All Intensive Purposes

Perhaps the most insistent teaching of the Catholic church today is a conception of family life. Apart from priests, nuns and homosexuals, the call to procreative marriage has been put at the very center of what it means to be a faithful Catholic. As you see in that passage above, the very Incarnation is deployed to defend marriage and procreation as a central human goal. And yet, when you read the Gospels, you find something very strange. Jesus barely mentions marriage. He never married. He demanded of all his disciples that they abandon their own families and wives, without even saying goodbye. He was openly contemptuous toward his own mother and father in adolescence and early adulthood. His fundamental response to adultery was forgiveness of the adulterer and suspicion of the morally superior. His contemporaries must have regarded him as illegitimate, since he was conceived out of wedlock. So this illegitimate, single man who broke up family after family, whose closest female friend was a childless former prostitute, who scandalously stayed alone in the home of two unmarried women, who offended every family value of the time ... has been turned into the chief architect of "family values!" I'm not saying that building families is something alien to Christianity. We are not all called to wander through the fields preaching salvation and telling people to abandon their spouses and children. I'm not saying that procreative marriage isn't a glorious thing. What I am saying is that the over-powering fixation on marriage, family life and procreation has overwhelmed the deeper and more unsettling priorities that Jesus obviously stood for and proclaimed. The gulf between the priorities of the Gospels and those of the hierarchy of the Church on this score is both wide and deep.

// posted by t.s. @ 12:18 PM