Canadian Catholic News: Catholic marriage ideal depends on personal witness, says moral theologian

OTTAWA, Canada (CCN) - The spreading the ideal of Catholic marriage depends on the personal witness of loving couples more than any arguments in a national debate on same-sex marriage, said a moral theologian.

Most decisions and behavior changes are influenced by people with whom we have personal contact, Pia de Solenni told a gathering Dec. 9 sponsored the Ottawa Cosmos and Damian Society for Medical Ethics and the Ottawa Catholic Physician's Guild. If heterosexuals are sending a message that any kind of relationship is defined as intimate and entitled to rights, if couples consider sex as strictly genital pleasure, use contraception, consider children a "maybe" and can divorce at anytime, then it becomes "very difficult to make the case against same-sex marriage," she said. De Solenni, who obtained her doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and received the 2001 Pontifical Academies Award, urged that teaching on the true meaning of human sexuality and marriage be taught long before marriage-preparation courses. Most marriages falter around money, sex, in-laws and communication, she said. Communications skills need to be taught before dating starts, and natural family planning should be taught to every young woman graduating from high school, she said, because it teaches a woman about her body. "Outside of the Catholic Church there is no context or vision for sex," the adjunct professor at Notre Dame Graduate School in Virginia and former director of Life and Women's Issues at the Family Research Council in Washington, D. C. said. Though she acknowledges that North Americans live in a sex-saturated society, de Solenni sees young people returning to the ideals of marriage, mentioning several articles about Ivy League educated women opting for motherhood instead of the job market, or career women leaving the workforce to raise their children. Young people have lived through the "divorce culture," she said. Among younger Catholics, she credits Pope John Paul II, who challenged them with the Catholic ideal of marriage and said every child has a right to be conceived as a result of love. Human sexuality is an essential characteristic of the human being, but it is wrongly equated with sexual actions. From the very beginning of human life, an embryo is either male or female. And though one's sex is a fundamental part of one's identity, she pointed to the lives of the saints to show that one can be masculine or feminine while having qualities or pursuing roles that traditionally belong to the other sex. Joan of Arc remained fully a woman while leading the French army, she said. "It's not just about what you do, but who you are," she said, noting that being male or female is an essential part of our being as creatures made in the image and likeness of God, and our understanding of ourselves is dependent on our being in relationship with others. "Not until Eve is created is Adam able to name himself," she said. "The whole creation is relational. We don't understand one without the other." She said that until we are in relationship we do not understand ourselves. De Solenni, who recently married, said the word "helpmate" used to "grate" on her, but John Paul II's teachings on the "Theology of the Body" helped to see helpmate as a "divine assistant." The marriage relationship is meant to be as intimate as that between Christ and the church, she said, and through marriage men and women not only come to know themselves and each other, they also come to know God. Original sin, however, has created a rupture between the body and the soul. "The body is the most evident centre of resistance to the spirit." While other sins are more hidden, such as pride, and avarice, and involve the will, sexual sin is "in your face, in front of us all the time" and men and women are experiencing the effects of shame and that shame is leading to men and women hiding their sexual differentiation, she said. One-night stands and casual sex are a way not to be intimate, a way not to be hurt, she said. The focus on sex has become a protection against exposing one's vulnerabilities and involves a closing off of what's essentially human. She criticized gender theory which sees one's sexual identity as similar to a role in a play or a costume one puts on. Now there are seven to nine genders, she said. She pointed out that 40 years of feminism have "trained women to think about sex the way a not very good man thinks about it."

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Republished by Catholic Online with permission of the Canadian Catholic News Service.

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