Could not the Theology of the Body, according to Saint John Paul II, be considered a contribution that is a genuine «development of doctrine»?
The first question I would ask this honorable perplexed Catholic lady, and all self-proclaimed traditionalists, is: have you read and studied all the catecheses that Saint John Paul II called the “Theology of the Body”? If the answer were negative, it seems to me that it would be advisable to do so first, before rushing to criticize its content, as it is neither fair nor honest to do so without knowing it thoroughly. Moreover, to understand it well, it must be read in the light of the entire extensive pontifical magisterium of Saint John Paul II regarding the person, marriage, and family, as expressed both in his pontifical documents and in his audiences, speeches, and pastoral trips.
Furthermore, uninterruptedly until today, faithful to the institute that Saint John Paul II founded and without having changed absolutely anything —neither name, nor contents, nor programs, nor professors, nor authorities, nor logo: nothing of all that Rome changed and forced to be changed in all the institutes there are in the world—, the Washington, D.C. headquarters, my alma mater, has studied, taught in its classrooms, and even proposed further reflections and developed abundant thought to delve deeper into the Theology of the Body according to Saint John Paul II. There we can find the deepest and most correct understanding and interpretation of the Theology of the Body according to Saint John Paul II.
I repeat my question, then: will not this Theology of the Body truly constitute an authentic “development of doctrine” with regard to the traditional Catholic understanding of the vocation to marriage and to paternity and maternity? Or did the Church’s Tradition regarding the understanding of the human person, marriage, and family become totally complete and consummated with the promulgation of the Humanae Vitae or —to avoid accepting any post-conciliar proposal— did it become totally complete and consummated with the last thing the great Pope Pius XII said shortly before dying?
You and other people who —I don’t like the term— self-identify as “traditionalists” (for I believe that every Catholic must know, love, observe, and be faithful to the Church’s Tradition from its beginnings) claim that the Theology of the Body constitutes a break with the Church’s Sacred Tradition.
I wonder: what Tradition are we talking about? Is there much contribution from the great ecumenical councils in the history of the Church regarding marriage as a path to holiness? If I remember correctly, although marriage has always been one of the seven sacraments of the Church, it was not until the great Council of Trent, in the 16th century, that marriage was magisterially ratified as one of the seven sacraments of the Church. Or am I wrong? Skimming through only the canons of the Council of Trent in Heinrich Denzinger’s book, I find that the canons of the Council of Trent occupy 60 pages in the edition I have of his book, and the Council dedicates only two pages to marriage, without making any mention of the so-called “traditional doctrine” of the ends or goods of marriage.
Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, several centuries apart in time, did contribute something to the doctrine of the ends of marriage prior to the Council of Trent. Both spoke of the ends of marriage: proles, fides and sacramentum, with the difference that Saint Thomas considered that the nuptial encounter of the spouses had no guilt whatsoever when it took place either for the good of offspring, as an act of the virtue of religion, or for the good of fidelity, as an act of justice, thus developing the doctrine of Saint Augustine, who affirmed that the intimate relations of spouses should always have procreation as their end; although he also recognized that there was no sin in spouses consenting to their spouse’s desire to alleviate their concupiscence and care for fidelity, stating that whoever sought the spousal embrace solely with this desire would incur venial sin. We can say that here Saint Thomas took a step forward, developing the Augustinian doctrine, without thereby denying or contradicting it. But there is something that must be acknowledged: the reality of marriage did not represent a great priority in the thought of either Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas, nor in that of the rest of the Fathers of the Church or scholastic theology.
It is not my objective to review here everything taught by Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas regarding marriage, as this is not the forum for it, and there are people much more erudite than I for that, and I would thank them if they did so. It is worth mentioning that both are the two authors most cited by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and they were the ones who contributed the most regarding marriage before the great Council of Trent, which, as we said, promulgated only a few canons on November 11, 1563.
It was not until the Roman Catechism —also called the Catechism of the Holy Council of Trent for Parish Priests— that the topic of the ends of marriage was addressed in Chapter VIII of Part II, in numbers 23, 24, and 25, affirming the order of the ends of marriage: proles, fides and sacramentum, understood as the procreation and education of children; the fidelity of the spouses —strongly condemning adultery—; and the indissoluble sacrament of marriage, which signifies the union of Christ with the Church; just as Christ never separates from the Church, the husband must never separate from his wife, and vice versa. Although the Catechism of the Holy Council of Trent for Parish Priests affirms the ends or goods of marriage in this order, it never establishes that one can occur without the other.
I ask: is it so necessary and indispensable to say that the fidelity of the spouses is subordinated to the procreation and education of children? And if children do not arrive due to sterility of one of the spouses, what would the fidelity of the spouses be subordinated to? With this I am not remotely inferring that marital infidelity can occur in some context or circumstance; it simply strikes me that traditionalists insist so much on the hierarchization of the goods or ends of marriage, when it is not possible to fragment them so that one can occur without the other two also being observed at the same time and always. Moreover, it is entirely clear that if one of the goods or ends is overlooked, denied, or confused, the other two will also suffer, for the three are intrinsically united. It is as if, in the link where sexuality, love, and fruitfulness are joined, denying or perverting one of the three seriously harms the other two elements. But the impression is that the great Council of Trent focused more on disciplinary than doctrinal matters regarding the state of married life.
It is worth mentioning that, until then, conjugal love is not mentioned either as an end or as a good of marriage, since offspring, fidelity, and the sacramental indissolubility of marriage could occur even if there were no love between the spouses; think, for example, of arranged or forced marriages. And it is precisely here that an authentic “development of doctrine” is urgently needed. Evidently, the Church’s Tradition has never suggested that marriage be lived without love, but it is clear that the love the spouses have for each other is the principle that gives life to marriage, that pursues its three ends and goods. Or do fiancés marry without loving each other just to form a suitable place where children are born and educated, for which it is convenient to be faithful to each other, help one another, and consider that their joint project cannot be dissolved?
In the encyclical letter Arcanum divinae sapientiae of Pope Leo XIII, promulgated in 1880, only two ends of marriage are affirmed. The great Pope Leo XIII states: “a nobler and more exalted purpose was assigned to conjugal society than before, because it was determined that its mission was not only the propagation of the human race, but also to beget the offspring of the Church, fellow citizens of the saints and domestics of God, that is, the procreation and education of the people for the worship and religion of the true God and of Christ our Savior. In the second place, the duties of both spouses were fully defined, their rights perfectly established. That is, that they must always be disposed in such a way that they understand that they owe each other the greatest love, constant fidelity, and solicitous and continuous help” (n. 8).
More than 50 years passed before Pope Pius XI promulgated his encyclical Casti Connubii, in which he gives preponderance to the doctrine of Saint Augustine on the goods of marriage, clearly stating that “offspring occupies the first place among the goods of marriage,” although his main motivation for promulgating that encyclical, more than reaffirming without novelties the traditional doctrine of the goods of marriage, seemed to be to denounce the —yes— novel threat against marriages, which were besieged by the evil of contraception, which he qualified as a “grave offense.”
But, if we are honest, we see how the Church’s contribution to the understanding of marriage as the “natural or normal” vocation of the baptized was not a great priority for the Church for centuries. It seems to me that the Church paid very little attention to marriage during all the centuries prior to the 20th century. The clearest proof is that, in the Church’s sanctoral, the number of married saints and saints (not to mention the ridiculous number of holy marriages, which perhaps does not even reach 15), compared to the immense number of celibate or virgin saints and saints, makes one think that, during all the centuries of Christendom, to aspire to be a saint one would have to, in principle, renounce marriage or, if the call of God to consecrated life in any of its modalities did not arrive, take marriage as a kind of second-class dish. I am not affirming that this is what the Church’s Tradition taught, but only that it would seem that, without teaching it, it considered it so: marriage as a more complicated path to achieve holiness.
This makes me think that the Church’s Tradition, regarding what it taught about marriage, was not sufficient and was ready for the possibility of a genuine “development of doctrine” to take place, which will never imply denying or contradicting anything previously taught. Evidently —and in this Saint John Paul II does not break with the Church’s Tradition either—, the state of consecrated virginal and celibate life is superior to that of marriage. What Saint John Paul II does is seek to avoid considering marriage precisely that: an inferior vocation, despite affirming that consecrated virginity is an “exceptional and not ordinary” vocation and, therefore, as a Christian state of life, a superior vocation.
Now, this superiority of consecrated virginity, always taught by the entire Church’s Tradition, due to the supernaturality of the call “for the Kingdom of Heaven,” does it imply that for the Church holiness is overwhelmingly much more “common” in people consecrated in perpetual virginity than in those living the vocation of sacramental marriage? Does the married state of life then constitute a much more arduous path to holiness? If so, should not married saints and saints who were canonized after a long and faithful married life and having educated a “large” family be venerated with more reverence than those who were raised to the altars after a heroic virginal or celibate life? Should not the hierarchization of holiness also be defined, always placing martyrs first; then, holy marriages who lived that state of life with a heroism not at all common; after, married saints; and, at the end, virgins and celibates? Of course, I am not suggesting this.
The point is that, in the Church’s sanctoral, holy marriages are an elite due to their extreme scarcity in number, and canonized married people are much fewer than virgin or celibate people who have been raised to the altars. Why? In part —it seems to me— the answer is because the Church’s Tradition paid very little catechetical and pastoral attention to the married state of life in the Church as a path to holiness, and in the environment it was always felt that the ideal of Christian life would have to be lived in the ascetic and/or virginal life proper to monks, hermits, nuns, priests, bishops, and popes.
When the Church finally turned to look at marriage seriously and directly was when the novel threat of contraception arose, which in the encyclical Casti Connubii Pope Pius XI affirmed that “… any use of marriage, in which maliciously the act is deprived of its own and natural procreative power, goes against the law of God and against natural law, and those who commit such an act become guilty of a grave offense” (n. 21). There was nothing more on that topic until Pius XII faced another novelty with the appearance of the contraceptive pill and condemned it in a speech to the VII Congress of the International Society of Hematology, on September 12, 1958, a month before his death.
The Perplexed Catholic Lady claims that Pope Pius XII defined the traditional doctrine and explicitly condemned the inversion of the ends of marriage, which had already been occurring among some theologians in the first half of the 20th century, both in De Finibus Matrimonii, from 1944, and in the “Address to the Matrons,” from 1951, and I would now like to delve a bit into this.
Although what the Perplexed Catholic Lady affirms is true, it is worth qualifying a bit. This “condemnation of the inversion of the ends of marriage” comes through a document that has the same doctrinal weight as the heretical and apostate Fiducia Supplicans, written by the prefect of what would be the former and not ancient Holy Office with the pope’s signature, and this condemnation is ratified years later in a speech at a congress, in 1951, and not in a pontifical document. Although, of course, serious attention must be paid to this “condemnation of the inversion of the ends of marriage,” it certainly does not escape further reflection that constitutes an authentic “development of doctrine.” Or should we give the same doctrinal value to Fiducia Supplicans as to De Finibus Matrimonii? I hope a traditionalist does not say that the reason the answer would be negative is that De Finibus Matrimonii was promulgated before the Second Vatican Council and Fiducia Supplicans after the Council, and that is enough.
I conclude by affirming that this condemnation of the inversion of the ends or goods of marriage, which so unnecessarily worries traditionalists, is considered “traditional doctrine” when the means of transmitting it is one of the least weighty in the Church. If, by establishing this condemnation of the inversion of the goods of marriage in this way, it is considered “traditional doctrine,” then it would have to be said that what is established in Fiducia Supplicans has the same magisterial weight, although this latter failed document has no element that could be considered worthy of being called doctrine.
To be continued in Part III
Note: Articles published as Tribune express the opinion of their authors and do not necessarily represent the editorial line of Infovaticana, which offers this space as a forum for reflection and dialogue.