Transcript

In the Gospel of St. John, Jesus draws a very strong contrast between the world and the saving message that He brings.

On the one hand, He tells us that He was sent into the world, not that the world would be condemned, but that it would be saved through Him, and would come to have life in His name.

That's John 3:16.

On the other hand, He says that the world, in so far as that means what is not of God, He says that the world rejects Him, and therefore also His message of salvation, and likewise, the disciples He sends to proclaim that message.

So, this is what He says in John 17, Father, I have given them Your Word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

Sanctify them in the truth.

Your Word is truth.

As You sent Me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

And for their sake, I consecrate Myself that they also may be consecrated in truth.

To be a Christian means to be consecrated in the truth, and the truth of Christ really is a saving message.

It is really good news.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, says our Lord.

His truth is the path towards genuine freedom and towards true happiness.

Still, it can be hard, and it's also possible that because you've decided to become Catholic, you could face real opposition from friends or even from family members.

But remember, Jesus Himself experienced this, and He foretold that His disciples would too.

Now, what are the points of Catholic teaching that are most difficult to proclaim in our contemporary culture?

They tend to focus on marriage, on family life, and on human sexuality.

So, in this session, I'd like to focus specifically on the Church's teaching about marriage.

Now, before I go any further, I want to reiterate the mercy of Christ and the power of the Gospel.

That is, the Church's teaching does not exist to condemn anyone, but to set them free with the truth.

And God is always willing to forgive anyone who repents, no matter how great the sin is.

God is more powerful than our sinfulness, and God always promises the help of His grace to repent and to live a new life according to His call.

Now, when Jesus is asked in Chapter 19 of Matthew's Gospel about divorce, He answers the question in a very interesting way.

He begins to speak about how God created human beings as male and female as complementary to each other.

Divorce is always wrong, He teaches, and it goes against the original meaning of human sexuality.

He quotes the Book of Genesis, A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

Now, here, Jesus is expressing, He is revealing a deep secret about the meaning of human life and of marriage.

Human beings are made for communion.

In fact, they're made for communion with each other.

Each of us is meant to be born into the communion of a family, a communion between a husband and a wife.

And a new marriage means that one who used to be a child in one family goes from that communion of that family to another communion, the communion of a new family.

That is, he leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife.

Now, in talking about this, Jesus is not just talking about a necessary biological function in order to propagate the human species over time.

What is He doing?

He's trying to communicate to us a deep truth about God's plan for us.

In fact, the very first command that God gives in the Book of Genesis is not about forbidden fruit.

It is, Be fruitful and multiply.

In other words, the power of human sexuality is a great gift from God, and it has to do both with the communion of love between two people and with the generation from that concrete act of love of new human life.

And that is, in fact, why we call it pro-creation.

That literally means, To create with God .

we participate with God in the awesome and wondrous act of the generation of new human life.

So, the use we make of this great power of human sexuality, this gift that God has given to the human person, this use must always be ordered to the meaning of this mystery.

That it would be an act of love between two people vowed to each other, and that this act be open to the generation of new life.

Indeed, a complete and lifelong commitment between a man and a woman is the only context in which God intends to bring new life into the world.

Now, there may be cases where for one reason or another, a new life does not come into the world because of that kind of communion of love.

But that is the context in which God intends and desires to bring new life about.

Now, it's in view of this whole mystery of the meaning of human communion and of human sexuality that Jesus speaks about divorce.

Now, let me preface what I'm going to say here with this.

This is a sensitive subject for many, since in our epoch, divorce has touched a great many of us, either directly or indirectly.

And there are many whose marriages have encountered grave hardships, sometimes for reasons that seem undeserved, and sometimes through the fault of one or both persons.

Of course, sometimes one party in a marriage has no choice but to separate from the other, particularly, for example, in cases of spousal abuse.

And the church recognizes that sometimes this is a necessary response to a marriage that has developed grave problems, and of itself, it is not a sin.

Nonetheless, we must say that every failed marriage is a terrible human tragedy.

The Catholic teaching on this is clear.

Christ elevated marriage to the dignity of a sacrament, and it signifies His spousal love and His unbreakable fidelity to the Church.

You read about that in Ephesians 5. And so, according to the Lord's own words, Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.

And if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

Now, where a true sacramental bond exists, where a true sacramental marriage exists, it can never be dissolved.

And so, no second marriage is possible during the life of the first spouse.

You may have heard people talk about an annulment.

Some even think that this is basically a Catholic form of divorce.

Now, that's a misunderstanding.

Because more properly, this is called a Declaration of Nullity.

That is, it's the recognition by a church tribunal that a true and valid marriage bond never actually existed in some cases, even though there may have been the outward appearance of a marriage.

Let's now turn to another difficult subject, especially difficult in our own time.

The question of homosexuality and the new phenomenon of same-sex unions, which the civil law is now calling gay marriages.

Here again, great sensitivity is necessary, especially since the Church's teaching is often very deeply misunderstood or wrongly thought to condemn individuals for things that they cannot control.

And that is not what the Church teaches.

So to understand the Catholic position, we have to go back to the meaning of human sexuality.

It's a gift, a gift given by God, that is ordered to the union of a man and a woman open to the generation of new life.

That is what human sexuality is all about.

And that means that every use of our sexuality that doesn't respect that original meaning, that meaning given to it by God, is in fact a misuse.

It's a misuse of something very great, something very powerful.

In fact, all of us have some sense that when we're talking about human sexuality, we're talking about something powerful and significant.

And that's why scripture and the Church both teach that all sins against chastity, including but not limited to homosexual acts, all such acts against chastity are, at least objectively speaking, grave matter and may be, therefore, grave sins.

Here, though, we need to add an important distinction.

And this is very important, especially when we're talking about homosexuality or talking to others about this issue.

The catechism of the Catholic Church distinguishes carefully between three things.

First, homosexual acts, that is, individual actions.

And these scripture very clearly teaches are gravely wrong.

And then, secondly, homosexual inclinations or desires.

And finally, third, the dignity of persons who may experience such inclinations or desires.

So, let's take this in order.

The acts themselves are always, objectively speaking, wrong.

To experience homosexual inclinations or desires, however- of itself, this is not a sin.

It might even be something experienced as unwanted.

So because it is an inclination to do something that is not rightly ordered, that is, it's an inclination towards a misuse of our sexual powers, that inclination itself is called disordered by the Catechism.

But, and this is a very important point, the Catechism does not teach that persons who experience such disordered inclinations have any less dignity or value as persons.

In other words, the Church's teaching is not about the value or dignity of persons because all persons are loved by God, and all have an intrinsic dignity as made in God's image.

Rather, the Church here is teaching about the nature of human sexuality, which can only be rightly used in a marriage between a man and a woman that is open to life.

So then what about so-called gay marriage?

Now, even if we were to grant that this is not part of God's plan, and I think that's quite clear from the teachings of Jesus Himself, is there something wrong with the state recognizing such unions in civil law?

That's a question that comes up for all of us living in our contemporary culture.

Now here, there's an important first principle about the law and marriage.

In fact, society has an important interest in marriage as a social institution.

And in fact, historically speaking, the reason that we have civil laws that govern marriage, the reason that marriage is a kind of civil institution as well as a religious one, is straightforward and clear.

I mean, in other words, the law privileges this particular kind of human relationship in a way that it doesn't treat relations between friends or between, uh, other relatives.

The reason is that marriage exists to encourage men and women to create the next generation, the next generation of citizens, you might say, in the right context and simultaneously to discourage the procreation of children in other contexts; for example, out of wedlock in fatherless homes.

This is important for civil society.

Marriage is the only human relationship that can both produce the next generation of children and connect those babies to both their mother and their father.

And the next generation of children is much more likely to be composed of healthy, productive, and good citizens if children are raised in a stable home by a mother and a father living together.

And there's ample evidence that that is true.

So, this is an important dimension of the legal and political argument today over same-sex unions and the law.

So, even if we were to set aside the very important religious dimensions of this question, it isn't simply a matter of individual choices and individual rights.

Rather, what the law recognizes as a marriage is a question that concerns everyone.

When the law begins to say that a marriage is not a relationship between a man and a woman committed to each other for the whole of life, but that the relation between, for example, two men or two women could also be called a marriage, and that they can be called parents and so forth, then a very significant shift in what we are talking about has happened.

In other words, marriage, understood to be that union of a husband and wife open to children, it ceases to be a shared public institution designed to guide the raising of the next generation.

And then what does it become?

Marriage becomes, in this new understanding, simply a private benefit for individuals without any necessary reference to children or to families in the wider sense.

So, it changes the very meaning of the words we use.

Husband no longer implies wife, mother no longer implies father, and so forth.

And this shift changes in a deep way how we, as a culture, as a society, as a civil society, encourage the next generation to come together in marriages and to raise children with a biological mother and father and so forth.

So when this kind of change happens, it means that we begin to lose the ability to communicate to others in a shared public context something that is vitally important for the future of our society, the need to have stable male-female relationships that produce stable and healthy children.

In fact, we find that what we mean when we say marriage is now a category that our language can't accommodate anymore.

These issues can be very challenging ones, especially in our contemporary culture.

But Jesus gives us the promise of the aid of the Holy Spirit, so that we will be able to bear witness to them.

And this is precisely what we'll be talking about in our next session when we'll discuss the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the Beatitudes.