Gay Marriage and the Catholic Moral Tradition

[A reader suggested that I re-word my remarks about Roy Bougeois, lest those remarks be interpreted to mean that he was making himself rich by his protest work.]

Right after Vatican II, when I was in my early years of priesthood, there was a move toward replacing the old moral theology manuals that had been used in seminaries. In my theology years, the early 1960s, we used a 17th edition of a Latin text published at Louvain in Belgium, authored originally by Ed. Genicot, S.I and Ios. Salsmans, I.S., with the title Institutiones Theologiae Moralis.

After Vatican II seminaries abandoned the old approach. But what to replace it with? One replacement was a text by Bernard Haring titled The Law of Christ.

I never read Haring's book. I understood that he talked a lot about "love." "Love" was just too wishy-washy a concept for me. I judged the book to be pious froth.

The problem was the word "love." I had never seen a definition of love. In fact, I went thirty-five years looking for such a definition. I thought that in a world dominated by scholastic reasoning, the very first thing one would do would be to provide a definition of such an important idea as love. But I found nothing.

But then, in the 1990s, my colleague and Franciscan confrere here at Quincy University, Fr. John Joseph Lakers, OFM, published Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy. That book gave me a definition of love, or, as he named it, intimacy. Intimacy or love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement.

Lakers had studied at Oxford in England under the analytic philosophers of the day, whose work focused on language. But throughout his life he had become passionately involved with two categories of people: young people preparing for marriage, and people of any age who were hurting. For forty years he spent hours talking with such people. His linguistic philosophy was shaped by his conversations with real people.

It is his synthesis that is the basis of our approach to the issue of gay marriage.

His synthesis is this. Jewish and Christian moral reasoning has been based on one of two metaphors: the metaphor of judgment and power, and the metaphor of intimacy. Christian ethics should be based on the metaphor of intimacy.


Metaphors

One of the biggest changes in philosophical thinking in the last hundred years has been a new way of thinking about thinking. The new way focuses on the word "metaphor."

A metaphor is a piece of language that recalls an experience.

Our brains record experiences we have. Words are the key to retrieving memories of those experiences. I see a chair in front of me. I have had past experiences of seeing chairs. When I hear the word "chair," my brain calls up memories of those past experiences. We might call a word a lower-level metaphor.

But our brains record more lengthy sequences of experiences. We use words to recall those sequences.

Jesus says, for example, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus is combining memories of camels, of needles, of rich people, and of kingdoms. A camel passing through the eye of a needle is not an experience that anyone has ever had. But by using language, Jesus combines two experiences into a story: here is a camel going through the eye of a needle. That story is a metaphor. Jesus uses it to teach about the relation of riches to God's kingdom.

Some years ago preachers were urged to say that the "eye of a needle" was in Jesus' time a certain small gate in a wall. Thinking about the metaphor that way made it a little easier to swallow. The scripture scholars came back and informed us that there was no such gate, and that the story of the gate in the wall is a way of softening Jesus' original metaphor. When Jesus said "eye of a needle," he meant the eye of the kind of needle everyone knows about.

The gate-in-the-wall story is a good example of how people raised in a world of scientific language are always tempted to make every statement into a scientifically-provable statement. Most people throughout history had no such temptation. They used language freely and creatively, with the result that their language was shot through with vivid metaphors, many of which would be scientifically impossible.

There are three metaphors that are relevant to the gay marriage issue. One is "judgment," the second is "power," and the third is "love."

The word "judgment" calls up the experience of a courtroom, where a judge determines whether a person has committed a crime or not. Crime cannot occur without law, which is language designed to spell out what is permissible and what is not permissible. But judgment is only the first step. After judgment must come "power," which is the ability to punish.

Punishment is any experience that most people would rather not have. The mildest form of punishment is a dirty look, a simple gesture that expresses displeasure--displeasure of course that follows behavior that is forbidden. I reach across the table in front of my neighbor and grab the water pitcher. The people around me judge this to be a violation of a rule of etiquette: when you are at a meal table, you ask your neighbor to pass the water--you don't just reach in front of your neighbor's face and grab the pitcher. So they punish me by giving me a disapproving look, and by exchanging disapproving looks with each other.

When the violation of a law is more serious, the punishment is more serious: a fine, jail time, prison sentence, even capital punishment.

The combined metaphor of judgment and power lies behind our entire legal and criminal justice system. It lies behind much of the way the Church deals with moral behavior.

When I was in the seminary, we were taught that the job of a priest in confession is to pass judgment on the sins that the penitent confesses, so that the confessor can "bind or loose" the penitent. If the confessor judges that the penitent is not sufficiently sorry, the confessor should withhold absolution, which means that the penitent is still subject to the punishment that his or her sin deserves. Forgiveness simply means the writing off of the punishment that an act deserves.

The language of binding and loosing has become central to the way that Church leaders see their roles among the Christian people. They have made law the central concept of Christian life.

The third metaphor relevant to the issue of gay marriage is love. Love is not wishy-washy sentimentalism. It is a type of behavior, which means that it can be observed empirically. It is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement of one person with another. The problem is that the word love is used as a metaphor for all types of emotional experiences, especially the experience of what social scientists call "romantic love." Romantic love is a specific kind of experience, apparently based in human biology, that attracts one human being to another. The experience is accompanied by powerful feelings of attraction and jealousy. It is a temporary experience--we can never seem to make it last for very long. Like all feelings or emotions, it is not under our control.

The word love refers to other metaphors: one person sacrificing her life for another, two people remaining faithful to each other for years. But these metaphors are limited. We are seldom asked to sacrifice our lives for someone else, and it takes years to be faithful to someone over a long period of time. Love is something that we have to do every day, and we have to know when we are doing it and when we are not doing it. The definition of love as passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement can apply to everyday experiences. Some involvements with others are short-term, such as my handing a sack of candy to a clerk and asking the clerk to accept my payment for it. Even in that limited context, I can be involved with the person respectfully. Passion, vulnerability, and faithfulness are less relevant to that situation, but in small and tiny ways even those characteristics can be observed at the cash register.

What Lakers and I are suggesting here is that Christian moral thinking, which is often based on the metaphors of judgment and power, needs to be based on the metaphor of love.


Sources of the Metaphors of Judgment and Power

The metaphors of judgment and power are solidly enshrined in Jewish Scripture. Perhaps their clearest expression is in the book of Deuteronomy. "I set before you here, this day, a blessing and a curse: a blessing for obeying the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today; a curse if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord, your God." (Dt 11:26-28) The metaphors are explicitly stated in that passage, but they are implicit in most of the stories of the journey of the people from Egypt into the promised land.

Using this metaphor, Jewish authors interpreted the experiences of their people as God's interventions in the people's fate. When the people obeyed God's laws they lived in peace and prosperity. When they disobeyed the laws, God punished them with foreign invaders and exile. Eventually their reflections on law resulted in its canonization: The Law. Psalm 119 is a good example of the respect that the Law gained among the people. It has 168 verses, and is the longest psalm in the bible. Almost every verse contains the word "law" or a synonym of that word.

Christians took up the metaphor. Their use of it grew immensely when Christians, in the late 300s, after Constantine, gained the upper hand politically in the Roman Empire. Christians began to construct a Christian law in imitation of Roman law. Eventually Church leaders developed the Inquisition, which often used secular power to enforce religious beliefs.

The criminal codes of our federal, state, and local governments are all based on the metaphor of judgment and power. They are based on two statements: this is what you should not do (law), and if you do it (judgment), we punish you (power). If the law itself does not cover my grievance with you, I can sue you, which is a different form of punishment--you will lose money hiring the lawyers you will need to defend yourself against the lawsuit.

We are a nation of judges and punishers.

Judgment and power still exist within the Christian community. We Catholics have pitied Protestant ministers who cannot challenge the beliefs and practices of their congregations lest they be fired by those congregations and have to look for another job. But the Catholic Church uses power, though these days it is mostly restricted to priests, religious, and theology teachers in Catholic institutions--people whose livelihood depends on the approval of the hierarchy.

Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest who took part in the ordination of a woman in 2008, was recently punished by an edict from Rome ordering his Maryknoll superiors to expel him from the Maryknoll Congregation. Bourgeois, who has for years led tens of thousands of people in protest against the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, is so well known and respected that people involved in the protest are likely to replace the support that Maryknoll had given him. But other members of religious orders vowed to poverty have no such security.

Recently a bishop in Australia was forced to resign his position because he violated the law that forbids discussing the issue of women's ordination. It is commonly believed that any bishop who comes close to such questioning can forget about advancement in the hierarchy.

That is power in operation. Is it any wonder that a young person would think twice about joining a Christian church where you can be punished for even discussing something?

A lay Catholic like Garry Wills can publish a scathing criticism of the papacy, claiming that it has made an art out of speaking falsehood for the last two hundred years, but the Church cannot punish him. The worst it can do to him is to forbid people to read his book. I am not aware of any such condemnation of Wills's work, which is probably wise on the part of Church leaders, because a condemnation would likely increase the sales of the book.

The bottom line is that all of us, those in the Church and those not in the Church, firmly believe that if we do not spell out the boundaries of acceptable behavior by laws and then punish violators, everything will fall apart. In social science language, we believe strongly in stimulus-response theory: people do what rewards them and do not do what punishes them. We do not have the resources to do much rewarding, so we focus on the punishing. The Law will save us.


Love

Lakers argues that a different metaphor appears in the prophets, for example, in Hosea. God speaks to the people as a spouse who takes back a wayward wife even after she has been adulterous.

God says (Hosea 2:21-22):

I will espouse you to me forever:
    I will espouse you in right and in justice,
    in love and in mercy;
I will espouse you in fidelity,
    and you shall know the Lord."

Similar metaphors can be found in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

And then there is Jesus.

Jesus used metaphorical language. Some of his language reflects the metaphor of judgment and power--for example the famous scene in Matthew 25 of the king separating the sheep from the goats. But more often Jesus' actual behavior was grounded in a metaphor of intimacy or love. He was passionately, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully involved with the people who came into his life. He forgave sinners, to the point where he scandalized the defenders of the Law. He ignored the Law when love seemed a more appropriate response to a person's behavior. ("The sabbath was made for people, not people for the sabbath.")

Jesus did talk about the fires of gehenna. Surely the threat of eternal punishment is using judgment and power. Or are the fires of gehenna metaphorical?

We interpret the metaphor of the fires of gehenna literally, but we do not take literally the metaphor of cutting off your hand when it causes you to sin. The sociologist would explain this by saying that the metaphor of the fires of gehenna is a useful political tool. If God can put you in fire for eternity, I should be able to punish you by causing lesser pain. I can burn you at the stake in the hopes of motivating you to escape eternal fire, but in the meantime I am preserving my own political power.

Jesus, as I read the Gospels, never himself actually inflicted punishment on anyone. Even when he drove the money-changers out of the temple, his action was more of a defense of the sacredness of the place than a punishment of those who were doing the buying and selling.

Jesus' whole life was a demonstration of passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with people and with his Father. His whole life was based on love. And didn't he say that love of God is the first and greatest commandment, and love of neighbor is second only to that first commandment? The reason we have not taken those two commandments more seriously is that our thinking about love is confused. We think that love means warm feelings, and we rightfully decide that we cannot take love seriously.

What if we Christians had grounded our moral thinking in the metaphor of intimacy four hundred years ago. I think it would have been difficult for Christians to go along with the atrocities committed in colonizing the newly discovered lands in the western hemisphere. I cannot see how a Christian could capture and force a native American to work without pay in gold mines if the Christian believed that God calls us to treat every person with respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness. Still less could a moral code founded on love allow people to transport other people across the Atlantic like cattle in order to use them as slaves in those mines. Colonialism and slavery were grounded in violence--there was just no other way to do it. Violence is the opposite of intimacy.

It would be difficult to over-estimate the damage that colonialism has done to our world. Ever since former colonies gained political independence in the 1960s, they have suffered decades of violent conflict and economic failure because of the leftovers of the colonial system. It would be hard to over-estimate the damage that slavery has done to our own country. It has left us with racism and violence, both of which contribute to the paralysis that is afflicting our government right now. Too many of our fellow citizens judge the behavior of others to be downright evil, deserving of firepower, and they are all set to provide that firepower. 

Those two examples should be enough to counter the charge that grounding moral behavior in a metaphor of intimacy is too easy and subject to one's personal prejudices. Traditional Catholic moral thinking was too accepting of colonialism and slavery. Voices raised in objection to those two institutions were drowned out by the voices of those who saw no incompatibility between the following of Jesus and domination of others by violence.

What the metaphor of intimacy does not do is to spell out in detail exactly what is right and what is wrong. That is what law does. We believe that if we do not spell out in detail what is right and what is wrong, society will go off into chaos.

What law cannot do is to provide guidelines for situations where the law has not yet been developed--for example, in colonies and the slave trade. Intimacy is not opposed to law, it is ahead of law. It gets there first. It sometimes requires us to do things that the law would not command. We all know of cases where a parent sacrifices his or her own well-being in order to give life to a child.


Natural Law

Natural law is a metaphorical extension of the concept of human law to the realm of nature. God, we say, is the author of natural law, and we can know natural law without the light of revelation. Reason alone will reveal God's will.

But "reason" is a weak reed on which to lean. No social scientist would claim that a statement she makes is based on reason. She would be accused of failing to test an idea against empirical evidence. Lakers would say that reason is a fiction--it is a construct based on the story that nature reveals itself to us as a lawgiver. Postmodern writers have called reason and rationality into question on the grounds that whenever someone claims that a position is based on reason, the claim conceals a move to dominate. Reason allows me to pass judgment on you and then punish you.

Can the morality of homosexual behavior be judged on the basis of reason? There is more and more evidence that the condition of homosexuality is not something chosen, but is something the individual is born with. That makes the condition of homosexuality natural. True, it is not the way that most people experience sexuality, but it strains logic to claim that we can judge one kind of sexual behavior as natural and another kind as unnatural when both kinds are found in nature.

Traditional condemnation of homosexuality is grounded in the belief that the Bible condemns it. Since we also believe that it is a freely chosen condition, it must be sinful.

What if we were to ground our approach to homosexuality in the metaphor of intimacy? Here are two people of the same sex. They say that they experience feelings of love for each other. More importantly, they are involved with each other passionately, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully.

Such loving behavior should be encouraged by Christianity. One of the more convincing reasons for not judging homosexual behavior is the empirical evidence that some homosexual men without commitments have hundreds of partners. Surely a legal framework which encourages fidelity is preferable to a legal framework which equates a loving relationship with promiscuity.

Is marriage an institution grounded in natural law? Historically, most human cultures have been polygamous. If we claim that monogamous marriage is based in natural law, we have to admit that much of human history did not realize that, because most societies, including Jewish society, were polygamous--they permitted one man to have more than one wife. That makes questionable the claim that it is obvious to all that monogamy is "natural."

True, the vast majority of people in the world today are monogamous. But the practices of the majority, the defenders of natural law say, are not a good way to judge the morality of behavior.

But, say the opponents of gay marriage, a marriage between two people of the same sex cannot propagate new life.


New  Life

Erik Erikson, the psychoanalyist who popularized the idea of adolescent identity, proposed that there are eight stages in the human life cycle. The next to last stage he labeled "generativity"--a stage where the individual becomes responsible for others and for passing on to others new life in many different forms.

Erikson's schema could be seen as another form of natural law--every person should go through the eight stages--but Erikson never claimed that his schema was given by God and not open to question. However, his idea that the adult person should be involved in the sharing of life in some way is good.

Life can be shared in many ways. The Church has traditionally argued that celibate religious give life in their own way to the Christian community. Yet their behavior is not open to new life in the physical sense. The argument that homosexual unions are against natural law because they are not open to new physical life seems to depend on a prior judgment that homosexual behavior is immoral in itself.

An environment in which children are being raised in the company of two adults who are passionately, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully involved with each other is far preferable to an environment in which children are being raised without any parent.

Catholic Moral Positions in General

 It is widely admitted that the "western" world is going through a crisis of belief in organized religion. Pope Benedict XVI saw secularism and indifferentism as major evils to the living out of Jesus' example. He further insisted that the crisis is caused by a failure to use reason properly.

The "indifferentism" of our time is not a rejection of morality. Our society can be intensely moralistic in reaction to behavior such as child or spouse abuse--we punish sex offenders by requiring them to make their addresses publicly known, and forbidding them to be within a thousand feet of an elementary school. What people are rejecting is a system of morals that seems to have lost touch with new developments in psychology and biology. It is simply not possible for the Church to speak authoritatively on  these developments if the Church continues to ground its judgments in natural law. A moral position that sees passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement as the ultimate criterion for what is good and bad is far more credible to people of our time. The increasing acceptance of gay marriage reflected in recent opinion polls is the result of more and more people having direct personal experience with gay people. A parent with a gay child finds it morally incredible that her child should be denied the experience of committed marital love on the basis of a philosophical belief about nature.

Ultimately, the crisis in young people's confidence that the Church in western societies is experiencing involves far more than just the morality of homosexuality. The Church has locked itself into a whole range of moral positions which are increasingly seen as arbitrary. The only remedy for this situation is to ground Christian morality in a metaphor of intimacy rather than in a metaphor of judgment and power. As long as the Church continues to try to claim that its laws will cover all eventualities, and then punish people who violate those laws, it will find itself losing the battle.

Catechism

     Teachers of religion to young people have a difficult job. I have done it--fifty years ago, true, but I have done it. I began with third and fourth graders in Island Grove, Illinois, progressed to eighth grade in Effingham, then to seventh and eighth grade in Quincy, and finally to high school in Quincy. Those were not, for me, good experiences.

     Part of the reason they were not good experiences was my own lack of experience as a young person. I had had no contact with young people on a "normal" basis, because I entered the seminary after eighth grade. Many people suffer from that kind of inexperience on one level or another. But the format we were expected to follow in teaching was also part of the problem.  It was catechism.

     Catechism. The word has been used in Christianity at least since St. Augustine. The idea is that there are truths which one wishes to communicate, and then there are tools which one uses to communicate that truth. Catechesis is the tools.

     The idea of catechesis always enthused me, but the reality always disillusioned me. It should be rewarding to communicate the wonderful beliefs of our faith, but the reality of trying to do it was, for me, frustrating.

     I think I have a new set of tools for doing it: story-telling.

     An old speech teacher of mine used to say, "people love stories." Ears always prick up when you say, "I have a story about that." TV dramas are based on stories. News reports are labeled as "stories." "The New York Times ran a story about that last week."

     Let me give an example: the seven sacraments.

     The catechism tells us that there are seven sacraments, signs instituted by God to give grace. I was asked to memorize the names of the seven. Suppose I were to say to my students, "Let me tell you the story of how we got seven sacraments."

     Trouble is on the horizon. This gets us into deep water. The Protestant Reformers said that there were fewer than seven sacraments, and the Catholic Church responded by saying that there are seven, and if you say anything different, we will burn you at the stake. That is part of the story of the seven sacraments.

     How did we get seven sacraments?

     There are people who have examined this question in great detail, and there is wide-spread agreement about the story they tell. The first part of the story is the story of Jesus. Jesus lived and taught and died and rose again. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus say "there are seven sacraments, which I am now instituting, and they are the following..."  What apparently happened was that early followers of Jesus gradually developed ways of carrying on Jesus' life and message, and gradually applied his message to events of our own lives.

     Jesus did baptize, and was baptized. Paul was baptized but did not baptize. Baptism is easy, and most Protestant reformers had no problem with baptism as a sacrament.

     Penance-reconciliation-confession was a different story. Some time during the early years of the Church's life, people who did really bad things were asked to do public penance for their behavior. They might have been forbidden to enter church for a year or more, or to sit at the church door with ashes on their heads. It was not until at least the 600s that the custom of confessing one's sins to a priest on a one-to-one basis arose.

     Holy Orders. The Gospels do not say that Jesus ordained anyone at the Last Supper. Paul's letter to Timothy, which was probably not written by Paul, makes reference to the "laying on of hands," but even that is not a clear sign of ordination to a priesthood. The Greek word for priest, hierus, is not used in the New Testament except in the Letter to the Hebrews, where it is used to refer to Jesus himself. The word presbyter, which is closer to the English word "priest," really means "elder," and referred to people who were apparently not ordained in any way.

     The basic story is that the seven sacraments grew out of Christians' ways of thinking about the story of Jesus and applying it to events in ordinary people's lives, but that process took centuries.

     That is the story that I would tell, and I could go into detail about the seven sacraments. If I am not able to go into detail about them, I know where to look for more detail, and I have been taught how to evaluate the quality of what I read. This makes preparation for a religion class interesting for me, because I am always learning more.

     Part of the weakness of our religion teaching since Vatican II has been that there are only so many ways that you can teach the catechism. By the time a child has finished grade school, he or she has presumably heard most of the catechism. What is a high school religion teacher supposed to do? One strategy is to go off into social analysis of various issues of the day, but then the class has become a sociology class. You can get artistic and have students make collages, but how different is that from an art class?

     A collage might make a particular aspect of our faith come alive for a student, but you can do only so many collages.

     The stories that we can tell about our faith are almost limitless. There is no danger that we will run out of material.

     Begin with the stories in the bible. Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his twelve sons, including Joseph of the famous technicolor dream coat. The ten plagues and departure from Egypt, crossing the Sea, wandering in the desert. Ruth, David, Bathsheba, Solomon, the kings after Solomon, the exiles of the Northern and Southern kingdoms. All these are in the bible--we don't need to purchase special catechetical materials for them, though visuals (and audials) of various kinds can help. When we enter a class without time to prepare, we can even resort to the oldest technique of all: read the story aloud right from the bible.

     Jesus and his birth, John the Baptist, all the things that Jesus did during his public ministry, his capture, trial, and execution, and then his resurrection.

     Possibly one reason we shy away from these stories is that many of them seem incredible (Jonah in the whale for three days). But we are learning that the bible is literature, and literature is seldom to be read as if it were science. We used to think that the bible taught us all the science we needed to know. Now we recognize that we cannot go to the bible for science. We go to it for stories about God, told in creative and often metaphorical ways. The stories raise questions about what is good and what is bad in human life.

     For centuries the Church tried to guard against false interpretations of bible stories. At first they tried to keep people from learning to read. Then they tried to keep them from reading the bible in their own languages. The Protestants objected to those strategies, and we now recognize that the Protestants were right. The Church now says it is good for people to read, and to read the bible in their own languages. But the Church is still so afraid that people might get the wrong ideas that they don't want people trying to tell the stories of our faith in any but the most traditional (and boring) ways.

     My method of catechesis creates the danger of misinterpreting the bible, but these days we have many more ways of counter-acting error than by trying to keep people's mouths shut. We have, in the Christian community, our own version of Wikipedia. I can tell a story, and there are people all around me who can correct my telling, in gentle ways, ways short of theatening to burn me at the stake. These days we can afford to be daring in our telling of our story as Christians, because there are so many fellow Christians who can engage us in the conversation that our stories create.

     We cannot do this kind of thing for very long before we are into theology. Our teachers and students will begin to develop a hunger for theology. We end up with a mature faith, one that has developed beyond the catechism, and is never finished developing.

     Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of one person with another. Sharing stories is a wonderful way of engaging in that kind of involvement. Our catechesis should be a daring, yet humble, telling of the Christian story as we understand it.

     One reason that so many people (the percentage in our country has doubled in the last twenty years or so) say "I'm spiritual but not religious," is that organized religion is stuck in the catechism, and cannot cope with people who have adult questions about faith. So the people are wandering around like sheep without a shepherd.

     Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send workers into the harvest. And tell those workers to use the magnificent heritage of stories that we have in the bible, in the "fathers of the Church," in the medievals like Thomas Aquinas, in the mystics like Teresa of Avila, and in today's mystics like Mother Teresa.

     Matthew says in his gospel that a scribe well trained for the kingdom of  heaven is like a householder who brings out of the storehouse new things and old. We Catholics have a great storehouse.

A revised view of natural law

     My thinking on natural law goes back to John Joe Lakers's position that human morality is governed by one of two metaphors: the metaphor of power and judgment, and the metaphor of intimacy, which he defines as passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of one person with another, or of one person with God, or of God with us. Intimacy is another word for love.

     The metaphor of power and judgment is clearly the more dominant of the two. It can be found in much of "Old Testament" scripture, and certainly in most of our criminal law. You judge whether something is right or wrong, and if it is wrong, you punish it. This suggests a behaviorist assumption of how humans operate. We act on the basis of punishments and rewards.

     JJ, in the months and years before he died, carried on a sustained attack on natural law theory. But in a sense, he is really stating that each of his two metaphors is "natural," in the sense that humans naturally operate on their basis. Therefore the attack should not be on natural law as such. There is indeed a natural law, but it has both positive and negative aspects.

 

     Negatively, one could make the case that human beings are structured naturally to dominate each other, even to the point of slavery, which is what slave-owners argued. Or that men are naturally sexually promiscuous, which is what some argue today. Or that men are naturally dominant over women, also argued today. We have learned, I think, that when a woman leads a professional life, she is not violating her nature.

     On the positive side, we can argue that intimacy is "natural." When one lives by that metaphor, good things happen. I might argue that humanity might never have learned the value of that metaphor had not Jesus taught it, but it might also be true that people have indeed discovered it outside of Christianity. There is no doubt, however, that for Christians, it should be dominant. "Love one another as I have loved you" is how Jesus put it. Or, "The greatest commandment is this: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. And the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

     That intimacy can be the basis of a Christian ethic is clear enough. We get into trouble, however, when we start to define specific behavior as "natural." Is it any more obvious that contraception is unnatural than that slavery is unnatural? Or that in vitro fertilization is unnatural than that male domination is unnatural? Questions like these are the reason that most social scientists reject the idea of anything being strictly "natural." For them the nature-nurture debate colors every discussion of what kind of behavior is good for human beings. To say that something is natural is to end discussion, and ending discussion is something that a scientist will not do.

The priest shortage

     What are we to do about the shortage of priests?

     Catholic laity are remarkably patient. In earlier days they endured "irremovable" pastors who were cranky, ineffective, and sometimes downright nasty. When they did not have a priest, they pestered the hierarchy until they got one.

     Catholic laity today are also patient, although some of them are choosing to exercise their patience away from the Catholic community. The reason they have to be patient is because their priests, who are getting older and older, are sometimes cranky, ineffective, and downright nasty. Not enough men are coming forward to be ordained to replace the ones that die, and the ones who do come seem to be "yes men" rather than men who can be involved with their people in vulnerable ways.

     Why aren't more men coming forward to be ordained? The two more obvious reasons are: 1) life-long commitment, and 2) celibacy. The life-long obligation may be a more important difficulty for them than the celibacy. Young people today expect to make career changes. The argument that marriage involves a life-long commitment overstates the parallels between priesthood and marriage.

     Garry Wills offers another explanation. Priests are required to defend in public things that they do not really believe. For example, no priest dares to say publicly that contraception is not sinful, even though surveys indicate that 80% or 90% of priests think that. This is uncomfortable for older priests like myself, who have been caught in the situation after we have already committed ourselves to priesthood. But I have to admit that if I were 20 years old and looking forward to taking up a role where I would have to defend things I did not believe, I would think twice and probably decline the entry.

     Sometimes I ask myself, should I publicly challenge Church teachings I disagree with? My answer: I don't have that kind of courage. Church leaders prefer to use power rather than dialog.

     I do not accuse the men who choose to be ordained of lack of integrity. I suspect that they are like I was at their age, totally committed to the Church and to its leaders, and assuming that anything the leaders say has to be true. While I would not accuse them of lack of integrity, I would judge them captives of youthful naivete. I certainly was naive in my early years.

     I also do not say that contraception is okay. Perhaps it is sinful, though the widespread use of contraceptives by otherwise pious Catholics suggests that the sensus fidelium does not see contraception as sinful. But if I were to believe that it is not sinful, I would want to be able to discuss the issue. That is precisely what Church authorities refuse to do. Who would choose to live muzzled?

     What will happen?

     Eventually I suspect that we will have a lay-led Church. So many priests will have died off that the laity will take over. We are already on the way, when there are more lay paid employees in the U.S. Church than there are clergy. Many of these laity are at least as well educated in theology as most of us priests were fifty years ago. At some point the Church will either decide to do without Eucharist or to start allowing new categories of people to lead the Eucharist. I put my money on the latter outcome.

     Probably the people who will become bishops are the men who are now entering as priests. Some of them, like myself, will change their thinking and become "liberal." Most will not. But it won't make any difference. Control will have passed to laity.

     The other factor that is likely to affect the situation is the rest of the world. Already there are more Catholics in the southern hemisphere than in the north. Some of those churches suffer from clergy shortages far worse than ours. Many of their people are every bit as "conservative" as our young clergy. But laity in their churches will be using contraception too.

     We probably won't have a Vatican III, but we don't need one. We just have to move ahead in the directions Vatican II gave us. I think the Church will do that.

Gay marriage

"Gay marriage" is the most recent subject of controversy in the churches, including the Catholic Church. The more liberal Christian groups, such as the Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ, are open to allowing gay couples to claim the status of being married. The more conservative ones, including the Southern Baptists and the Roman Catholics, reject such openness.

Whether or not we can view gays as entitled to the status of being married, the crucial issue comes down to the morality of homosexual behavior. The morality of homosexual behavior runs head on into one of the clearest statements in scripture. The statement is not, as are some moral statements, limited to the Old Testament, so that Christians might claim that it has been superseded by Christ's new law. It is found at the very beginning of one of the most solidly attested New Testament documents, St. Paul's letter to the Romans. Here is what Paul says, describing the state of humanity without Christ:

           ...Therefore, God handed them [the pagans] over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the
           mutual degradation of their bodies. . . .God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females
           exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with
           females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received
           in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity. . ." (Romans 1:24-27, New American Bible
           translation)

It would be hard to imagine a clearer statement of the immorality of homosexual behavior.

Yet something is happening in our societies that calls for a re-examination of this text. As they have personal contact with openly gay people, often in their own families, more and more people are coming to accept the idea that a homosexual orientation is not the result of choice but of biology. If that is so, why is it not preferable for two men or two women to live in a committed relationship with one another than for them to live without such commitment? If it is preferable for them to live that way, can the sexual behavior that will result from such living be wrong? If it is not wrong, what do we do with Paul's letter to the Romans?

The answer to that question is that we do what we have done throughout Christian history when confronted with scriptural texts that seem to go against commonly accepted wisdom. We interpret the texts as products of a specific cultural environment, not binding for all times and places. Such an interpretation of homosexuality has been done. See Daniel Helminiak's book What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality.

We have in Christian history two other examples of how new understandings have caused the church to reject apparently clear scriptural texts: usury and slavery. Until the 1600s, Christian churches regarded the charging of interest on loans as immoral. (See John T. Noonan's book, Usury.) Until the 1800s Christian churches also existed comfortably with the idea that slavery is acceptable. There are clear scriptural texts which can be used to defend both positions. Today both positions are rejected, by Catholic as well as by most Protestant groups. Does homosexuality fall into the same category?

I think it does, but it will be a hard sell. Paul's statement is just too clear and too dramatic. Catholics are not biblical literalists, but this particular text has language that snares Catholics on another term dear to traditionalists: "natural." The females exchanged "natural" relations for "unnatural." If we accept Thomas Aquinas's grounding of morality in natural law, it will be much harder for us to interpret away this text as the product of a particular culture. Not only does the text condemn homosexual behavior, but it seems to legitimate natural law as a grounding for all morality.

I have argued elsewhere for the replacement of natural law as a basis of morality with a criterion of intimacy or love: passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement of one human being with another and with God. My argument here is that the "faithful" are using such a criterion and coming up with a different judgment of the morality of homosexuality than our traditional judgment. The sooner we get away from trying to use natural law as the grounding for our moral thinking, the sooner we will be able to engage our own culture in ways that both challenge its weaknesses and affirm its strengths. As it is now, the official Church is no more able to challenge the culture than are the Old Order Amish.

Reason

[I wrote the following essay in November 2006 as a companion to the work of John Joe Lakers, O.F.M., who uses his background in linguistic philosophy to argue for a moral discourse different from the one commonly assumed by Catholic authors.]

            In his now well-known lecture in September 2006 to an assembly of German academics at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XV repeated a hope often voiced by his predecessor, John Paul II. The hope is that the Church be able to speak to present-day secular culture in new ways. In Benedict’s words, “. . .if reason and faith come together in a new way, . . . only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”

            Public reaction to the lecture centered on Benedict’s use of a quotation from a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor. The quotation accused Islam of being a religion of violence. The public reaction to the Pope’s quotation drowned out any discussion of the claims he made about reason and faith. However, Benedict chose to speak in an academic environment, and as an academic accustomed to discourse in such environments, I want to offer a critical reaction.

            Philosophical thinking since the time of Thomas Aquinas has moved in directions that call Aquinas’s synthesis into question. As Benedict himself noted in his lecture, the Franciscan John Duns Scotus already in the 14th century disagreed with Aquinas. Subsequent centuries saw Catholic philosophy develop in many directions away from Aquinas. It was only in the late 19th century that Pope Leo XIII raised Aquinas up as a model for Catholic philosophy, and baptized Aquinas’s thought as THE way Catholics ought to approach philosophy. Such a baptism hardly fits comfortably with the claim that philosophy should proceed totally without the light of revelation, in order that revelation might better be understood. The claim also sat uncomfortably with my own Franciscan seminary educators, who based their teaching on Scotus and his 14th century pupil, William of Ockham.       

            Leo’s baptism of Aquinas gave rise to the movement called “neo-scholasticism,” a movement that virtually disappeared after 1960. Secular philosophy, beginning already in the 17th century with René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, also moved away from medieval scholasticism. Modern thought has been shaped not only by those two figures, but also by writers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Emmanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. In social science, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, George Herbert Mead, Sigmund Freud, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and the rest of the immense literature in sociology and psychology have implications for our thinking about the human person. Analytic philosophy, focusing on analysis of language, and the still more recent movement called postmodernism require response from thinking Catholics, and a response based on more than the thinking of one medieval philosopher-theologian who was known in his day for the courage to enter dialogue with the “pagan” philosophers, Plato and Aristotle.

            Any true dialogue with modern culture must be willing to include any and all secular authors in the conversation. The fact that Benedict ended his consideration of post-Aquinas authors with Duns Scotus suggests an ignorance of the culture that Benedict wants to engage. According to Lakers, Scotus was struggling to deal with problems not adequately dealt with by his predecessors. He was not able to reach a solution to those problems, but his struggle led to later developments that were not, as Benedict claims, sad deviations from a search for a truth already stated by Aquinas. The crux of the matter lies in the meanings of the concept of “reason.” Benedict wants to claim that “reason” must co-exist with faith (a point important to make in cultures where religious fundamentalism is increasing), and that reason is incompatible with violence. However, he goes on to say that “reason” means “Greek reason,” reason as enunciated by, Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. That reason must co-exist with faith has been a traditional Catholic position. That reason means Greek reason is, in today's world, inexcusably ethnocentric. That Greek reason means reason as enunciated by Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas is not only ethnocentric but disregards over seven subsequent centuries of philosophical tradition.

            However, Lakers makes a deeper critique of Benedict's claim. According to him, postmodernist authors claim that “reason” is a fictitious term. That is, to use the concept of reason is to create a fictitious narrative, whose effect is to shut down further conversation.

            “Shutting down conversation” may seem to be an overstatement. No one today wants to be accused of doing that. But when authors claim that a statement is based on reason, the reader has only two choices: reject the claim, or accept the claim and fall silent.

            An example from present-day politics illustrates the point. Catholic pro-life theologians claim that their position on abortion law is based not on religious or denominational belief but on “natural law.” The term “natural law,” which is regarded by almost all social scientists as incompatible with a scientific outlook, creates a claim that an argument is based on reason. Having made that claim, pro-life politicians can only move to raw political power, claiming that, as citizens of a democracy, they have the right to try to influence public policy. I do not dispute the right of anyone to try to influence public policy. What I do dispute is the claim that the grounds for the pro-life position are self-evident, based on reason, and can only be rejected by people who are in bad faith.

            One could make a convincing argument against the pro-life political stance on the basis of the traditional neo-scholastic distinction between what can be known by reason without the aid of revelation, and what can be known only through revelation. For example, I may accept on faith the Church teaching that the human person is present from the first moment of conception. But I reject the claim that such a teaching can be known from reason without the aid of revelation. If the Church in this country were to acknowledge that its claim about personhood is not known by reason alone, it would be forced to quit accusing its opponents of bad faith, and would have to enter into discussion with them on the basis of reasoned discourse, all the while recommending that Catholics be guided by the official teaching.

            The claim that “reason” is a fiction implies a much deeper problem. At first glance it would seem to open moral discourse up to total relativism. Lakers argues that it does not. His argument requires an analysis of the nature of moral discourse, of the way that human beings use language to make moral claims on one another. Any moral claim, he says, is ultimately grounded in one of two metaphors: the metaphor of power and judgment, or the metaphor of intimacy.

            The metaphor of power and judgment assumes that a competent judge can declare a particular behavior to be wrong, and the individual who practices it must be punished. The alternate way is to assume that human beings relate to one another in the hope of realizing a life lived more fully. Lakers argues that such a full life can come only from intimacy, which he defines as involvement characterized by passion, respect, vulnerability, and faithfulness. The use of a metaphor of intimacy does not result in purely random outcomes. Those four criteria are demanding. But they do not settle for all times and places the course of action that the individual should pursue.

            The first reaction of Church teachers will certainly be that Lakers’s position is “situational”  ethics, condemned by the magisterium decades ago. Lakers too rejects situational ethics, arguing that it is just another appeal to “reason,” but an appeal that washes out most of the humanly significant aspects of interpersonal behavior. Since we are dealing with philosophy here, not theology, I cannot reject Lakers's ethics simply on the grounds that the magisterium has condemned it. I will need to know why it is to be condemned, and whether the magisterium has listened to my position. I will relate to the magisterium from a metaphor of intimacy, and I will expect it to relate the same way to me.

            It is true that we have not been doing things this way in the Catholic Church. But we have changed a lot of things that were once thought to be self-evident. Both Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians for centuries rejected as immoral the practice of charging interest on loans. By the 18th century both Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians, along with the magisterium, had found ways to legitimize the practice. The legitimation occurred because generations of the faithful acted on the basis of the intimate relationships that grow up between living human beings and gradually shape a new moral consensus.

            Today the behavior of Catholics in “western” societies has moved vast distances from the positions claimed by the magisterium. Poll data claim that over ninety percent of lay Catholics in the United States reject papal teaching on contraception, and there is survey evidence that nearly the same percentage of priests agree with the rejection. Simply re-affirming the teaching will not be any more successful than John XXIII’s decree (in the 1962 encyclical Veterum Sapientiae) that Latin should henceforth be the language of all philosophical and theological teaching in all Catholic seminaries throughout the world. Such behavior of the faithful is not always, as some Churchmen would claim, a symptom of a widespread loss of faith. Traditional theology referred to it as the sensus fidelium, the “sentiment of the faithful.”

           The claim that western societies are hopelessly corrupted by secularism, and that the future of the Church lies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, is hardly a courageous confronting of the challenges posed by “modernity.” What will happen if and when the faithful in those regions acquire the affluence that characterizes western societies? The lion must be bearded in its den. If the Church cannot construct an argument for its moral positions that can at least dialogue with western secular cultures, it will have abandoned its claim that truth is one--that faith must co-exist with “reason.”

            In short, Lakers argues, the postmodernist critique of “reason” requires that morality be grounded in something other than the traditional moral claim that certain practices are intrinsically immoral and that their immorality can be known by reason alone. Using his background in linguistic philosophy, he builds an argument based on the metaphor of intimacy. Those behaviors which grow out of the metaphor of intimacy are moral; those which do not are immoral. This sounds very much like Paul's argument that the Law cannot save, or the gospels' statements that Jesus' central commandment is a commandment of love.

            In short, Catholic moral theology can no longer ground itself in the concept of “reason.” It must embrace the much messier, but also the much more demanding, use of the metaphor of intimacy in its moral discourse. Only through intimacy can human persons achieve the “fullness of life” that Christians see as the promise made to us by Jesus.