Bishop Joseph N. Perry
Before I was appointed a bishop of the Catholic Church, I worked eighteen years in the Tribunal for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee that handled judgments on failed marriages of individuals who desired contact with the Church following a divorce and/or hoping for a church approved second marriage.
I estimate that in that time period our canonical services handled about twelve thousand marriage cases. I was inspired by the many men and women who came to the office to tell the church about their hopes and dreams, failures and hurts.
The Church continues to bring enormous resources, energy and personnel to the ministry of marriage preparation and marriage enrichment as evidenced by the Archdiocese’ recently revised procedures, titled, In the Spirit of Cana, the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Pastoral Outreach to Christian Marriage: Formation, Preparation, Celebration and Continuing Education. Check out: www.familyministries.org.
Marriage ministry is a ministry of great strides and anguish; great strides for the desires of clergy and couples to improve the faith of the couples and individuals we work with, and great anguish in face of the rates of unsuccessful marriages and family breakdown and current trends to re-define marriage outside of its traditional heterosexual construct.
We are also aware of the popular trend to live together without marriage and the option taken by many young couples not to marry in the Church. All this would seem to point to a lack of faith in marriage and family life being the foundational support of society and the church. One can speculate endlessly on the causal factors behind these trends.
Priests, married couples and catechists often are at a loss for adequate words to describe the faith of the Christian community with the human experience of marriage which is, by Catholic belief, raised to the dignity of Sacrament by Jesus Christ. Catholic faith holds up the values of faith, fidelity, and sacrificial love as superior virtues responding to a sacred reality that is defined by God and explained further by his Son, Jesus Christ to would-be disciples.
Sacramental marriage reaches to heaven for the benefit of the couple while communicating saving graces with the presence of Jesus Christ in that marriage.
An increasingly secular society such as ours may find such traditional reflection arising largely from the rubrics of an ancient culture and its patriarchal images and therefore hardly relevant to the popular ways relationships come together in the modern day. But we cannot afford to dismiss so easily the foundational teaching with marriage that is substantive to our Judeo-Christian heritage.
Some couples may be anxious about the increasingly counter-cultural stance of the church in face of a number of issues popularly debated that carry ramifications for church life and practice, most of them moral issues with sexual content and life issues bearing upon the privilege of individual choice. In this area, church teaching about human sexuality, childbearing, family size regulation are not always clearly understood or, sometimes, is outrightly rejected as old-fashioned and irrelevant to the times.
Mere cohabitation without marriage, seemingly stemming from a popular hesitancy with life-long commitment is another idea that makes the Church’s message fall on deaf ears. Divorce is rampant in American society and provokes certain emotional reactions in the young who may not have seen many marriages work, including that of their own parents.
Commitment in the Christian dispensation asks for a good deal of personal trust, devotion and discipleship to allow oneself the resolve to mimic the God who has been faithful to us and to bear out that faith through the bonds we forge with one another and the church’s mission. A prevalent cynicism and pervasive social distrust would make this kind of lifestyle in discipleship difficult to conceptualize.
Couples living together without marriage is contrary to the Christian assembly’s fundamental understanding of sexual integrity and marital fidelity.
The Church’s pastoral strategy with couples in midst of these realities is rather daunting. Noticeably, the number of weddings in the Church are down in comparison to previous years. Even nationally, civil marriages are diminished in number while divorces continue to rise.
How can we impress the young with the challenge of discipleship in Christ and, therefore, offer their marriages to the graced sacramental embrace of Christ as an avenue to genuine personal fulfillment? One way, certainly, is for parents to model affirming marriage and family relationships for their children. Another is for parishes to raise up and affirm marriages and families locally while also affirming the suffering witness of and ministry to parishioners who have not achieved that goal.
Catechetical content with our youth must clearly expound the teaching of the Church with marriage and its correct preparation and celebration emphasizing that civil marriage as well as contrary definitions of marriage are against fundamental Christian teaching and practice. The word and witness of faithful married couples must be brought to light in our communities as a buttress to official teaching at the lips of priests and religious, the latter who are often in the lead with this catechesis.
In all this, teaching and pastoral care must be sensitive and welcoming, even of those who bring a contrary opinion and lifestyle. The Christian community must always be inviting while encouraging people with the new idea of the Scriptures and the enlightenment of Catholic teaching and practice over the centuries.
The evangelical moment must necessarily deal honestly with the realities of peoples’ lives these days: sexual freedom, individual choice, the issue of family size, divorce rates, roles of husband and wife, economic realities, cohabitation, none of which are easy topics to frame in Christian vocabulary. We must be clear about what the Church teaches while encouraging others to more courageous discipleship. There are simply certain things that Christians do not subscribe to if they call themselves Christians. Options with lifestyle are limited and the few mandates there are coming from Revelation are few in number but firm in their vision.
Christian marriage – sacramental marriage is a source of grace for a couple, a unique way that husband and wife can save each other.
March 31, 2005
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