At the end of this second part addressing the effects of the Council’s teaching on Catholic Marriage, Don Pietro highlights ten points of variance between Traditional and Council teaching, placing the former teaching in first place and the latter in second place.
1. The Equality of
the Spouses
i) ‘The unity
of marriage, confirmed by Our Lord, is clearly apparent in the equal personal
dignity which is accorded to man and wife in mutual and unreserved affection.’
(GS 49, see also GS 29 [1]);
ii)‘The mother,
too, has a central role in the home…; this role must be safeguarded without,
however, underrating the woman’s legitimate social advancement’ (GS 52)
In Familiaris
Consortio, section19, text (i) is quoted by Pope John Paul II, and in the
same Encyclical (s. 22) the Pope states: ‘The equal dignity and responsibility
of women with men is realized in mutual self-giving.’ The equal personal
dignity expressed in these texts is taken by him as the ground for placing the
husband and wife on the same level tout
court, at the cost of the authority of the husband. Church Tradition,
deriving from St. Paul [2],
had, by contrast, always considered the husband as the head of the wife and of
the family. We read in Arcanum for
example [3]:
‘The husband is the chief of the family and the head of the wife.’ The Pope,
without denying the traditional doctrine explicitly, passes it over in silence
and substitutes it with a new vision of things.
In the ‘Theology of the Body’ Discourse of August 11th
1982 the Pope justifies this new vision of the equality of the spouses on the
basis of a difference of ‘contemporary sensitivity’, a difference of ‘mentality
and custom’ and of the ‘social position of women in regard to men’ (as already
expressed in text (ii) above). As we asked in our essay ‘The Church and
Asmodeus’: Is the husband no longer head of the wife as Christ is Head of the
Church? Have St. Paul and Tradition been put in second place to the modern
world, and Truth to sensitivity?
Text (ii) promotes the woman’s social advancement, as
a text of Apostolicam actuositatem
(9) promotes her apostolate in the Church generally on the basis of the fact
that ‘in our days women are taking an increasingly active share in the entire
life of society.’ These, amongst a number of other conciliar texts, promote the
active life for women, so drawing women away from their duty to bear and raise
children in a Christian manner, which Pius XI had described as: ‘a most grave
abuse to be abolished at all cost’ [4].
2. Vocation to Marriage
‘ [children should be
educated to]… be able to follow their vocation, including a religious vocation…
Priests should… nurture the vocation of married people.’ (GS 52).
Here the term ‘vocation’ is used equally of the
religious life and of marriage. This is a further novelty which, by placing the
religious and married life on the same level, blurs the distinction between the
supernatural and natural orders, tending to elevate marriage to a higher order
than is its due. As we have observed elsewhere [5], the
two senses of vocation are distinct in the following ways: the former is a
personal call from outside oneself, i.e. immediately from God, in order
absolutely to transcend the possibilities of human nature; the latter is an
instinct of human nature, and therefore only mediately from God, in order to
realize a possibility of that same nature.
3. ‘Sex Education’
‘Children and young people…
As they grow older they should receive a positive and prudent sex education’ (Gravissimum
Educationis 1) [6].
This text, which also recommends development of the
said children and young people ‘in the pursuit of liberty’, contradicts the
dispositions of Pope Pius XI in Divini
illius Magistri (1929) and Pope Pius XII in his ‘Allocution to Fathers of
Families’ (1951) which require that such education be given by educators and
parents in private [7].
How indeed can one rely on public schools to teach
such delicate matters in an appropriate way? We have seen in recent years how
eagerly even Catholic schools have put into practice such irrational and
pernicious theories as the ‘gender “ideology” ’. What sort of maturity are we
ascribing to the children? Do we think of them as mature as the children in
Hesiod’s evil and burdensome Iron Age, born with gray hair on their temples? And
have the Council Fathers shown themselves any more paternal, modest, sagacious
or realitaetsnahe than Aristophanes’
beard-sporting women Councillors, the Ecclesiazousae?
Conclusion to Section A
To show how far Traditional, that is to say Catholic,
marriage doctrine contrasts with that of the Council, we shall in the following
table present ten points of variance between Traditional and Council teaching,
placing the former teaching in first place and the latter in second place:
i) The nature of marriage:
a)
a spiritual
bond,
b)
a partnership of
life and love;
ii)
The primary end
of marriage:
a)
procreation and
education,
b)
married love
(implicitly);
iii)
The dignity of
married love:
a)
its
symbolization of Christ’s love for His Church,
b)
its sexuality
(principally);
iv)
The nature of
married love:
a)
mutual
assistance,
b)
sexual union;
v)
The correct
attitude of spouses regarding procreation:
a)
generosity,
b)
responsibility;
vi)
The Church’s
assessment of artificial contraception:
a)
explicit
condemnation,
b)
no explicit
condemnation;
vii)
The authority of the husband:
a)
the husband is
head of the wife and of the family after the model of Christ,
b)
the husband is
on the same level as the wife;
viii)
The role of the
married woman:
a)
wife and mother;
b)
the combination
of family life with active life outside the home;
ix)
The object of
vocation:
a) the consecrated life alone,
b) either consecrated life or marriage;
x)
Public ‘sex education’:
a)
explicitly condemned;
b)
explicitly promoted.
We view as the most remarkable features of the new
marital doctrine its naturalism and eroticism.
By its naturalism
we mean:
-
its scant
interest for the sacramentality and Christological dimension of marriage;
-
its consequent
suppression of teaching on the husband’s headship of the wife and of the family
after the example of Christ;
-
its reduction
of the essentially supernatural orientation to consecrated life to the
essentially natural orientation to marriage.
By its eroticism,
we mean its preoccupation with love and sexuality at the expense of the Natural
Law in the following fields:
- - procreation;
- - mutual
assistance;
-
- contraception;
and
- - education.
In the post-conciliar years we shall see an
intensification of this eroticism, as ‘love’ advances ever further into the
foreground in Humanae Vitae, in the
new rite of marriage [8],
in the teachings of Pope John Paul II, in Canon Law, and in the New Catechism
(the ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church’), until it is explicitly lent the
primacy over procreation in Amoris
Laetitia (see above). The latter document is equally remarkable for its
macabre posturings in face of the ‘Gender’ theory and of pre-marital ‘love’ [9].
Sexual love hereby attains a status not far different from that which it enjoys
in the World.
By according primacy to sexual love in marriage, the
Magisterium implicitly deifies it, lending it the perfection of existing for
its own sake which belongs to God alone. This deification will be yet more
clearly manifest in subsequent years: on the doctrinal level in ‘Theology of
the Body’ (see the essay referred to in the last footnote), and on the
spiritual level in the veneration of a ‘fertility goddess’ in St. Peter’s
Basilica, Rome [10].
[1] ‘All women and men are
endowed with a rational soul and are created in God’s image; they have the same
nature and origin and, being redeemed by Christ, they enjoy the same divine
calling… there is here a basic equality between all…’
[2] Eph. 5.23
[3] D 3143
[4] Quadragesimo Anno AAS 23
[5] amongst other places, in ‘Family under Attack’ , Appendix A on ‘Theology
of the Body’
[6] we recall the initiative to form school-children
‘at all levels’ in the use of the media in Inter
mirifica (16) above, without reference to any inherent moral danger in such
formation.
[7] for the spirit of purity
still characteristic of Catholicism under such venerable Supreme Pontiffs we
refer to the hymn Vexilla Christus
which we have quoted in chapter IV above in our discussion of Christ the King.
[8] see the footnote in chapter I
above, quoting from the book Lex Orandi
by Graham Leonard
[9] Amoris Laetitiae (ss. 280-4): see ‘The
Church and Asmodeus’ for this development, on the site Rorate Caeli
[10] which may be seen as the act
of sacrilege that unleashed the ‘corona virus’ and the vaccination, see chapter
10 below
