Church learning to adjust and change - Back Burner

Following my last column, which conveyed the heart-wrenching letters of two women who, for decades, have suffered agonies over the present annulment requirements of our church, I turn to the good news of the reforms that are now in the making.

It is clear that Jesus taught, without qualification, that marriage is a stable and total commitment. Matthew's Gospel (5:23, 19:9) adds to the Lord's words the well-known clause in Deuteronomy, allowing an exception for some "matter of indecency" (24:1). While the meaning and the interpretation of this clause have historically been notoriously difficult, an increasing number of Catholic biblical scholars today have arrived at a growing consensus that both Matthew and Paul adapted Jesus' teaching to fit their own church situations.

They understand that the Lord's teaching against divorce and remarriage falls within the Sermon on the Mount--an impassioned statement of Christian ideals and attitudes, not precepts or laws in the restricted sense. As Fr. William O'Shea notes: "One can make a case for understanding Christ's insistence on the indissolubility of marriage as an ideal to be seriously pursued rather than a law to be literally enforced." Therefore, "if even within the brief span of the New Testament period the church found it necessary to accept such adaptations, is it not conceivable that the church of our day should recognize the need for further exceptions and adaptations?"

In agreement, Scripture scholar Fr. Bruce Vawter adds: "The exceptive clauses of Matthew are not ... concerned with the 'grounds' for divorce in the modern sense but, rather, with a complexity of imperative values with which nothing can probably be compared in our own culture.... The saying of Jesus, whatever its historical context, was construed by the earliest Christians to be Gospel, not law.... At the very least, we should be able to say that, on the New Testament precedent, other situations can be envisaged in today's world that are every bit as demanding of accommodation as those that occurred so long ago in the Matthean, the Lucan, the Marcan and the Pauline churches."

In this sense, out of fidelity to Scripture, the church must do what the New Testament did--address the needs and the challenges of the existing age with its interpretation of the mind of Christ. Risky? Yes. But the opposite is a crippling fundamentalism.

As Ladislas Orsy, SJ, holds in the New Dictionary of Theology (1987) "outdated medieval psychological theories still influence (in fact, dominate) the definition of the ground of nullity."

The current annulment process in the church fails miserably in this regard. As William P. Roberts writes: "Many marriages that are now irreparably broken were once real marriages that endured the tests of many years and brought happiness and satisfaction. It can be dishonest, insulting and ultimately a discredit to marriage and to the annulment process to pretend that such marriages never existed. It is better to face honestly the deeper question: Is it possible for a marriage that once existed to have disintegrated to such an extent that it is now truly dead?"

Today, I believe, the church is relearning something of the exhilaration and, yes, of the pain of growth that characterized the New Testament experience. Nothing less will answer the hunger of our times.

Fr. Jim Roberts writes from Vancouver, B.C.

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