Lesson 8: Experience I

AGENDA

• Review From Last Time
• Discussion of Case #7: The Ministries of Women in the Church

REVIEW FROM LAST TIME

Some observations on points from our recent class discussion:

1. First, some of you observed the problem of sanctioning homosexual marriages within the church because of “the non-complementary nature of homosexual marriages.”
1. I received the following email from one of you on this topic: “The model of marriage as being between a man and a woman is paralleled to Christ's relationship to the Church. The sacramental nature of marriage is the fact that it is representative of this mystery. It is representative of Christ's love, which encompasses all of humanity, so much that ‘he gave himself up for her’. God's love infiltrates all barriers, especially those that exist between men and women. The gender exclusivity of homosexual marriage fails to represent this inclusive relationship between Christ and the Church. Drawing on these parallels, homosexual marriage would actually be more representative of Christ's relationship to himself, which would complicate the nature of his Sacrifice, etc. The second point has to do with the options that homosexuals have in service to the church: In the discussion today, it seemed like we were forgetting that all Christians are first and foremost called to live a life of chastity. It seemed like the only resort for homosexuals who are not allowed to marry is the religious life, which is problematic for reasons that we've seen in the recent church scandals. The single life is not viewed as a vocation anymore; everyone lives their single lives in anticipation for a calling to the vocations of marriage or religious life. Homosexuals have the option, as we all do, to be witnesses and examples of the single life. Priests have the church hierarchy. Married couples have other couples who have been married for 50 years. The single vocation is the most common vocation present in the Church at any given point in time, yet there are very few living examples.”
2. This comment points us to Paul VI’s statement in Humanae Vitae (par. 8) that “Married love particularly reveals its true nature and nobility when we realize that it takes its origin from God, who 'is love,' the Father 'from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.' Marriage, then, is far from being the effect of chance or the result of the blind evolution of natural forces. It is in reality the wise and provident institution of God the Creator, whose purpose was to affect in man His loving design. As a consequence, husband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them alone, develop that union of two persons in which they perfect one another, cooperating with God in the generation and rearing of new lives. The marriage of those who have been baptized is, in addition, invested with the dignity of a sacramental sign of grace, for it represents the union of Christ and His Church.” We have in this passage a recognition that God’s plan for marriage encompasses all men and women, and that between two baptized persons, this natural institution is elevated to the dignity of a sacrament. Keep in mind, however, that these arguments would be, at best, arguments against gay marriage having sacramental dignity and not arguments against civil gay unions. As we discussed in class, the Church does make such arguments by an appeal to a cross-traditional (or what it takes to be a widely accepted) notion of the common good, although we have also seen responses to its arguments on this matter.
3. The comment above also illustrates well that the Church (bishops and theologians alike) have not spent enough time speaking about what the vocation to a chaste single life ought to look like, more specifically how it is different from life under vows in a religious community.
4. It also brings up the related point: if it is true that each of us is created as a unity of body and spirit, and if, as the Bishops now recognize, there is an important distinction between “the homosexual condition or tendency and individual homosexual actions,” (par. 3) then how exactly is a homosexual person to act both as unity of body and spirit, as a self-giving lover of others, in a way that is both unique to their particular homosexual creation and at the same time non-genital, while not at the same time being effectively reduced either to a theology of celibate religious life (from which they are barred) or a completely asexual way of life. What pastoral advice could be given to those in this situation? What sense of bodily gift could be emphasized?
2. Second, there was the issue of homosexual couples adopting and raising children.
1. One of you noted with some reservation the statement from the bishops’ letter that, "Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development". To this statement, one of you responded that, “This statement was very confusing to me, because I cannot seem to grasp how actual 'violence' is being done to the children, or how the Church is defining 'full human development'. In my opinion, loving and caring for one's child is all that is essentially necessary to be considered a good parent. It seems like in this passage, it is being implied that heterosexual parents are better parents than homosexual or single parents by default. Furthermore, does the Church not believe it possible for a homosexual couple to raise a good Catholic? Also, does the Church argue against all forms of legal union between homosexuals? Obviously marriage is out of the question, but I was just making sure I understood correctly that this [letter] was defining any unions at all between homosexuals as wrong.”
2. Whether you agree with it or not, the logic of defining this situation as violence goes something like this: full human development requires that children have models of both fatherhood and motherhood if they are to develop into responsible fathers and mothers and thereby contribute to the common good by raising responsible children. In order for this to happen, it is strongly advisable that they have both models, such that if one has two fathers or two mothers one is missing part of the example needed for this development. This is violence not in the physical sense but in terms of factors lacking for children needed for them to develop into responsible citizens of the Church and the world. In the rhetoric of the document, it seems to be akin to understanding extreme poverty as form of violence. This argument also suggests that if one does not see both motherhood and fatherhood modeled in the household, then there is some risk that they will not see the mother/father two-parent family as normative and essential for ongoing social well being (a threat to the common good and the continuation of the species).
3. It is interesting, though, that single parent families tend to be treated by the bishops not as a moral problem, but as a tragic situation which requires pastoral care, even if they will want to say that we should not treat this as the ideal for all families. Perhaps the question is whether the bishops’ approaches to different kinds of “non-ideal families” are fundamentally different and, if so, whether their approach to moral persuasion differs based on whether they see the situation as one of choice or accidental circumstance.
3. Third, there was an intriguing question about whether sex is necessary or required in marriage.
1. One of you noted that “Mary and her husband Joseph seem to be a model where it is not required. If that is true, why can't homosexuals be allowed to live in a similar, celibate marriage, that is, if it's only the homosexual actions that are deemed wrong by the Magisterium of the church? Are they still allowed to seek a spiritual bond with another member of the same sex? Or would this be akin to living in temptation? I think this ties in somewhat with the question on whether a celibate homosexual couple could raise a child.”
2. This is a very interesting question, but one that faced church leaders (especially lawyers) in the medieval church for a very different reason. The question was what counted as a marriage—what were the necessary components. This was important for such things as inheritance and provision for family members (women and children) and the conditions for separation or divorce. There are two lines of thinking on this that emerged from two separate historical contexts:
   1. On the one hand, there was the importance of mutual consent. This stemmed from early Roman law, where new families were created as new centers of agency and power. On the other hand, there was the importance of consummating the marriage.
   2. The 1983 Code of Canon Law states in canon 1057 that “The consent of the parties, legitimately manifested between person qualified by law, makes marriage; no human power is able to supply this consent.” [where, qualified by law would preclude homosexual couples, as well as those already married or in religious orders] “Matrimonial consent is an act of the will by which a man and woman mutually give and accept each other through an irrevocable covenant in order to establish marriage.” Its essential properties are (1) unity and (2) indissolubility (CCC p. 1249)
   3. Sex enters in with respect to the difference between a ratified marriage and a consummated marriage—canon 1061 (p. 1257). A valid marriage between two baptized persons is said to be ratified even if not consummated. Such marriages are sacramental and still are marked by the essential properties of unity and indissolubility. However, a marriage that has not been consummated “for just cause, the obligations of a merely ratified marriage can be dispensed from, or it can be dissolved at the request of one of the spouses.”
   4. No matter how many times one has had sex prior to marriage, once consent is given before God, if the couple never has sex again their marriage has the odd state of being sacramental and ratified but not consummated. To my knowledge, the bishops have not speculated how a celibate loving homosexual relationship is similar to or different from such an arrangement, mostly because such cases would not be the work of diocesan marriage tribunals because such relationships would not be considered marriages in the church.

DISCUSSION Case #7: The Ministries of Women in the Church

1. Our last discussion demonstrated how difficult it is, even for people who claim to take the same scriptures as a source for moral thinking, to agree on what counts as “right reason” about moral matters.
1. The standard for “right reason” outside the church differs substantially from what that would mean inside the church (often in public discussions it is reduced to an uncritical notion of “common sense”).
2. Recently, however, in the writings of Catholic moral theologians outside the Magisterium, the problem of the proper relationship between reason and experience has come into focus. By way of introduction to the next case, we can use Pope Benedict’s article, “Bishops, Theologians, and Morality” to look at the problems that arise when we allow experience to trump reason or if we adopt too narrow a view about what reason is capable of doing.
2. What does Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict think is the problem with modern society? Headdresses this question according to the four sources of moral knowledge.
1. First, he addresses the role of reason (under the heading “reduction to objectivity”). Here he judges the problem to be the reduction of reason to its ability to calculate and quantify (instrumental or calculating reason). To understand the proper use of freedom, one cannot look to reason’s calculating ability. One needs also to be able to employ reason to think about human happiness as this relates to some transcendent end or good, which must be related to some notion of the ends proper to human beings as rational creatures ordered to God. Ratzinger is responding to those who say that we can only know externally observable traits about objects, rather than things as they are essentially. So that we can only know human beings in the same way we can know squirrels (more complicated, but still just objects for our observation, about which we can make calculating rather than moral judgments).
2. Second, he addresses the role of experience (under the label ‘Subjectivity and Conscience’). Here the issue is, in some sense, the opposite of the problem of reason. If we are going to know anything about human beings, modern society thinks, all we can really rely on is people's own reports about how they feel about themselves. And if this is so, moral judgments would seem to come only from what one can justify to oneself in conscience based on a reflection on one’s own experience. This would seem to make any individual subject immune to any kind of moral criticism save for the personal opinion or structures of one’s own psychology. So in this way, it is as problematic to reduce morality its subjective dimension as to its objective dimension. In one sense, the reason we cannot seem to make moral judgments these days is that we tend to think that we only have access to the study and advancement of efficient processes. In another sense, we do have access to the object itself, but only as it understands itself. We cannot seem to say anything that would be universally valid across time and culture. Any admission to a common morality has no lasting basis; it is only the consent of the will at any one time based on a presumed intuition that there is something good or evil in the situation at hand. This tends to mean that one’s individual conscience has the capacity to make something good or evil through the very operations of its judgment.
3. Third, he address the role of scripture (under the heading “the Will of God and His Revelation”). Here he is saying that scripture provides us a model to understand how to correct this imbalance between the subject and the object. Revelation and reason (properly understood) are united in that both understand objects in the world as having a moral status beyond their externally observable properties and beyond the particular and varied judgments that subjects make about them. In other words, there is a moral order that is objectively real (things in this world have intrinsic rather than instrumental value), and that actions can be judged as in accordance with or against this moral order, and that this is the true nature of conscience.
4. Fourth, he addresses tradition (under the heading, “the community as a source of morality”). What tradition seeks to do is twofold. On the one hand, it interprets scripture and the proper use of reason. But it also forms a standard for morality, not just as an abstract set of rules or norms, but a wider integrated form of life. It is the job of the bishop as teacher in the church not just to point out the particular moral rules and norms that Christian commitment entails, but also the form of life which the community should exhibit. In fact, he says that those who have the right to speak in the tradition are those who have lived its highest ideals. This means that the role of the bishop is to call the present community to remember the examples of faith and morality in its past.
3. Toward the end of the article, Ratzinger says that the role of the bishop is to interpret the life of the contemporary community in light of the example that has been passed on through the tradition, rather than to introduce innovation. The danger of innovation is that it is no more than the expression of uncritical, easy subjective experience, divorced from the good of the community or from the community’s historical testimony to the truths it reveres. So here is the problem:
1. If we admit experience as a source for moral theology, we are acknowledging a very basic idea in Christian faith. The first people of the Covenant and the first Christians had an experience of God which they kept alive in stories which later became texts. The encounter with God is not first about reason, but about the immediacy of an experience. Pope Benedict himself acknowledges this at the beginning of his letter, Deus Caritas Est, which you have read. He says in par. 1, “We have come to believe in God’s love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice of a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
2. However, it is not possible to pass on the immediacy of any experience, much less an experience of God, to another person. You find ways of distilling it down to what you take to be its essential elements, its most important facets. This is not entirely unlike what the first Christians were doing. They were analyzing their own experience of the event of Jesus and passing it on to the next generation. So the basic rules of the community, and its formal statement of belief in the Creed, was a rationally accessible formulation of the meaning of their experience based on their rational debate with each other about what they encountered.
3. So the problem of reason and experience is that reason cannot fully express the meaning of an experience, but it does have the advantage of being able to pass on something of the truth of experience to the next generation. Likewise, experience tends to be impressionistic, it is individual, and if the community were to be run but the sum total of individual experiences, it would be chaotic and that original event of encounter would have no filter, no check, no way of sorting out what really happened from one’s selfish perceptions of that event. Tradition, in this sense, is that process of organizing and filtering and passing on the truth and its practical implications from one generation to the next.
4. So the basic issue for the Christian seems to be how to communicate this truth that is basically experiential but requires reason to have a discussion about a common meaningfulness across time. This happens in two ways: witness and service (the first two categories of moral theology pertaining to the human person that we will be examining next time).
4. So as we turn to the readings for this case, we must keep in mind the basic question that motivated authors such as Cahill to write about the role of experience in ethics.
1. Question: What status, if any, do official church teachings (as expressed in the writings of John Paul II and the CDF) give to the experience of women in determining the moral norms that govern their view of a proper understanding of women’s calling in the church?
2. Consider how Cahill’s account of a feminist theological ethics, as well as the comments by Patrick, Farley and Ruether, reframe this question in order to answer it:
1. Lisa Cahill: “A feminist theological ethics maintains that human nature is not adequately understood without full attention to the personal and social experience of women…It also insists that issues of so-called personal ethics, such as sexuality, cannot be understood apart from their social contexts and that social institutions, like male and female gender roles, have direct and deep influence on individual decisions and actions.…Justice for women means to regard women as the moral and social equals of men and to support their equal participation in the social roles that contribute to the common good, as well as their equal share in those benefits comprised by it.” (p. 212 in Catherine Mowry LaCugna, ed. Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective (HarperSan Francisco, 1993)
2. Anne Patrick: feminism endorses “(1) a solid conviction of the equality of women and men, and (2) a commitment to reform society, including religious society, so that the full equality of women is respected, which requires also reforming the thought systems that legitimate the present unjust social order.” (cited by Cahill, p. 213)
3. Margaret Farley: “Feminist ethics traces its origins to women’s growing awareness of the disparity between received traditional interpretations of their identity and function and their own experience of themselves and their lives.” (cited by Cahill, p. 214)
4. Rosemary Ruether: “The critical principle of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, appraised as not redemptive.” (cited in LaCugna, p. 13)