Explaining Vatican on Same-Sex Rites

Tooley: Hello this is Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy, with the pleasure today of speaking with Stephen White at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, and also director of the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America, also here in DC. And I’m talking to Stephen White about this week’ “shocking” announcement from the Vatican that the Roman Catholic Church still affirms its traditional understanding of marriage as the union of male and female, even after 2000 years, which has astonished a lot of people. So, Stephen, explain to us what this pronouncement is, why it was needed, why it’s been surprising to a number of people, and what exactly is the Church’s teaching on marriage rooted in and why is it unlikely to change next week, next month, or next year.

White: Yeah, well, let’s start at the beginning, not Genesis, but the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is responsible for any doctrinal questions in the Church, received a question, a dubium in Latin, about whether it was possible for the Church to bless same sex unions. And the normal process is someone submits a dubium in a form of essentially yes or no question, and they get a yes or no response from the CDF. This happens for lots of issues. This one obviously sort of went viral. The response from the congregation was no, and their response was provided along, their negative response was provided, along with a rather brief but succinct theological explanation of why that’s the case, along with an additional explanatory letter sort of taking a more pastoral look at how this response fits into the Church’s handling of this particular issue. There’s the short version. And people can find it online. It’s available in English. You can read the whole thing. It’s not long, but the short answer is the Church cannot bless same sex unions, because the Church doesn’t bless sexual relationships outside of the institution of marriage. Outside of marriage, sexual relations are prohibited or against the moral law, and therefore the Church is not going to bless relationships that are founded on something that the Church has always taught to be sinful and contrary to God’s law. As you said, it’s not a surprising answer, but a lot of people seem to be surprised by this. And I think part of that is just frustration. There are a lot of people who don’t like the Church’s teaching and want to see it jettisoned. And I think there are a lot of people whose hopes had gotten up in that regard, because of what they took to be a softening of the Church’s position from Pope Francis in recent years. Famously he said when asked about the hypothetical priests who might be gay, but as living chastised and striving to live to the Church’s teaching, Pope Francis answered, “Who am I to judge?” That was taken by a lot of people to be a sort of difference. The other, there are laws, there are more rules, but let’s not get too caught up in following rules, let’s not be too legalistic. I don’t think that’s what the Pope meant. If you took the Pope to mean that, then this response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, which was signed off on, or done with the approval of Pope Francis, would be a surprise. Some people see it as sort of a whiplash, as if the Pope is screening back and forth between sort of open statements and welcoming statements and then sort of more harsh language, speaking about how the Church cannot bless sin and speaking of intrinsically disordered acts and things like that. But the two are really consistent. The Church insists that we should love everybody, but the whole point of the Church is that we are sinners in need of redemption. And so, while the Church insists on loving people who have same sex attraction, loving people who are all kinds of sinners, that we distinguish between the person that we are called to love and acts that are contrary to God’s law, which we don’t love and we don’t accept. Mercy doesn’t consistent of telling people they’re just okay the way they are. God meets us where we are, but he doesn’t leave us there. And so, there’s been a, not entirely surprising I think, reaction against the clarity with which the CDF addressed the issue.

Tooley: I’m Protestant, of course, and I’m not deeply familiar with how the Catholic Church works doctrinally, but it would be my understanding that even if the Pope desired to change the Church’s teachings, he does not have that authority or power. That the doctrine is embedded in the Church in such a way that no individual could adjust the Church’s marriage teaching. Is that correct?

White: Yeah, that’s right. It’s a little bit more complicated than that. Our understandings of the Church’s teaching develop over time, but what won’t happen, what can’t happen, is for something that is contrary to God’s law to suddenly not be contrary to God’s law. The Church has always taught that sexual relationships are for the good of the spouses, right, but that they are also always directed towards the procreation and rearing of children. There are no acts, sexual or otherwise, that two men can share with each other that share those ends. And there are acts that a married heterosexual couple commit that don’t comport with those, and those are also not allowed. It’s worth noting, though, that the CDF statement on same sex unions said that the Church doesn’t bless sexual unions outside of marriage for anybody. That applies, by the way, to people who are not of the same sex. Someone who is in a sexual relationship that is not marriage cannot expect to have that relationship blessed, even if it’s a man and a woman asking for that blessing. The Church would say no to that as well for much the same reason. The reason for that teaching is not that that’s sort of the policy we settled on, but there are scriptural and long-standing traditional teachings, teachings within the tradition I should say, there’s extensive papal writings on this and on these issues. And I think one of the challenges here is that sort of the ambient understanding of what marriage and human sexuality is has changed dramatically. Some of that has to do with the widespread availability and acceptance of contraception, which the Church famously still opposes for very related reasons to the reason it continues to oppose homosexual acts. And so, the fundamental understanding of what human sexuality is for is not something that’s sort of made up, and it’s not something the Church can do or change. And that makes a lot of people very unhappy, for reasons that in one sense are understandable. So far as a lot of Catholics around the world have sort of lost a sense of what the Church teaches about sexuality generally, it makes it hard for them to understand what the Church teaches about sexuality in this particular instance of homosexuals.

Tooley: Do you think that the Pope inadvertently over the years has fueled some of these misunderstandings by some of his casual remarks, or it’s just been almost entirely the projection of expectations?

White: Well, that’s a tough question because it gets to the intention of the Holy Father to a certain degree. I’m not surprised by this sort of clarification from the CDF, and I’m not in any way surprised that Pope Francis would hold that same sex unions are morally compromised, because of the nature of the acts involved. I think it is the case that, look, there’s a pastoral challenge which is a real one, which is that the Church looks at the flock and the flock is asking for answers to questions that it wasn’t asked before. You have people who have gay friends and neighbors and family, you have Catholics who are in gay relationships who earnestly are seeking what the Church offers, right. There is a face there. These are baptized Christians who are striving to come closer to God and the Church’s teaching, and this is a hard teaching in a way that it wasn’t in the past, in the sense that sort of the expectation of the culture and a lot of Catholics has changed. So, the teaching doesn’t change. It’s sort of farther removed from what sort of the baseline expectation of a lot of society is. And so, simply stating the Church’s teaching with clarity, as important as that is, isn’t really sufficient to address the pastoral challenge that the church faces right now. And so, all of that to say I think one of the reasons that Pope Francis has taken a sort of softer rhetoric towards these questions in the past is out of a solicitude for people who need and expect more from the Church than simply a restatement of what the Church teaches. It’s really important for the Church to insist that God loves you and the Church has a place for people who are struggling with these issues. The Church is precisely the place where these people should go, just as everyone should be looking to the Church for guidance on how to live in a way that brings us closer to God, to be more open to God’s grace in our lives. And simply restating the teaching doesn’t necessarily accomplish that. It’s a start but doesn’t accomplish that. So, I think he’s trying to signal that there’s an openness, but, again, the Church must separate the person from the sin. The old saying “love the sinner, hate the sin” makes a lot of people unhappy right now, and I think there’s been a conflation, not so much by the Pope or by the Church, but a conflation by a lot of people who would insist that you, in the case of say gay Catholics, you can’t separate those two. It’s sort of take me as I am or nothing. That if you reject my behavior, that you are rejecting me. And that’s not a conflation that’s sustainable on any issue, not just this one. To insist that we cannot be distinguished or separated from our sin renders mercy incoherent, to be honest. If the idea is that we can’t look at one another as loved but also in need of conversion, then what do we need mercy for? Again, that applies to everybody, not just people who are struggling with this particular issue. And that idea that you love the sinner, hate the sin, that we can distinguish the person who was very much deserving of love and mercy from the acts in question, that makes a lot of people unhappy because they don’t want to separate those two. They want to be accepted as they are and left to be as they are, or recognized for what they are. Behind a lot of this is the desire not just for the Church to be more sensitive, but I think behind a lot of this is a real desire for the Church to say, “Your sin is not sin.” And the Church is not going to say that. The Church can’t say that.

Tooley: Some of the more liberal German bishops who appear to be pushing for the Church to move in a different direction. What exactly do they want the Church to teach? What adjustments are they looking for, in your perception?

White: That’s a very broad question. I think there’s a generally liberalizing trend in in Germany, which is essentially, and I don’t know that every German bishop or even any German bishop would agree quite with my putting things this way, but there’s a sense that the Church can’t expect its members to follow morality. That it’s out of step with the age, right. That it’s too old fashioned or needs to be updated for the 21st century. And that’s a dead end, right. If God asks us to act as our times suggest we should act, then what do we need scripture and tradition for? What do we need God’s mercy for? Just go with the flow. And I think there’s a hope and expectation that the Church can find ways to develop its doctrine or to change its teaching or to change its discipline. And there are certain senses in which it can do that, but it can’t do it in a way that makes what is contrary to God’s plan, to God’s law, okay. That can’t happen. And I think that’s sort of at the root of a lot of these applications, and it’s simply not going to happen. Now the German Church is in the midst of sort of a meeting of many bishops and lay people in the Church of Germany to try and sort of find a way forward for the Church. And there’s been a lot of indication that the Vatican and Pope Francis are very unhappy with the direction that that’s going, and I think that it’s not unreasonable to take this Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith clarification on this issue to be directed largely towards the German Church. If you have a whole lot of bishops and an entire national church functioning on a sort of theological premise that is irreconcilable with the rest of the Catholic Church, that’s a problem. And there’s a real worry about there being a schism in the German Church and in other places as well, other churches trying to make itself palatable to modern sensibilities by distancing itself from its own teaching and tradition. And I would say, from the truth. So, how that plays out, I don’t know. There could be kind of a de-escalation. It could be sort of a long, slow simmering. There could be something more dramatic. And we’ll see. The moment right now is a little bit delicate. So, stay tuned. It’s not an easy situation, and from a pastoral point of view, Rome doesn’t want to just sort of send people away or accelerate a break. At the same time, there’s only so much that they can concede to keep things together.

Tooley: Is the underlying issue with the German Church its extensive funding by the government, or why does it stand out even from other churches in Western Europe?

White: It’s a complicated question. The German Church is fantastically wealthy, in part because of the church tax. But that in itself I don’t think explains this. I think the German Church, as wealthy as it is, is also very conscious that it has very low participation. People don’t show up for mass there. The German Church is not a particularly healthy church, far from the only sort of country in Europe where that’s the case. And so, I think that the German Church is right in this regard that something’s got to give. That just continuing along the path that we have been is just sort of a slow road to nowhere. The question is, do you really engage in the sort of get back to basics and focus more on evangelization and less on institutional maintenance and sort of get out there knocking on doors, inviting people to meet Christ? Or do you try and sort of make your product more marketable to the audience you have? That’s sort of a good way of putting it, but the church in Germany seems to be leaning more towards the latter than the former, and I don’t think that there’s much of a future for that, but we’ll see.

Tooley: In terms of the Church’s teachings on marriage, popular Protestant perspectives would say, “Well, there are several Bible verses in the New Testament that are very clear on the topic of sexual morality and we’re governed by those.” The Catholic Church’s teaching is more complex than that. For the purpose of non-Catholics, how would you explain how the Catholic Church got to where it is on its marriage teaching?

White: How many millennia do you have for an explanation? There are a couple of things at play here. One is the Church’s theology of the sacrament of marriage, which is in a certain sense distinct, clearly related, but in a certain sense distinct to what the Church insists is a natural, prelapsarian even, institution of marriage. At its most basic level, marriage is for the sake of procreation. The whole reason we have men and women come together is to provide for a new generation, be fruitful and multiply, right. So, there’s pretty early scriptural warrant for marriage. And on the sacramental side, in the Gospels we hear Christ speaking about, when questioned about divorce for example, speaking about how it was in the beginning, that divorce was not allowed from the beginning, but out of the hardness of hearts of man it was allowed by Moses. But that was not how it was intended in the beginning. And so, there’s this idea that sacramental marriage, marriage between two baptized people, is not something that the Church can undo. Once a sacramental marriage is undertaken, it is permanent. It’s not eternal, but it is lifelong, and only the death of one or both spouses can bring it to an end. There’s nothing that the Church, not even the Pope in Rome, can do to undo that now. When you get into questions of is a civil divorce allowed or not, that’s a bit more complicated, but the basic point is that marriage is what God has bound together. No man can break it, including the Pope. Along with that has always been this understanding that the primary end of marriages is not just making new people, but to raise them right, to bring them into a relationship with their creator. So, there’s also this idea, there’s also a philosophical argument that goes along with that. A philosophical or theological argument that reinforces the Church’s position on the connection between marriage and procreation. And you can see how this touches on both questions of contraception, but also on questions of homosexual acts insofar as an act does not serve the end for which it was created. That applies both to a contraceptive act, but also to same sex sexual acts. So, the Church’s teaching on those two is related, which is an interesting point, because it’d be very hard for the Church to change its teaching on say same sex relationships without also changing teaching on contraception. There’s an interior coherence there that the Church maintains that changing one or the other would significantly shift and unsettle. I don’t know if I’m answering your question about how we got to where we are. It’s a big broad teaching and there’s a lot there, both scriptural and from tradition. I can go on if you’d like.

Tooley: Well, we’ll have to discuss this further in another interview, but Stephen White, director of the Catholic Project at Catholic University and senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, thank you for a very informative conversation on a timely topic.

White: Thank you, Mark.