Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Thanks to Patrick for his insightful remarks about the issues surrounding blogging. I think all of us who contribute to web logs and those who offer comments to authors’ postings can take stock of what you said. Of course, this is a prevalent means of communicating ideas today. This does not mean that it is a good or desirable method, but it is one that exists and its impact cannot be underestimated.
I am also grateful to Eduardo for his posting entitled “Dolan on Gay Marriage.” There are many things that can be said about the Archbishop’s post and Eduardo’s commentary on it. Today I’ll restrict my commentary to Eduardo’s thesis that Archbishop Dolan about the definition of marriage. But before I do, I think it important to take stock of this reality about blogging to which Patrick has referred: is the medium of the web log the place where any of us really expect a detailed analysis of every nuance, no matter how important, in a few hundred words? I for one think that it would be impossible to achieve this, and, therefore I do not expect in-depth discussion in blogging. Web logs are better as providing catalysts for discussion and debate, but they are not the substance of the detail that must inevitably accompany discussion and debate. Justice to the positions that emerge in blog posts and the justifications that should undergird the positions presented require more than a few paragraphs that are the limit of blogging. I also think that Archbishop Dolan realizes that detailed argument is necessary on this vital subject and on many other issues, and that is why he can and does write pastoral letters where sufficient detail can be mustered in explaining the views which he is proposing. I don’t think that Eduardo believes that the Archbishop is incapable of “reasoned argument”; moreover, I am sure he shares with me the perspective that Archbishop Dolan has demonstrated that he, like us, would be dissatisfied with “conclusory zingers”.
So, on to one of Eduardo’s contentions that “Dolan himself can hardly make up his mind on the subject of marriage’s meaning.”
Now I must get to his principal critique. Eduardo makes the point that the Archbishop is inconsistent in the three definitions that he, the Archbishop, has provided in the postings to which he, Eduardo, refers. The definitions of marriage provided by Archbishop Dolan to which Eduardo refers are these:
- marriage is “one man, one woman, united in lifelong love and fidelity, hoping for children”
- marriage is “a loving, permanent, life-giving union to pro-create children”
- marriage is “loving, faithful union between one man and one woman leading to a family”
At this point, it might be helpful to take stock of how the Church teaches what marriage is and is not:
Marriage is explained in some detail in Part Two, Section Two, Chapter Three, Article Seven, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is evident that what the Archbishop asserted in his several postings does not deviate from the Catechism.
Moreover, the Archbishop’s formulations are consistent with the lengthy discussion of marriage in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.
In the 1983 Charter of the Rights of the Family, the Church more succinctly defines marriage as: “that intimate union of life in complementarity between a man and a woman which is constituted in the freely contracted and publicly expressed indissoluble bond of matrimony and is open to the transmission of life... [and it] is the natural institution to which the mission of transmitting life is exclusively entrusted”. Once again, the Archbishop, using various formulations, captures this.
The Code of Canon Law specifies that marriage is the “matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring, has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptized.” Again, I think that the Archbishop is faithful to this formulation.
In spite of what Eduardo contends, I think that the Archbishop has capture accurately the essence of what the Church teaches not only for Catholics but for the good of civil society and, therefore, the common good. And he does this using an economy of words that is vital to the medium that he used in his blog.
I share Eduardo’s point that the Archbishop did not address the perils of divorce. But that is not the subject which the New York lawmakers are presently considering, and, therefore, this grave issue is not treated in the Archbishop’s postings. Neither is abortion. Ditto with euthanasia and assisted suicide. All of these issues have some bearing on marriage and family, but they are not what are at the heart of the present legislative debate. The legislators are, however, contemplating a radical redefinition of marriage, and that is the issue to which Archbishop Dolan is responding.
I disagree with Eduardo that the Archbishop has authored “unconvincing screeds aimed at producing nice sound-bites for the press.” By contrast to Eduardo, I think the Archbishop has distilled for a particular medium (i.e., blogging that does not favor detailed discussion) the essence of important moral teachings that have a bearing on not only where Catholics should go with the legislative proposals but where the entire state of New York ought to proceed. Eduardo confuses the issue addressed by the Archbishop and the legislature by introducing another matter dealing with what is the family. While they are related, they are not the same; moreover, the legislature is not defining the family—yet. But it is considering redefining what constitutes a marriage. I am confident that the Archbishop is capable of addressing the family definition issue elsewhere, but that is not what the New York legislature is now in the processing of attempting to redefine.
If Eduardo is dissatisfied with the Archbishop’s efforts in explaining marriage, I think many would point out that the Marriage Equality movement which favors the redefintion of marriage for “equality’s” sake has failed to demonstrate what is equality, first of all, and why the union of a man and a man or a woman and a woman is the same as, or is equal to a union of a man and a woman who, by themselves, have a far greater chance of procreating children than any same-sex union, by themselves, of doing the same.
As this is a blog entry, I guess this enough for one posting...
RJA sj
My friend and colleague, rock-star sociologist of religion Christian Smith, recently came into full communion with the Catholic Church and has a new book, available at Amazon, called "How To Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five [get it?] Difficult Steps." I read the book in draft, and loved it. It has, I think, as much (maybe more) to teach (or remind) and challenge Catholics as it does to help curious Evangelical Protestants. It's not a polemic, by any stretch, and isn't really "apologetics", though it does have an Apologia Pro Vita Sua dimension. Highly recommended.
Monday, June 20, 2011
To steal a line from Stanley Hauerwas, I don't really believe in California. But even I will admit that California in the decades following World War II was about as ideal a time and place as American life can offer. Caitlin Flanagan has a nice essay in the current Atlantic about the California of her childhood and one of its sainted heroes, the devoutly Catholic Cesar Chavez. Flanagan winsomely recalls the labor activism of her Berkeley English prof father ("In the history of human enterprise, there can have been no more benevolent employer than the University of California in the 1960s and ’70s, yet to hear my father and his English-department pals talk about the place, you would have thought they were working at the Triangle shirtwaist factory."), but she's especially perceptive about Chavez:
To understand Chavez, you have to understand that he was grafting together two life philosophies that were, at best, an idiosyncratic pairing. One was grounded in union-organizing techniques that go back to the Wobblies; the other emanated directly from the mystical Roman Catholicism that flourishes in Mexico and Central America and that Chavez ardently followed. He didn’t conduct “hunger strikes”; he fasted penitentially. He didn’t lead “protest marches”; he organized peregrinations in which his followers—some crawling on their knees—arrayed themselves behind the crucifix and effigies of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His desire was not to lift workers into the middle class, but to bind them to one another in the decency of sacrificial poverty. He envisioned the little patch of dirt in Delano—the “Forty Acres” that the UFW had acquired in 1966 and that is now a National Historic Landmark—as a place where workers could build shrines, pray, and rest in the shade of the saplings they had tended together while singing.
For much of the twentieth century, California was a parable for America, including American Catholicism. But the story doesn't end on a happy note:
Growing up here when I did meant believing your state was the most blessed place in the world. We were certain—both those who lived in the Republican, Beach Boys paradises of Southern California and those who lived in the liberal enclaves of Berkeley and Santa Monica—that our state would always be able to take care of its citizens. The working class would be transformed (by dint of the aerospace industry and the sunny climate) into the most comfortable middle class in the world, with backyard swimming pools and self-starting barbecue grills for everyone. The poor would be taken care of, too, whether that meant boycotting grapes, or opening libraries until every rough neighborhood had books (and Reading Lady volunteers) for everyone.
But all of that is gone now.
