Lesson 9: Experience II

AGENDA

• Review From Last Time
• Discussion of Case #8: Inter-religious Marriage

REVIEW FROM LAST TIME

1. The Problem of Personal Experience
1. The irreducibility of individual experience, especially in describing it to another, which significantly impacts us as Christians called individually [not just as a type (male Christian, female Christian, married/unmarried, ordained/lay) to respond to the call of the Gospel
2. Consider the following question: How does one differentiate the call to a form of life (marriage, a profession, a cause) from the call to a particular person or people to live in a certain way?
3. There is a longstanding suspicion of the role of experience in moral thinking because of a tendency we all can detect in ourselves to use individual experience as an excuse or a trump card to do what we want, even if it hurts others and or even ourselves.
4. The question then becomes how to think about experience as a source for moral thinking in a way that allows the collective experience of the Church to be in constructive relation with the individual experiences of Christians.
2. How do the Catholic Bishops respond in thinking through the value of experience in describing to faithful Christians the proper relationship between men and women? [Discussion of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World”]
1. Perceived Tendencies in the Current Discussion
1. Antagonism between Men and Women (which can only be due, if God’s loving plan for creation is taken to heart, to the improper understanding of freedom [for self determination rather than for love of God])
2. Denying the link between biological sex and socially conditioned gender (that is, assuming there is no inherent connection between sex and gender)
3. This antagonism and denying this important link, so the Bishops argue, are the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the human person: desire to be free from all traces of biological determination and from any external authority feeds a notion that one "creates oneself" according to one’s will. On the bishops' account, this is the result of sin not a logical extension of God’s plan.
2. Response: Proper Understanding of the Human Person will bring men and women into peaceful collaboration.
1. “the human body, marked with the sign of masculinity or femininity, includes right from the beginning the nuptial attribute, that is, the capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift and—by means of this gift—fulfills the meaning of his being and existence.”[par. 6 citing JP2]
2. “[woman’s and man’s] equal dignity as persons is realized as physical, psychological, and ontological complementarity, giving rise to a harmonious relationship of uni-duality, which only sin and the ‘structures of sin’ inscribed in culture render potentially conflictual.” [par. 8]—so the problem isn’t with the teaching, the Bishops respond, but with the cultural values that cannot see the goodness in the teaching.
3. “the human creature, in its unity of soul and body, is characterized therefore, from the very beginning, by the relation with the other-beyond-the-self.” [par. 8]
3. Feminine Values in the Life of Society
1. Capacity for the Other, linked to women’s physical capacity in a profound way (not for self-determination) [par. 13]
2. However this must not be reduced to physical motherhood, for a life of virginity testifies to the ability to develop that capacity and live it outside model of physical fecundity
3. Feminine Values in the Life of the Church
4. Mary as the model of listening and receiving the word of God
5. This listening is not passive, but exhibits an active love, a “royal power which vanquishes all violence” through the strength of example.
3. Lisa Sowle Cahill, “Feminism and Christian Ethics” [course packet]
1. Cahill’s critique of the teaching of the Catholic bishops—If we are going to advocate a religious norm about the nature of the human person, is it sufficient that norm can be fully enunciated by men, using their own experience, their own rationality, and their interpretation of the historical experience of the tradition of the Church? While it is important to grant some autonomy to the Church as moral teacher, it is unreasonable to think that the male hierarchy of the Church can fully free themselves from the particularities of their experience (male and clerical) to teach about women in an unbiased and fully Christian way
2. This experience is not just personal but social (that is, Cahill is not complaining that her individual experience is being ignored but rather that the experience of Christian women collectively over time has been and is being ignored). Here we see an echo of the Church’s sense of tradition as the reflection on the experience of the faith community, but attempting to broaden the faith community to include the voices of women in a more explicit way.
4. Experience and Inter-religious Marriage
1. When it comes to examining the moral norms that ought to govern married life, which includes but is not limited to norms that guide marital sexual intimacy, how should we view the experience of the married couple? Or as one sometimes hears in casual conversations (in parishes and elsewhere), should the experience of the “good Catholic” couple count more than the experience of the Catholic couple who seriously questions the teachings of the bishops on matters of marital sexuality?
2. Are we even compelled to look outside our own tradition for a richer notion of common human experience or is it sufficient to take as the experience relevant to moral thinking only that of a certain group within a certain religious tradition?
3. Another way to formulate the question about the role of experience in moral theology is to ask whether all experience, outside of the guidance of church, in inherently self-justifying, in the service only of the individual’s perceived needs and not in service of their real needs or the needs of their families and communities?
4. There appears to be some need for a critical filter on experience, to help us sort out our true good from our incorrect perceptions of what is good for us. (This is, after all, one of the basic aspects of moral development that parents draw on as rationale for guiding and disciplining children.) But is the moral teaching of the Church a filter on experience of this kind or must it be further developed through the life of the Church today?
5. In the light of inter-religious marriage, we have need to think about these questions in a novel pastoral context. A couple must work out its moral decisions pertaining to the couple as a unit (in matters of marital sexuality but also the vocation of the couple and the family to serve). But here we have an instance where a level of pastoral discernment is intrinsic to the problem of Catholic moral teaching in this context. One cannot assume that the non-Catholic partner to the marriage will take or would even find it reasonable to take the Catholic teaching on matters of sex and gender as normative.

DISCUSSION OF Case #8: Inter-religious Marriage