THE SACRAMENT OF ORDERS
Jesus Christ, the only mediator between God and humanity (I Tim 2.5), possesses a unique and absolute priesthood which, while fulfilling the Old Testament priesthood, surpassed it and abolished it (Heb). He exercised his priesthood as Prophet by revealing the Father, as Shepherd 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). Consecrated and sent on a mission through baptism and confirmation, every Christian is made to share in Christ’s priesthood; as a member of the priestly people he/she shares in the Church’s mission of representing Christ’s unique mediatory function. However, Christ entrusted a special function to the apostles whom He chose to be His authentic witnesses, the dispensers of His mysteries and the shepherds of His flock. 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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
William Bausch, A New Look at the Sacraments, Mystic, 23rd Publications, 1999.
S. Brislin, The Ministry of Deacons in an African Diocese, Eldoret: Gaba Publications, 1983.
Raymond Brown, Priest and Bishop. New York: Paulist Press, 1970.
Donald Cozzins, The Changing Face of the Priesthood, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 2000.
Burnette & Gerald Fish, The Kalenjiin Heritage, Africa Gospel Church, Kericho, 1995, Chapter 34, Priests and Elders, pp 262-266
Avery Dulles, The Priestly Office, New York, Paulist, 1997.
Jacques Dupuis & Josef Neuner, The Christian Faith, New York, Alba House, 2001.
Jean Galot, Theology of the Priesthood, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1986.
J Lang, Ministers of Grace: Women in the early Church, Slough: St Paul’s, 1989.
Paul Philibert, Stewards of God’s Mysteries, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 2004.
Joseph Martos, Doors to the Sacred, Missouri, Liguori, 2001.
Richard McBrien, Catholicism, San Francisco, Harper, 1994.
Kevin McNamara, ed., Vatican II, The Constitution on the Church, London, Chapman, 1968.
Aidan Nichols, Holy Order, Veritas: Dublin, 1990.
Kenan B Osborne, Orders and Ministry, Orbis, New York, 2006.
Geoffrey Robinson, Confronting Power & Sex in the Catholic Church, Liturgical, Collegeville, 2008.
Len Sperry, Sex, Priestly Ministry, and the Church, Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2003.
Susan Wood, Sacramental Orders, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000.
Lumen Gentium, Presbyterorum Ordinis, Optatum Totius, Vatican Council II, Austin Flannery, ed., Dublin, Dominican, 1975.
John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, 1992; Christifidelis Laici, 1988.
Interdicasterial Instruction, Ecclesia de Mysterio, 1997.
Congregation for the Clergy, The Priest and the Third Christian Millennium, 1999; The Priest, Pastor and Leader of the Parish Community, 2002.
Code of Canon Law and Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Chapter One OLD TESTAMENT
Early Israel
• No distinct priesthood – Father of Family & Head of Clan functions as priest.
• National Leaders sometimes led people in worship.
• 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).
Intermediary
Deuteronomy 33:8-10 suggests three basic priestly functions:
• Discernment of God’s will through the casting of sacred lots (1 Sam 14:41-42)
• Teaching and interpreting the Mosaic Law, the Torah (Dt 33:10).
• Sacrifice and cultic offering (Dt 33:10).
Prophets replace priests as spokespeople for God.
Scribes and rabbis assume tasks of preserving and teaching the traditions of Judaism.
Priests - Temple Ministry.
Elders
Groups of elders organised and governed the Jewish communities.
Chapter Two JESUS CHRIST
Pattern for Ministry
1. Call from God: Not self-initiated, not from community. 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, and 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. 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. When Jesus spoke of service, he spoke of giving his life as a 'ransom for many' (Mk 10:45), and as the good shepherd of laying down his life for the sheep (Jn 10:15). Paul writes to one of his Churches, almost as if he were conferring a favour, ‘To you it is given, on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for his sake’ (Ph 1:29). Suffering, then, not for its own sake, but to be utilised to serve and enrich others by associating it with the sufferings of Christ, who offered his life out of love for all.
4. Shepherd
'I am the good shepherd; I know my own, and my own know me; and I lay down my life for the sheep' (Jn 10:14-15). Attitude of shepherding seen especially in his leadership and compassionate care. As a leader, he spoke out for justice for the poor and he formed a community of followers around him, sharing his insights with them, and instructing them how to behave (Mt 10). As a compassionate care, Jesus healed people who were wounded, sick, possessed and in pain and reconciled the ‘lost’ with God. He is the shepherd who leaves the ninety nine and goes in search of the lost one (Lk 15.4).
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 claimed what appeared to be a sacrilegious closeness to God whom he addressed intimately as Abba (Mk 14.36). He did not hesitate even to revise the law of Moses and he spoke out against religious leaders of his day. His primary message was: the “Kingdom of God is among you,” (Lk 17:21). God is present in the here and now, not in the above or in the future. God is a loving and compassionate presence in our lives and always overcomes the power of evil. Jesus taught that the good news of God’s love for the marginalised and the outcasts of society. Priests carry this good news to the far ends of the earth, especially to those who are weary and to those who have no hope (PO 4, CCC 1565, PdV 15)
Transmission of Ministry
• The Call of the Twelve Disciples. Jesus chose ‘those he wanted’ – Mk 3.13.
• The Apostles: The leaders of the early Christian community.
• Peter exercises Primacy (Mt 16.18, Lk 22.32, Jn 21.15.19).
• The Seventy Two – Lk 10.1-12.
• The Mandate and the Holy Spirit – Jn 20:21-22.
Chapter Three NEW TESTAMENT COMMUNITIES
The Twelve
• Elders in a Jewish Christian Community – Represented Jewish Group and Proclaimed Christ.
• Peter, James and Consensus Leadership.
• Twelve: Representing the New Israel and Universality of Church.
• Retention of Ministry: The Election of Matthias – Acts 1.15-26. The retention of apostolic ministry must be regarded as the essence of early Christianity.
• The Church remains forever based on the witness of the Apostles – Rev 21.14. 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: Bishops link with Apostles and Fidelity to Apostolic Faith.
Acts: Chapter Six
• Development of ministry: Seven men chosen for ministry.
• The Twelve: 1) feel a genuine need for assistance; 2) propose a solution; “select seven men filled with the Spirit and wisdom, whom we shall appoint”; 3) win community acceptance for their proposal; 4) let the community choose the candidates; and 5) present them to the Twelve; 6) who pray and impose hands on them; 7) and the word of God continues to spread. As the first account of what the Apostles do when they need help in ministry, this NT passage becomes a model in choosing new ministers to continue the mission of Jesus, (Noll, pp. 98-99).
• First indication of diversity of ministries.
• Deacon: Philippians 1:1 and I Tim 3:8-13. Deaconess Phoebe – Romans 16:1-2.
Missionary Apostles
Besides the Twelve, there were other “apostles”, bringing the words of Jesus Christ to the world. Paul of Tarsus, Barnabas, (Acts 14:14), Andronicus, Junias (or possibly Junia), Rom 16:7. To be fit for this ministry a person had to have seen the risen Lord so that he could bear witness to what he himself had experienced (I Cor 9:1; Acts 1:22). They were itinerant evangelists who travelled from one city to another making converts, establishing communities, placing others in charge, and then moving on. While Paul claims to be an apostle (Rom 11.13) and he uses the term ‘apostle’ for Silvanus, Timothy (I Th 2.7) and 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. Any structure was viable that kept the gospel alive, the tradition firm, and the community intact. In the early Church documents, we discover a fluidity in ministry, leadership, form, and structure. Note I Cor 12:4-7, 27-31, 1 Tim 5:9-13, Eph 4.4-7, 11-12, I Pet 4:10-11. There were many gifts of ministry, and these gifts were distributed among many people. They were exercised by gift, inspiration, consensus, or appointment and were prompted by the needs of the community. All the members are responsible in solidarity. Each makes his or her contribution to the progress of the whole. Each utilise his/her charisms, so that the community is built and grows in love. The Spirit is given to each for the good of all. The key feature in this structuring of the community is ‘service’.
Paul seems to tell us in I Cor 12.28 that the original group of ministers, Apostles and disciples, are gradually being replaced in the Church by a second level of ministers called apostles, prophets and teachers.
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. They were chosen in a variety of ways and for the same reasons we choose leaders today for their natural talent or their connections. Paul refers to them as “those who labour for the community” or “those who are over you.” Some places seem to be ruled by a local committee of elders. Others seem to be ruled by one of the missionary apostles. Other communities are ruled by a single person in concert with his council of elders and, later, all by himself. In speaking of elders, the plural is always used. To be an elder is to be a member of a group, a ‘college’, the members of which seem to have corporate responsibility for directing the life of the community. Note I Peter 5.2 and Acts 20.17-36. The word, presbyeteros, is not part of sacerdotal vocabulary and does not say anything about the possibility of exercising a sacred function. However, elders exercise the presidency, preach and teach (I Tim 5.17) and anoint the sick oil (Jms 5.14).
Titles: The names of activities and the groups who performed them became titles in a more organised Church. Apostoloi means “emissaries”. Deacon is from diakonia, meaning “ministry” or “service”. The titles bishops and priests come from the activities of overseeing, episkopoi, and being elders, presbyteroi, respectively.
The Pastoral Epistles
• 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.
• Probable Development: Apostles & Disciples → apostles, prophets, & teachers → presbyter-bishops & deacons. The structured leadership of a supervising committee of presbyter-bishops assisted by deacons evolved.
Priesthood
In the NT communities, there were no specific Christians who were called priests. Nowhere in the entire NT is the word priest used of a Christian individual, even of any of the apostles. The reasons for this are as follows. First, the word priest was associated with the pagan priesthood and their animal sacrifices, and so the early Christians avoided the term. Second, the first Jewish Christians already had priests in the temple and went there, so there was no need to duplicate the office nor confuse it. However, when the Jewish temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., and the Jewish priesthood with it, considerable doubt was left in the minds of both Jews and Jewish Christians as to whether the concept of priesthood was even valid anymore. The Epistle to the Hebrews tried to answer this and to comfort the bewildered by saying there was now no need for a priesthood. The crucifixion and death of Jesus replaced forever any need for a temple, a sacrifice, or a priesthood. Jesus, the high priest, rendered a once-and-for-all sacrifice, superseding all others and making all future sacrifices and priestly offices superfluous. So, again, there was no reason for early Christianity to think in terms of priests.
Then, too, the attitude of early Christians, inherited from Jesus, manifested a disinterest in priests, priesthood, and temple. According to Jesus, God could be encountered anywhere. They recalled that he said as much to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (Jn 4:20-24), that God would be worshipped in spirit and in truth and that where two or three are gathered in his (Jesus’) name he would be in their midst (Mt 18:20). Indeed, Jesus seems to be quite critical of all cultic acts, took a dim view of the dietary laws, was liberal about the Sabbath, and spoke of destroying the temple. Therefore, the early Christians took their clue from such words. They did not need temple, sacrifice, or priests. If there is to be any temple at all, it is to be one constructed of “living stones” of people who offer up “spiritual” sacrifices to God through Jesus (1 Pet 2:4).
So, leaders in the Christian community did not consider themselves priests. Rather they perceived themselves as stewards of the mysteries of God (1 Cor 4:1), arousing the faith of a priestly people. Moreover, it is not clear that anyone in particular was commissioned to preside over the Eucharist in the beginning. The most that can be said is that those who presided did so with the consent of the local Church and that this consent was tantamount, but not always equivalent, to ordination.
Priestly People
However, the baptised are perceived as a priestly and a holy people (I Pet 1:2). The term is applied to Christians collectively in 1 Peter 2:10 and in Revelation 1:6; 5:10; 20:6. No one is excluded from the Lord or given special status or privilege since the Spirit is poured out on all (Acts 2:17). The Church is therefore a new Israel with a new priesthood and a new High Priest ‘of the order of Melchizedek and forever,’ who by his perfect life and sacrificial death had become the perfect mediator between God and humanity (Heb 3). The link between Jesus and Melchizedek is mentioned in Heb 5:6, 6:20, 7.1, 7:10, 7:15. In Gen 14:17-20, Melchizedek gains prominence because of his meeting with Abraham. There is no mention of his ancestors or descendents which suggests the idea of an eternal priesthood. He is seen as superior to Abraham because he was offered a tithe of everything by Abraham; so, he is superior to all the descendents of Abraham, including the Levites. He is King of Salem, that is, Jerusalem, the place where Yahweh lives. He offers the bread and wine, giving us the image of the Eucharist. Ps 110:4, represents him as a figure of the Messiah, and implies that when the Christ comes he will replace the levitical priesthood.
Other early writers took up this notion that what Christians did through their worship and their daily lives was a priestly activity of a holy people (I Pet 2:1-10). They were a nation of priests who served God and who would reign with Christ at the end of time (Rev 1:6; 5:10; 20:6). So by the end of the first century, Christians had developed an understanding of priesthood that was based on but went beyond their Jewish heritage. There were no specific Christians who were called priests, but Christ himself was regarded as the high priest of the new religion and in a spiritual sense all believers were part of a priestly people called to honour God by praise and self-sacrifice.
Chapter Four EARLY DEVELOPMENT
The Second Century
Monarchical Episcopate: Around 110 AD we find evidence for the so-called monarchical episcopate, a local city or town Church presided over by one bishop, in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch.
Bishop’s emergence:
• Apostles died
• Persecution
• No Second Coming
• Internal strife & Heresies
This led to a need for a firm, solid, stable leadership.
By the end of the second century, the tripartite ministry of bishop, presbyter, and deacon becomes universal in the Church (Clement of Rome & Didache).
The title, Pope (father), is reserved for Bishop of Alexandria in the East, but in the West it is used for important bishops and only in the 11th Century it comes to be limited to the Bishop of Rome. The title Patriarch (father who rules) is reserved for the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem (Pentarchy).
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 and clear during worship, “porters” were assigned janitorial and guard duties, “acolytes” accompanied the bishop and acted as secretaries and messengers, “widows” and “virgins” were appointed to pray for the Church or to take care of the sick and needy, “teachers” were assigned to instruct catechumens, and those with exceptional ability were sometimes allowed to preach to the faithful.
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. 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 and Ordination.
In the Greco-Roman political and social world, there were indeed well-defined orders, the order of senators, the order of decurions, and 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. However, Tertullian (160-225), began to use a version of these political and social orders for the church structures themselves. He began writing about an order of bishops, an order of priests, and an order of deacons, probably also under the influence of Psalm 110:4 and Hebrews 5-7, which refer to the priesthood “according to the order of Melchizedek”. Only gradually did other Christian communities take over the use of the term for their Christian leadership. By the third century, the terms ‘order’ and ‘ordination’ were accepted by the Church and they were used especially to denote the clerical aspect of ministry, the sacred functions fulfilled by typical priests. Cleric is derived from the Greek, kleros, meaning lot or heritage as in Acts 1:26, the lot falling to Matthias. The Greek ritual was referred to as the laying on of hands, cheirothesia. Both ordination and cheirothesia gave a certain distinctive and officially acknowledged role to someone for specific ministries within the local community. Now the leadership of the Church was recognised and set apart through a liturgy of ordination.
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. The bishop is elected by the people, but he receives the imposition of hands from another bishop. The presbyter, or priest, is ordained by the bishop with other priests joining in with the laying on of hands. According to the rite of ordination, presbyters were compared with the elders whom Moses had chosen (Num 11:17-25). With the bishop’s permission a presbyter could replace him as the presiding eucharistic minister. For centuries the approval of two groups was required for this ordination: by the community and by the pastoral group he was joining. There was an intimate connection between a community and its bishop with the former having its free choice of the latter.
Cyprian (210-258), Bishop of Carthage.
In the early Church there was an avoidance in using priestly language in relation to ministry. But now because the Eucharist is clearly linked to the sacrifice of Jesus, Jesus is seen as the great high priest, the community as a priestly people and of the highly sacral culture, the bishop begins to be perceived as a priest, especially in the Didache, the writings of Clement, Ignatius, and Hippolytus. Then Cyprian repeatedly calls the bishop a high priest and applies the priestly language of the OT to the Church order of his day. The terms presbyter and bishop contain a clear reference to the role of those ministries in leading the community. The term priest, in contrast, seems to define the office solely in terms of worship. Thus, instead of understanding the cultic role as a result of being the community’s leader, people began to see the priest more and more as primarily a cultic figure, ordained for sacramental ministry and doing other things in the community only secondarily. As Christianity moved out into the rural areas, the bishops, city men, wondered who was going to take care of the Christians there. Eventually, they turned to the presbyters. Cyprian delegates his presbyters to go out and celebrate the Eucharist in the outlying villages; a genuine departure from the tradition that only the bishop presided at the Sunday Eucharist. These presbyters took over the eucharistic presidency in the outlying districts. The city bishops kept all other powers except baptism. They kept control over confirmation, jurisdiction, and official teaching. This left the presbyter identified and associated with the Eucharist. He became the priest.
More Development
Moreover, the diaconate as a separate ministry was gradually disappearing. Bishops needed assistants who could officiate at the liturgy, and deacons were not empowered to do this. To provide more priests for the people, some bishops took to ordaining deacons as presbyters, thereby making the presbyterate look like a higher rank rather than a different type of ministry. By the fifth century the diaconate was beginning to be viewed as a step toward the priesthood and after the sixth century the permanent diaconate all but vanished. The humble origin of the priest as basically an inferior cleric from the countryside remained intact throughout the centuries. Priests remained largely uneducated and from a lower social strata than the bishops, who were educated, often aristocratic and from the ruling class.
The emergence of the bishop as the main community leader had two consequences. First, the charismatic figure, so influential in the early Church, tended to disappear or to be absorbed into the bishop’s role. The second consequence of needed centralisation was that the momentum continued. Eventually all ministries became absorbed into the bishop’s office. Anyone outside his office who did ministry came to be seen as extensions of him. In fact, after the twelfth century there came the distinction between the ‘major’ orders, subdeacon, deacon, and priesthood, and the ‘minor’ orders, acolyte, porter, exorcist, and lector. 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. They therefore began to be regarded as “clergy,” as persons who were set aside for sacred functions like the Roman priests or the Jewish Levites. As “clergy” they became distinguished from “laity.” The sacralisation of Church leadership takes place.
Celibacy & Clerical Dress
Soon ordination came to be understood as something more than a sacred ritual initiating a person into a sacred ministry. When bishops ordained presbyters they transmitted to them the power to be priests of the new covenant, sharing the priesthood of Christ in the order of Melchizedek, the priesthood which supplanted and was superior to the priesthood of Aaron and Levi because it offered to God the perfect sacrifice. But if the Christian priesthood were a newer and greater priesthood than that of the Jewish priests and Levites, then it seemed logical that Christian clerics would be called to a greater holiness than the priests of the old covenant. Holiness in the ancient world was closely connected with purity, and purity among other things meant sexual abstinence. St Ambrose (d. 397) argued that since Christian priests served at the altar all their lives (unlike their Jewish predecessors, who served only periodically), they should live in a state of perpetual continence. However, the ideal of sexual of continence was not always seen as requiring an unmarried clergy. It was more often taken to mean that married clerics should stop living with their wives, or at least stop having a sexual relationship with her. Thus with the evolution of Christian ministry into a cultic priesthood came a demand for sexual purity and ultimately for celibacy.
In the fifth 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. It was the beginning of a distinctive style of clerical dress. Today the priest is expected to wear clerical garb as a witness of his dedication to his people and his faithful service to Jesus. Pope John Paul II wrote in 2000, “The priest should always conform (to the clerical garb) since it is a public proclamation of his limitless dedication to the brethren and to the faithful in his service to Jesus Christ.” Canon Law 284 states: “Clerics are to wear suitable ecclesiastical dress, in accordance with the norms established by the Bishop’s Conference and legitimate local custom.”
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 one group of clerics that usually did not marry were the monks, who lived in monastic communities rather than alone and vowed to remain celibate. 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 and ordered all married priests to renounce their wives and do penance. The Second Lateran Council declared that marriages of clerics were not only illegal but also invalid. Three other important developments take place: the distinction between power and authority, the distinction between validity and liceity, the rediscovery of Augustine’s idea of the priestly character. The Third Lateran Council transformed community power into personal power by making ordination a ritual for giving spiritual power personally to the priest. The distinction between the power of orders and the power of jurisdiction was introduced. So ordination became a ceremony to designate a man as totally apart from the community instead of totally identified with it. 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 with people and a great burden on them.
• Popes, Cardinals, Bishops: Princes - eager to increase wealth and maintain power.
• Council of Florence, 1439 – Ordination a sacrament, & explains it matter and form.
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.
Martin Luther
Martin Luther complained that the word of God was not being adequately preached, or the sacraments adequately administered. He believed that priesthood was a valid ministry in the Church, but only that and no more. He saw no reason to believe that priests were metaphysically changed into superior Christians with special powers by their ordination. Whatever happened through the sacraments, he argued, happened by God’s power and not man’s, and so all Christians could act as God’s instruments in virtue of their baptism. He saw no scriptural evidence that something like a sacramental character was given to priests, and he took Christ’s words to baptise, preach, and continue the Eucharist as being directed to the Church, not to a privileged group within the Church. Thus any Christian could legitimately do these things, and it was only for reasons of Church order that certain Christians were selected, trained, and commissioned by the community to perform them as ministries in the Church. The only difference between the clergy and other Christians was that they were commissioned by the community to perform certain functions in the Church, and if they failed to perform them they could be removed from their office and their ministry given to others. He even allowed bishops in his model of the church, not as rulers or bestowers of supernatural powers on the clergy, but as supervisors of the church’s ministries much as he envisioned they had been in the first centuries of Christianity. Later, however, the Lutheran lords of Germany decided that the office of bishop was a superfluous one, and today only a few Lutheran churches still have bishops (Sweden, South Africa, USA, Canada). (Cf, Doors to the Sacred pp 501-503, See ‘A Lutheran perspective of ministry’, G Wenz, TD 51:1, 2004, pp 41-46).
John Calvin
John Calvin, likewise, included liturgical and sacramental functions in his understanding of ministry, but he refused to call the Church’s ministers “priests” because he rejected the idea of the Eucharist as a sacrifice and he insisted that only Christ himself and Christians in general had a scriptural right to the title “priest.” Moreover, his reading of the NT led him to distinguish a variety of ministries in the Church, not all of which had to be performed by the same person. Pastors were to be primarily preachers of the gospel of salvation. Teachers were called to explain the scriptures and show how they applied to daily life. Elders and deacons were to be supervisors of the Church and administrators of practical affairs, thus freeing pastors and teachers to be full-time ministers of the word. The Churches that were founded in the Calvinist tradition had no use for bishops and simply eliminated the episcopacy as a distinct office. Presbyterians created senates of elected elders or presbyters with administrative jurisdiction over clusters of local Churches. Congregationalists went even further and insisted that the elders of each individual congregation had the ultimate authority, subject only to the authority of the Bible as the Spirit led them to interpret it.
The Anglican Church
At the other extreme, the Anglican Church kept the episcopal model of Church organisation almost entirely intact. When Henry VIII proclaimed himself head of the Church in England, his motives were political rather than religious, and almost every bishop in the House of Lords agreed that he had the right to do so. Their motives were also political, to free the English Church from foreign domination, and they felt no pressure to alter the traditional form of Church government in which they played an integral part. Likewise their understanding of orders and the powers that they conferred remained essentially Catholic. In the years that followed Henry’s death, however, the more radical ideas of the continental reformers began to influence the English Church. Opinions were divided between those who held to the traditional Catholic view of priesthood and orders, especially in regard to the power of consecrating the Eucharist, and those who accepted the Protestant view of ministry as primarily pastoral and the Eucharist as a memorial rather than a sacrifice. In the end, both views were tolerated and the episcopal structure of the Church in England remained as it was. Officially, ordination is still regarded as a sacrament and Anglican bishops continue to ordain priests to a sacramental ministry. Not all Anglican bishops and priests accept the Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist. So, from a Catholic viewpoint, this cast doubt upon the validity of their priesthood since they are not necessarily ordained with the intention of “doing what the Church does” in celebrating the Eucharist. Moreover, for more than a century Anglicans were ordained using the rites of the Edwardine Ordinal (1552). In this ordinal the rites of the Roman Pontifical were changed by Thomas Cramner. So Anglican orders has the double defect of form and intention from the Catholic perspective (Catholic Faith, p. 727) (Martos, Doors to the Sacred, pp. 438-441).
Objections.
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.
The Council of Trent
Trent 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, that the Mass is a true sacrifice, and that there is a true hierarchy in the Church consisting of bishops, priests, and deacons and that these ministers do not depend on the call of the community for their authority and powers. The Council chose to define a priest in terms of two personal powers, namely to offer the eucharistic sacrifice and to remit sins. The bishops were successors of the apos¬tles in a special way in that they had authority to rule over the Church. So only they could confirm, ordain, and perform other sacred functions. Under the impact of Trent, the Catholic Church launched a reform of the clergy. Seminaries for the education and training of future priests were established, and greater emphasis was placed on priestly spirituality.
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. Priests were holy ministers concerned with holy things, sacramental persons as well as administers of sacra¬ments, and they were expected to be completely dedicated to their work. The reform of the clergy was made possible by the general acceptance of the belief that government in the Church was a divinely established hierarchy.
Chapter Six RECENT TIMES
Pope Pius XII
Episcopalis Consecrationis, 1944, the two bishops who assist the main consecrator in an episcopal ordination are co-consecrators and must act as such.
Sacramentum Ordinis, 1947, the matter is the imposition of hands, and the form the words determining its meaning.
Second Vatican Council
Participation in the Priesthood of Christ.
LG speaks first of Christ’s unique priesthood which is communicated by Him to His Church and is shared by the entire people of God (LG 10-13). Ministerial priesthood, which differs from the common priesthood “in essence and not only in degree” (LG 10), is essentially related to it; it is viewed as a service to the people of God. 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).
Ministerial Priesthood
Episcopate:
• A Sacrament (LG 21) which confers the fullness of the Sacrament of Order.
• Successors of the Apostles (CD 2)
• Entrusted with the care of a diocese
• A duty which they must exercise in communion with the Pope (LG 21)
• United with the Pope, they constitute an Apostolic College (LG 22)
• Have solicitude for whole Church (LG 23-24)
• Have authority in their dioceses, but also collegially in their regions and in the whole world
• Union of bishops symbolises the communion of Churches (23).
• Bishops “enjoy the fullness of the sacrament of orders,” whereas priests and deacons are dependent upon them in the exercise of authority (CD 15).
Presbyterate: United with bishop in priestly dignity (CD 15, LG 28). Ordination enables priests to act in the person of Christ (LG 28) and to represent Him among their flock as Head of His Body (PO 2). 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).
Threefold Function
Christ is at once Teacher, Priest and Shepherd. These three functions are continued in the Church; hence the Church has a threefold function; prophetic, sanctifying and pastoral, which are shared by the entire people of God; the laity exercise them in their own way (LG 34, 36). 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 were called to holiness, and 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. The documents show a preference for presbyter over sacerdos.
Revision of Rites
The 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. Moreover episcopal conferences may request the creation of other lay ministries, among which the ministry of catechist is mentioned.
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 lay ministries.
• Bishops – Pastors.
• Priests – Preachers and Community Builders.
• Priests – Loss of Identity
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Examination Final Draft April 2009
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
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
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.
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