, and at the same time a sacramental commissioning that empowers priests to govern the community in the name of Christ.”
Chapter Ten
Characteristics of Leadership
Courage — I Tim 1:6-7.
No resentment – ‘There is no limit to what you can achieve provided you don't mind who gets the credit.’
Passionate
Openness
Service
Confidence
Inner Authority
Transparency
Presence
Self-awarenessSpirituality
(From ‘Courageous Conversations’ by Daniel O’Leary, Furrow, Feb 2006, Vol 57, No 2).
Chapter Eleven
CELIBACY
The image of the Church official in Apostolic times is that of a married person, who is a good parent.
The Encratic Influence.
Elvira, c295-302 - Imposes celibacy on bishops, priests and deacons, but has not universal application.
Nicaea, 325 - Forbids marriage after receiving orders.
Popes Innocent I in 401 & Pope Leo I, 440-461, allow married priests to live with their wives ‘as brothers and sisters’.
Trullo, 692 - Forbids marriage after receiving orders.
Pope Nicholas II forbade the faithful from attending Mass said by a priest who was not celibate in 1059.
With Gregory VII in 1073, celibacy became a condition for entering the presbyteral ministry.
The First Lateran Council (1123) prohibited those in holy orders from marrying and ordered all married priests to renounce their wives and do penance.
Candidates for the priesthood who were already married might not receive any higher orders unless they severed all relations with their wives.Trent confirms the discipline.
Motives for the Law.
Divine Intimacy
Cultic Purity
Attraction of the Kingdom (Mt 19.12)
Social Motives
Evangelically Inspired
Pope Paul VI: Christ, Church & Eschaton
Pope John Paul II: Freedom for Service & Sign of Fidelity
Conclusion Richard Sipe says: ‘Celibacy is a freely chosen dynamic state, usually vowed, that involves an honest and sustained attempt to live without direct sexual gratification in order to serve others productively for a spiritual motive’.
Therefore, she permits only those who feel themselves called to celibacy to enter the ranks of her ministerial priesthood.
Chapter 12
Inter Insigniores
Reasons for not ordaining women as priests.
1. Jesus Christ did not call any woman to be part of the twelve apostles.
2. The Apostles did not include any women in the apostolic group.
3. From the earliest centuries, the constant practice of the Church has been not to ordain women to the priesthood.
4. No natural resemblance to act in the name of Jesus.
5. Not a human rights issue.
6. Church has not got the authority.
Reasons given for showing that women can minister as priests.
1. Jesus liberates women.
2. During the Last Supper, Jesus empowered women to preside at the Eucharist.
3. Church is called to be Liberated from Prejudice.
4. Affirmed in latent tradition.
5. Women were Ordained as Deacons.
6. Supported by developments in other Christian Churches.
7. Called by the Holy Spirit
SUMMARY Basis of Sacrament: Heb 5 (Jesus the compassionate High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek).
Institution: Lk 22:19 (Do this in memory of me).
Practice: 2 Tim 1:6 (Fan into a flame the gift God gave you, when I laid my hands on you).
Prophetic Act: Lk 6:12-16 (Choice of 12); 9:1-6 (Mission of 12).
Doctrine: The sacrament of Order was instituted by Christ and is conferred through the imposition of hands and the prayer of ordination.
The minister of the sacrament is the bishop. The sacrament confers the Holy Spirit & grace for the exercise of the ministry. It imprints a sacramental character which conforms the recipient to Christ the Priest. Some ministries can be conferred on lay people by installation.
TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A PRIEST’S LIFE PATTERNHow I live as a priest is more important than what I do as a priest.What Christ does through me is more important that what I do by myself.
It is more important for me to live in union with the presbyterium than to be alone and absorbed in my work.The ministry of prayer and the word is more important than serving at tables.
It is more important to work united with my fellow workers than to do the maximum number of jobs all by myself.
It is more important to concentrate on a few points and to influence others than to be hurried and incomplete in everything.
Joint action is more important than isolated action, no matter how perfect.The cross is more important than efficiency; it is more fruitful.
Openness to the whole (community, diocese, Church throughout the world) is more important than a particular interest, no matter how important that may be.
It is more important that the faith be witnessed to all than that all ‘traditional’ demands be satisfied. (From ‘The meaning of Christian Priesthood’ by Gisbert Greshake).
Monday, February 2, 2009
Notes for Students Ch 7-12
Chapter Seven Ordained Ministry & Priesthood of the Faithful
In virtue of their baptism, all the faithful participate in the priesthood of Christ. I Peter 2:9 explains that the faithful are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation and a people set apart”. The letter goes on to say in 2:12 that Christians are to live among the gentiles so that seeing their good deeds, they will give thanks to God. In NT times, there seems to have been a special stress on offering ones life as a sacrifice for those who have not yet heard of Christ, so that they could see Christian dedication as an invitation to believe.
Vatican II teaches in LG 34 that the baptized faithful share in Christ’s “priestly office of offering spiritual worship for the glory of the father and the salvation of humanity” and that “their prayers and apostolic undertakings, family and married life, daily work, relaxation of mind and body, even the hardships of life if patiently borne… are offered to the Father in all piety along with the body of the Lord. And so, worshiping everywhere by their holy actions, the laity consecrates the world itself to God” (LG 34). Their loving acts of ministry, generosity, justice, and compassion are the visible expression of the living Christ, animating his mystical body.
The CCC asserts that: “While common priesthood of the faithful is exercised by the unfolding of baptismal grace – a life of faith, hope and charity, a life according to the spirit – the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood. (1547). The ordained have as their mission to gather, proclaim, explain, heal, nourish, and send the baptised out to engage in the world. Vatican II asserts that the laity are given the special vocation of making the Church present and fruitful in those places and circumstances where it’s only through them that it can become the salt of the earth (LG 33).
We have been so cautioned to remember that the priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood “differ essentially and not only in degree” (LG 10) that we have tended to lose the missionary focus of the Church and deprive the faithful of any awareness of their priestly identity. The more urgent pastoral problem today is that most Catholics have no idea of the priesthood of all believers and so are not affirmed by it or inspired to action by it. Besides, the statement in LG 10 that the two kinds of priesthood in the Church differ not only in degree but in essence obviously does not mean that the ordained priest undergoes an essential change, thereby ceasing to be a partaker in our common humanity. The distinction is not between two kinds of person but two kinds of priesthood. The Council refuses to attribute a higher grade or degree to the ministerial, as though the common priesthood ranked lower that it on the same scale. Instead it situates the two kinds of priesthood in different categories, like oranges and branches. The ministerial priesthood involves a public representational function rather than a personal giftedness. If anything, the common priesthood is more exalted, for the ministers are ordained for the sake of service toward the whole people of God (Dulles, PO, p.11).
Vobis sum episcopus, vobiscum Christianus – St Augustine.
There are two key texts can help us in our understanding of this relationship, namely, Gen 2:7 and Ezek 37. The images of body, shape and bones represent the ministerial priesthood, while the images of breath and flesh signify the common priesthood. These narratives and images indicate both the interdependence and the difference between ministerial priesthood and the common priesthood of the faithful. As Congar claims there is no Word without Breath and Breath is ineffective without Word. The following table illustrates this even further.
The most successful example of the appropriation by the faithful of their baptismal calling in the years since Vatican II has been the growth of lay ecclesial ministry, participating in the ordained ministry. When lay people realise their vocation through a ministry for the Church, they are participating in the apostolate of the Church in a very direct and specific manner. This apostolate entails a mission that consists of a call and a mandate with the requisite authority assigned to it. The faithful are not all called or obliged to participate in this apostolate, because their general mission is personal, spiritual and ex spiritu as distinct from being social, juridical and ex officio. The ministries and others associated with this apostolate are essential for invigorating the Church’s life and are, undoubtedly, required to ensure the smooth running of the ecclesial community. The following table presents some of the chief functions of the ordained, the baptised and those collaborating in ecclesial ministry.
Ordained Priesthood
Common Priesthood
Collaboration in Ministry
Priest
Presiding & Administering the Sacraments, Prayer
Romans 12:1, Participating in Sacraments, Prayer. LG
Eucharistic Ministry, Ministry of Word
Prophet
Preaching, Teaching
Example, Reading the ‘Signs of Times,’ Presenting way forward.
Catechising, theological work, missionary work,
King
Pastor, Leader
Compassion, Engagement in the World, Work Marriage: Love Spouse, family and community. Be Sacrament of God’s love
Administration of parishes, founding new ecclesial communities, social & youth ministries, maintaining ecclesial communities,
As baptised and confirmed members of the Church, lay ministers, by virtue of their personal call, can exercise apostleship ex officio and they have the right and duty to do so. This apostolate does not become an ‘apostolate of the hierarchy’; the laity are not turned into curates without cassocks. They do not have to wait to be empowered or delegated by the hierarchy to discharge their individual apostolic missions. However, the autonomy of the laity is not absolute; lay activity remains subordinate to the hierarchy and entails participation in the apostolate of the hierarchy. This participation does not extend to sharing in hierarchical powers but is effective in the practical order of Church life. Moreover, every ministry that is exercised publicly in the Christian community needs some kind of recognition from the local Church leader. This direct apostolate and the apostolate of Christian living are both lay apostolates, requiring no mandate from the hierarchy. Yet there is a sense in which all apostolic activity which involves participation in the hierarchical apostolate requires a formal mandate, since this apostolate derives from the mandate of Jesus and is a public activity in the Church. This dialectic of autonomy and dependence shows that lay people, though directors in a certain sense, continue to be directed. Lay ministries co-operate and collaborate with the hierarchical ministry in forming the ecclesial community.
One of the real benefits of having laity serve in ministerial functions is the solidarity which they express with the other laity of the parish. However, Pope John Paul II has warned against the clericalisation of lay elites (Chistifideles Laici, 23) and is concerned that the talent and enthusiasms of the most gifted lay faithful are drawn into liturgical ministries. He fears that this may be to the detriment of their lay witness and committed political action in the world. The hoped-for lay presence in the world has seldom received the theological development, catechesis, or implementation consistent with its importance as a major theme of the Council.
Chapter Eight CHARACTER & PERSONAL IDENTITY
CHARACTER: Jesus Christ is said to be the 'express image of God's person’, the 'very stamp of his nature' (Heb 1:3). It is derived from the Greek word for an engraving tool or a die stamp. Moral character indicates the consistent conduct of a personal agent whose mind and will are fixed on a supreme good, so that moral action comes to him or her almost as second nature. The priestly character is the personal reality corresponding to the outward matter and form of ordination. Mysterium Ecclesiae of 1973, states that the rite of ordination confers “on priests not only an increase of grace for carrying out ecclesiastical duties in a holy way, but also a permanent designation by Christ, or character, by virtue of which they are equipped for their work and endowed with the necessary power that is derived from the supreme power of Christ”. Priestly character is a gift, indelibly marked on the soul at ordination, and a task to be achieved through continuous personal formation. When a priest’s mind and heart are fixed on being fully a priest, then his conduct will be consistent with priestly living and ministry and eventually this priestly activity will come to him almost as second nature. Then we can say he has a priestly character that is effective in his personal life and is truly indelible.
PERSONAL IDENTITY:
Disciple – Call & Total Response, Cross, Hope
Apostle – Sent.
Chapter Nine Community
A Presence in the Community
Symbol Bearer: Officially designated to embody the community’s values.
Living Reminder of God’s Word.
Spiritual Personality.
Model of Human Authenticity.
B Active in the Community
Preacher, Prophet, Herald of God’s Kingdom, Evangeliser, Proclaimer of God’s word and justice.
Leader:
Public Figure representing the Church.
Administrator.
Forms, Organises and builds up the Christian community (requires gift of discernment, dialogue ability, & leadership to stabilise)
Connects
President of Eucharist – he effects the Church’s most powerful expression of unity. Mystagogue.
Servant – Pastor and Agent for Development, Care for the Earth, Justice and Peace.
Definition: Ordination, then, can be defined as a “recognition of the gift of leadership, and at the same time a sacramental commissioning that empowers priests to govern the community in the name of Christ.”
Chapter Ten Characteristics of Leadership
Courage — I Tim 1:6-7.
No resentment – ‘There is no limit to what you can achieve provided you don't mind who gets the credit.’
Passionate
Openness
Service
Confidence
Inner Authority
Transparency
Presence
Self-awareness
Spirituality
(From ‘Courageous Conversations’ by Daniel O’Leary, Furrow, Feb 2006, Vol 57, No 2).
Chapter Eleven CELIBACY
The Apostles were, for the most part, married men who had discovered the hidden riches of the Kingdom of God and were so enthralled at the prospect of being involved in establishing the Kingdom that they joyfully left everything, without counting the cost, to follow Jesus. Thus, while they were essentially capable of marriage, their involvement with Christ and his Kingdom so engaged them that they were “existentially incapable” of doing other than leaving all things to follow Christ. In this sense, they are truly “eunuchs” for the sake of the Kingdom.
In the Synoptics, the original experiential fact of this ‘inner logic’ is already formulated as a demand. Whoever wants to be Jesus’ disciple must leave everything - ‘house, brothers, land, mother, father’(Matthew). In Luke, the formulation of this demand is less strict. The term ‘leave’ is weakened to ‘hate’ – weakened, because for a Semite ‘hate’ in such a context meant ‘to love less’. Jesus approvingly states a fact of religious psychology; in view of their joy in finding the ‘hidden pearl’ some people cannot do other than live as unmarried. But there is absolutely no question of a law commanding this. Thus, the NT knows no juridically binding connection between office in the Church and celibacy, but it recognises something more fundamental - that the religious experience of the overpowering attraction of God’s Kingdom and of being involved in establishing it becomes, for some people, a condition which makes entrance into marriage impossible in practice. Still, the image of the Church official in Apostolic times is that of a married person, who is a good parent.
The Encratic Influence.
Elvira, c295-302 - Imposes celibacy on bishops, priests and deacons, but has not universal application.
Nicaea, 325 - Forbids marriage after receiving orders.
Popes Innocent I in 401 & Pope Leo I, 440-461, allow married priests to live with their wives ‘as brothers and sisters’.
Trullo, 692 - Forbids marriage after receiving orders.
Pope Nicholas II forbade the faithful from attending Mass said by a priest who was not celibate in 1059.
With Gregory VII in 1073, celibacy became a condition for entering the presbyteral ministry.
The First Lateran Council (1123) prohibited those in holy orders from marrying and ordered all married priests to renounce their wives and do penance. The Second Lateran Council (1139) declared celibacy a law of the universal Church. It said that marriage of subdeacons, deacons, or priests after their ordination was invalid. Candidates for the priesthood who were already married might not receive any higher orders unless they severed all relations with their wives.
Trent confirms the discipline.
Motives for the Law.
Divine Intimacy
Cultic Purity
Attraction of the Kingdom (Mt 19.12)
Social Motives
Evangelically Inspired
Pope Paul VI: Christ, Church & Eschaton
Pope John Paul II: Freedom for Service & Sign of Fidelity
Conclusion
Richard Sipe says: ‘Celibacy is a freely chosen dynamic state, usually vowed, that involves an honest and sustained attempt to live without direct sexual gratification in order to serve others productively for a spiritual motive’. While the Church never imposes celibacy on anyone against his will or obliges anyone to become a priest, she has the right to impose restrictions on the manner of life of those whom she chooses as her ministers. On the basis of the biblical connection between religious celibacy and the Kingdom of God, she has concretised the state of life of all who wish to freely accept office in the Church into a Christian way of life that makes them available to all in a special way. Therefore, she permits only those who feel themselves called to celibacy to enter the ranks of her ministerial priesthood.
Chapter 12 Inter Insigniores
Reasons for not ordaining women as priests.
1. Jesus Christ did not call any woman to be part of the twelve apostles.
2. The Apostles did not include any women in the apostolic group.
3. From the earliest centuries, the constant practice of the Church has been not to ordain women to the priesthood.
4. No natural resemblance to act in the name of Jesus.
5. Not a human rights issue.
6. Church has not got the authority.
Reasons given for showing that women can minister as priests.
1. Jesus liberates women.
2. During the Last Supper, Jesus empowered women to preside at the Eucharist.
3. Church is called to be Liberated from Prejudice.
4. Affirmed in latent tradition.
5. Women were Ordained as Deacons.
6. Supported by developments in other Christian Churches.
7. Called by the Holy Spirit
SUMMARY
Basis of Sacrament: Heb 5 (Jesus the compassionate High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek).
Institution: Mt 18:18 (binding & loosing), Lk 22:19 (Do this in memory of me).
Practice: 2 Tim 1:6 (Fan into a flame the gift God gave you, when I laid my hands on you).
Prophetic Act: Lk 6:12-16 (Choice of 12); 9:1-6 (Mission of 12).
Doctrine: The sacrament of Order was instituted by Christ and is conferred through the imposition of hands and the prayer of ordination. The minister of the sacrament is the bishop. The sacrament confers the Holy Spirit and grace for the exercise of the ministry. It imprints a sacramental character which conforms the recipient to Christ the Priest. Some ministries can be conferred on lay people by installation.
TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A PRIEST’S LIFE PATTERN
How I live as a priest is more important than what I do as a priest.
What Christ does through me is more important that what I do by myself.
It is more important for me to live in union with the presbyterium than to be alone and absorbed in my work.
The ministry of prayer and the word is more important than serving at tables.
It is more important to work united with my fellow workers than to do the maximum number of jobs all by myself.
It is more important to concentrate on a few points and to influence others than to be hurried and incomplete in everything.
Joint action is more important than isolated action, no matter how perfect.
The cross is more important than efficiency; it is more fruitful.
Openness to the whole (community, diocese, Church throughout the world) is more important than a particular interest, no matter how important that may be.
It is more important that the faith be witnessed to all than that all ‘traditional’ demands be satisfied. (From ‘The meaning of Christian Priesthood’ by Gisbert Greshake).
In virtue of their baptism, all the faithful participate in the priesthood of Christ. I Peter 2:9 explains that the faithful are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation and a people set apart”. The letter goes on to say in 2:12 that Christians are to live among the gentiles so that seeing their good deeds, they will give thanks to God. In NT times, there seems to have been a special stress on offering ones life as a sacrifice for those who have not yet heard of Christ, so that they could see Christian dedication as an invitation to believe.
Vatican II teaches in LG 34 that the baptized faithful share in Christ’s “priestly office of offering spiritual worship for the glory of the father and the salvation of humanity” and that “their prayers and apostolic undertakings, family and married life, daily work, relaxation of mind and body, even the hardships of life if patiently borne… are offered to the Father in all piety along with the body of the Lord. And so, worshiping everywhere by their holy actions, the laity consecrates the world itself to God” (LG 34). Their loving acts of ministry, generosity, justice, and compassion are the visible expression of the living Christ, animating his mystical body.
The CCC asserts that: “While common priesthood of the faithful is exercised by the unfolding of baptismal grace – a life of faith, hope and charity, a life according to the spirit – the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood. (1547). The ordained have as their mission to gather, proclaim, explain, heal, nourish, and send the baptised out to engage in the world. Vatican II asserts that the laity are given the special vocation of making the Church present and fruitful in those places and circumstances where it’s only through them that it can become the salt of the earth (LG 33).
We have been so cautioned to remember that the priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood “differ essentially and not only in degree” (LG 10) that we have tended to lose the missionary focus of the Church and deprive the faithful of any awareness of their priestly identity. The more urgent pastoral problem today is that most Catholics have no idea of the priesthood of all believers and so are not affirmed by it or inspired to action by it. Besides, the statement in LG 10 that the two kinds of priesthood in the Church differ not only in degree but in essence obviously does not mean that the ordained priest undergoes an essential change, thereby ceasing to be a partaker in our common humanity. The distinction is not between two kinds of person but two kinds of priesthood. The Council refuses to attribute a higher grade or degree to the ministerial, as though the common priesthood ranked lower that it on the same scale. Instead it situates the two kinds of priesthood in different categories, like oranges and branches. The ministerial priesthood involves a public representational function rather than a personal giftedness. If anything, the common priesthood is more exalted, for the ministers are ordained for the sake of service toward the whole people of God (Dulles, PO, p.11).
Vobis sum episcopus, vobiscum Christianus – St Augustine.
There are two key texts can help us in our understanding of this relationship, namely, Gen 2:7 and Ezek 37. The images of body, shape and bones represent the ministerial priesthood, while the images of breath and flesh signify the common priesthood. These narratives and images indicate both the interdependence and the difference between ministerial priesthood and the common priesthood of the faithful. As Congar claims there is no Word without Breath and Breath is ineffective without Word. The following table illustrates this even further.
The most successful example of the appropriation by the faithful of their baptismal calling in the years since Vatican II has been the growth of lay ecclesial ministry, participating in the ordained ministry. When lay people realise their vocation through a ministry for the Church, they are participating in the apostolate of the Church in a very direct and specific manner. This apostolate entails a mission that consists of a call and a mandate with the requisite authority assigned to it. The faithful are not all called or obliged to participate in this apostolate, because their general mission is personal, spiritual and ex spiritu as distinct from being social, juridical and ex officio. The ministries and others associated with this apostolate are essential for invigorating the Church’s life and are, undoubtedly, required to ensure the smooth running of the ecclesial community. The following table presents some of the chief functions of the ordained, the baptised and those collaborating in ecclesial ministry.
Ordained Priesthood
Common Priesthood
Collaboration in Ministry
Priest
Presiding & Administering the Sacraments, Prayer
Romans 12:1, Participating in Sacraments, Prayer. LG
Eucharistic Ministry, Ministry of Word
Prophet
Preaching, Teaching
Example, Reading the ‘Signs of Times,’ Presenting way forward.
Catechising, theological work, missionary work,
King
Pastor, Leader
Compassion, Engagement in the World, Work Marriage: Love Spouse, family and community. Be Sacrament of God’s love
Administration of parishes, founding new ecclesial communities, social & youth ministries, maintaining ecclesial communities,
As baptised and confirmed members of the Church, lay ministers, by virtue of their personal call, can exercise apostleship ex officio and they have the right and duty to do so. This apostolate does not become an ‘apostolate of the hierarchy’; the laity are not turned into curates without cassocks. They do not have to wait to be empowered or delegated by the hierarchy to discharge their individual apostolic missions. However, the autonomy of the laity is not absolute; lay activity remains subordinate to the hierarchy and entails participation in the apostolate of the hierarchy. This participation does not extend to sharing in hierarchical powers but is effective in the practical order of Church life. Moreover, every ministry that is exercised publicly in the Christian community needs some kind of recognition from the local Church leader. This direct apostolate and the apostolate of Christian living are both lay apostolates, requiring no mandate from the hierarchy. Yet there is a sense in which all apostolic activity which involves participation in the hierarchical apostolate requires a formal mandate, since this apostolate derives from the mandate of Jesus and is a public activity in the Church. This dialectic of autonomy and dependence shows that lay people, though directors in a certain sense, continue to be directed. Lay ministries co-operate and collaborate with the hierarchical ministry in forming the ecclesial community.
One of the real benefits of having laity serve in ministerial functions is the solidarity which they express with the other laity of the parish. However, Pope John Paul II has warned against the clericalisation of lay elites (Chistifideles Laici, 23) and is concerned that the talent and enthusiasms of the most gifted lay faithful are drawn into liturgical ministries. He fears that this may be to the detriment of their lay witness and committed political action in the world. The hoped-for lay presence in the world has seldom received the theological development, catechesis, or implementation consistent with its importance as a major theme of the Council.
Chapter Eight CHARACTER & PERSONAL IDENTITY
CHARACTER: Jesus Christ is said to be the 'express image of God's person’, the 'very stamp of his nature' (Heb 1:3). It is derived from the Greek word for an engraving tool or a die stamp. Moral character indicates the consistent conduct of a personal agent whose mind and will are fixed on a supreme good, so that moral action comes to him or her almost as second nature. The priestly character is the personal reality corresponding to the outward matter and form of ordination. Mysterium Ecclesiae of 1973, states that the rite of ordination confers “on priests not only an increase of grace for carrying out ecclesiastical duties in a holy way, but also a permanent designation by Christ, or character, by virtue of which they are equipped for their work and endowed with the necessary power that is derived from the supreme power of Christ”. Priestly character is a gift, indelibly marked on the soul at ordination, and a task to be achieved through continuous personal formation. When a priest’s mind and heart are fixed on being fully a priest, then his conduct will be consistent with priestly living and ministry and eventually this priestly activity will come to him almost as second nature. Then we can say he has a priestly character that is effective in his personal life and is truly indelible.
PERSONAL IDENTITY:
Disciple – Call & Total Response, Cross, Hope
Apostle – Sent.
Chapter Nine Community
A Presence in the Community
Symbol Bearer: Officially designated to embody the community’s values.
Living Reminder of God’s Word.
Spiritual Personality.
Model of Human Authenticity.
B Active in the Community
Preacher, Prophet, Herald of God’s Kingdom, Evangeliser, Proclaimer of God’s word and justice.
Leader:
Public Figure representing the Church.
Administrator.
Forms, Organises and builds up the Christian community (requires gift of discernment, dialogue ability, & leadership to stabilise)
Connects
President of Eucharist – he effects the Church’s most powerful expression of unity. Mystagogue.
Servant – Pastor and Agent for Development, Care for the Earth, Justice and Peace.
Definition: Ordination, then, can be defined as a “recognition of the gift of leadership, and at the same time a sacramental commissioning that empowers priests to govern the community in the name of Christ.”
Chapter Ten Characteristics of Leadership
Courage — I Tim 1:6-7.
No resentment – ‘There is no limit to what you can achieve provided you don't mind who gets the credit.’
Passionate
Openness
Service
Confidence
Inner Authority
Transparency
Presence
Self-awareness
Spirituality
(From ‘Courageous Conversations’ by Daniel O’Leary, Furrow, Feb 2006, Vol 57, No 2).
Chapter Eleven CELIBACY
The Apostles were, for the most part, married men who had discovered the hidden riches of the Kingdom of God and were so enthralled at the prospect of being involved in establishing the Kingdom that they joyfully left everything, without counting the cost, to follow Jesus. Thus, while they were essentially capable of marriage, their involvement with Christ and his Kingdom so engaged them that they were “existentially incapable” of doing other than leaving all things to follow Christ. In this sense, they are truly “eunuchs” for the sake of the Kingdom.
In the Synoptics, the original experiential fact of this ‘inner logic’ is already formulated as a demand. Whoever wants to be Jesus’ disciple must leave everything - ‘house, brothers, land, mother, father’(Matthew). In Luke, the formulation of this demand is less strict. The term ‘leave’ is weakened to ‘hate’ – weakened, because for a Semite ‘hate’ in such a context meant ‘to love less’. Jesus approvingly states a fact of religious psychology; in view of their joy in finding the ‘hidden pearl’ some people cannot do other than live as unmarried. But there is absolutely no question of a law commanding this. Thus, the NT knows no juridically binding connection between office in the Church and celibacy, but it recognises something more fundamental - that the religious experience of the overpowering attraction of God’s Kingdom and of being involved in establishing it becomes, for some people, a condition which makes entrance into marriage impossible in practice. Still, the image of the Church official in Apostolic times is that of a married person, who is a good parent.
The Encratic Influence.
Elvira, c295-302 - Imposes celibacy on bishops, priests and deacons, but has not universal application.
Nicaea, 325 - Forbids marriage after receiving orders.
Popes Innocent I in 401 & Pope Leo I, 440-461, allow married priests to live with their wives ‘as brothers and sisters’.
Trullo, 692 - Forbids marriage after receiving orders.
Pope Nicholas II forbade the faithful from attending Mass said by a priest who was not celibate in 1059.
With Gregory VII in 1073, celibacy became a condition for entering the presbyteral ministry.
The First Lateran Council (1123) prohibited those in holy orders from marrying and ordered all married priests to renounce their wives and do penance. The Second Lateran Council (1139) declared celibacy a law of the universal Church. It said that marriage of subdeacons, deacons, or priests after their ordination was invalid. Candidates for the priesthood who were already married might not receive any higher orders unless they severed all relations with their wives.
Trent confirms the discipline.
Motives for the Law.
Divine Intimacy
Cultic Purity
Attraction of the Kingdom (Mt 19.12)
Social Motives
Evangelically Inspired
Pope Paul VI: Christ, Church & Eschaton
Pope John Paul II: Freedom for Service & Sign of Fidelity
Conclusion
Richard Sipe says: ‘Celibacy is a freely chosen dynamic state, usually vowed, that involves an honest and sustained attempt to live without direct sexual gratification in order to serve others productively for a spiritual motive’. While the Church never imposes celibacy on anyone against his will or obliges anyone to become a priest, she has the right to impose restrictions on the manner of life of those whom she chooses as her ministers. On the basis of the biblical connection between religious celibacy and the Kingdom of God, she has concretised the state of life of all who wish to freely accept office in the Church into a Christian way of life that makes them available to all in a special way. Therefore, she permits only those who feel themselves called to celibacy to enter the ranks of her ministerial priesthood.
Chapter 12 Inter Insigniores
Reasons for not ordaining women as priests.
1. Jesus Christ did not call any woman to be part of the twelve apostles.
2. The Apostles did not include any women in the apostolic group.
3. From the earliest centuries, the constant practice of the Church has been not to ordain women to the priesthood.
4. No natural resemblance to act in the name of Jesus.
5. Not a human rights issue.
6. Church has not got the authority.
Reasons given for showing that women can minister as priests.
1. Jesus liberates women.
2. During the Last Supper, Jesus empowered women to preside at the Eucharist.
3. Church is called to be Liberated from Prejudice.
4. Affirmed in latent tradition.
5. Women were Ordained as Deacons.
6. Supported by developments in other Christian Churches.
7. Called by the Holy Spirit
SUMMARY
Basis of Sacrament: Heb 5 (Jesus the compassionate High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek).
Institution: Mt 18:18 (binding & loosing), Lk 22:19 (Do this in memory of me).
Practice: 2 Tim 1:6 (Fan into a flame the gift God gave you, when I laid my hands on you).
Prophetic Act: Lk 6:12-16 (Choice of 12); 9:1-6 (Mission of 12).
Doctrine: The sacrament of Order was instituted by Christ and is conferred through the imposition of hands and the prayer of ordination. The minister of the sacrament is the bishop. The sacrament confers the Holy Spirit and grace for the exercise of the ministry. It imprints a sacramental character which conforms the recipient to Christ the Priest. Some ministries can be conferred on lay people by installation.
TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A PRIEST’S LIFE PATTERN
How I live as a priest is more important than what I do as a priest.
What Christ does through me is more important that what I do by myself.
It is more important for me to live in union with the presbyterium than to be alone and absorbed in my work.
The ministry of prayer and the word is more important than serving at tables.
It is more important to work united with my fellow workers than to do the maximum number of jobs all by myself.
It is more important to concentrate on a few points and to influence others than to be hurried and incomplete in everything.
Joint action is more important than isolated action, no matter how perfect.
The cross is more important than efficiency; it is more fruitful.
Openness to the whole (community, diocese, Church throughout the world) is more important than a particular interest, no matter how important that may be.
It is more important that the faith be witnessed to all than that all ‘traditional’ demands be satisfied. (From ‘The meaning of Christian Priesthood’ by Gisbert Greshake).
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