PERSPECTIVES ON CHURCH AND DIVORCE

This is a long post, but I thought the topic a worth unpacking a bit.
The gospel reading at mass for Sunday October 9, 2012, brings up the painful problem of divorce. Briefly, in the passage Jesus takes a stand typical of his many other stands: he goes against the prevailing thought and attitude, both religious and cultural – which at the time was pretty lax about the whole question of marriage and divorce. He held up for people the ideal of marriage as a permanent and unbreakable union. 

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Before going any further, we should note that the early Church too had problems with Jesus’ absolute “no divorce” teaching. If you want you can look up Paul’s advice to new Christians who found themselves in mixed marriages (I Cor. 7:12-16). Or check out the exceptions to the rule that are found in Matt. 5:32 and 19:9. Whatever the precise meaning of these passages, they are introducing some exceptions. In the early Church, then, there was both acceptance of Jesus’ teaching of “one flesh”/”no divorce” as well as attempts to deal with problems that arose when it was applied.  
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The Church in our times takes the same stand as Jesus did, in a culture that has the same casual vision of marriage and divorce, but like the early Church, also tries to deal with the problems that arise when the prohibition is applied. Like Jesus, the Church also tries be compassionate to people who are in deep pain, whose marriages have, despite the spouse’s strongest efforts, come apart. 
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In every diocese there is a very busy office called the marriage tribunal, dedicated to helping people to find ways of dealing with broken marriages within the parameters of a Church law that staunchly defends the ideal of marriage as a permanent and unbreakable union. In this way the institutional Church tries to imitate a second stance of Christ: compassion toward people who were in pain, whose lives were coming apart. The truth is, as many Catholics know, that often these efforts come across as unfeeling, bureaucratic and bungling.
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How does this unfortunate and un-Christ like situation come about? I don’t pretend to have any solutions, but I’d like to suggest an approach to this thorny issue that might help some of us to see the issue in some new ways. It has to do with what Avery Dulles S.J. called, in the title of his book “Models of the Church.” (A lot of the following material was taken a few years ago from a web site that is no longer active, so I can't give you the exact attribution.)

 

No single way of looking at the Church can ever be completely adequate, because the Church concerns God and the mystery of salvation -- two topics that the human mind will never grasp fully. So obviously no human-made model or image can do so either.

THE CHURCH AS INSTITUTION

However, from about the year 1600 (in response to the Reformation) until 1940, Catholic theology was in exactly the situation of having only one dominant model or "paradigm" (the technical term for a dominant model) for describing and understanding the nature of the Church. That model was the secular political society, the State. It is this "institutional model" that Robert Bellarmine presented in his classic definition of the Church in De Contoversiis (1588):

"The one and true Church is the community of men brought together by the profession of the same Christian faith and participation in the same sacraments under the authority of legitimate pastors and especially of the one Vicar of Christ on earth, the Roman Pontiff.... The one true Church is as visible and palpable as the Kingdom of France or the republic of Venice."
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This model or image of the Church as a visible institution colored our view of everything from ecumenism (forget about it!) to sin and grace (both of which can be measured and analyzed neatly and dealt with in precise quantities). In this model it is very clear who is a member of the church and who is not – a crucial consideration in a political-state model,  and especially important at the time of the Reformation. You were either in the Church or you were out. Everything about the Church had to be visible and measurable. Notice that in the above definition there is no mention of God, Christ or salvation(!)  
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How was marriage seen in this institutional model? The answer is pretty obvious:  marriage was considered simply as a contract between two parties; the terms of the contract were clear, including the fact that it cannot be dissolved. The Church saw herself as the “defender of the bond” of matrimony. Obviously this model doesn’t give birth to a very deep or rich theology of marriage.

THE CHURCH AS MYSTICAL COMMUNION

After such a long period under one single model, it was the beginning of a new era for the theology of the Church (called “ecclesiology”) when another model began to rise to prominence. This model was the "Body of Christ". It was an ancient model resurrected by theologians in the nineteenth century and then becoming more prominent in the 1930's. Eventually it was presented to the world in Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi (1943).

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This model stressed all those things that were obviously missing from the political society model. It was a more democratic model as well, stressing the activity and gifts of the Spirit in all members and the dependence of all on the contributions of each. It was a welcome and much needed complement of the earlier model, and much enriched ecclesiology and Catholic Church life. 
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What does marriage look like in this model? Since the “mystical communion” model emphasizes the spiritual and “mysterious” dimension of Church including the sacraments, the sacrament of matrimony can be seen as a special form of that mystical communion that already exists among the members of Christ’s Body, and in fact between Christ and his Church. This suggests a deeper and more Christ-centered view of marriage than the idea of marriage as a legal contract.

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However, not surprisingly, this “mystical communion” model, like any single model, has proven incomplete. For one example, it raises a central concern about the nature of the Church: The relationship between the mystical and the visible, between the supernatural community of grace in Christ and the visible society of very human beings. The relationship between these two has always been problematical. This model sees that Church as not just an invisible communion of grace, but it also sees the visible community as the fullness and completion of Christ, Christ in the Church being in some sense brought to complete achievement, making the Church divine and perfect in a way not intended by those who first came up with the model (including St. Paul). Stressing the mystical dimension of the spiritual communion can take an anti-institutional turn, too, giving rise to a very cavalier attitude toward lots of important issues such as the teaching authority of the bishop.
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So the tension still remains between the visible, institutional society and the essentially spiritual communion. Both are essential. But it is not clear how they are combined from the expressive power of the Body of Christ model alone. And the sacrament of Marriage suffers from the same tug-of-war. Using the language of the preceding sentence, marriage is a “visible institutional entity" but it is “essentially a spiritual communion”. 

THE CHURCH AS SACRAMENT

The next model to emerge, that of the Church as Sacrament, started to catch on with theologians in the late 1940's , and like the “mystical body” model it was an very ancient approach used by Saints Cyprian, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. Many respected theologians worked with this model, and it was included in the Vatican II Constitution on the Church in the statement: "The Church is in Christ as a sacrament or sign and instrument of intimate union with God and of the unity of all mankind." It became a major theme of the Council (ch. L.G.9, 48; S.C. 26; A.G. 5; G.S. 42).

A sacrament is both sign and instrument. It describes in some sense the indescribable and inexpressible spiritual reality. For instance, pouring of water expressed spiritual purification: the Church as a sacrament of Christ expresses Christ ("the glory of Christ shines on its face"), and, as sacrament of salvation, the Church's community life expresses something of what salvation essentially consists in. At the same time a sacrament is an instrument which effects what it signifies. The symbolic washing brings about the spiritual purification it expresses: the Church as a sacrament of Christ brings about the continuation of Christ's ministry and as sacrament of salvation builds a community of salvation in the world.

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To many this model appeared to offer a solution to the dilemma of the relationship between the visible and the invisible aspect of the Church: an OUTWARD SIGN of an INVISIBLE REALITY that EFFECTS WHAT IT SIGNIFIES. The visible community in this model was the visible form of the invisible communion in Christ. It was seen to have an advantage over the Body of Christ model in permitting a kind of shaded area in place of a sharp line of demarcation between Church and non-Church. (Many people were uneasy with Pius XII's exclusivist statement in Mystici Corporis Christi that the Church of Christ is the Roman Catholic Church, a statement which he reiterated in Humani Generis (1950) with the words, "The Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing." 
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“This model had the capacity to provide a new impetus to the missionary activity of the Church by stressing the fact that the Church community is essentially an effective sign as a light to the world, a beacon of hope, and a community-building force at the heart of the world, rather than some weird sect on the fringe of human society. The model could also motivate loyalty to the Church from the realisation of the importance of being in the community and striving to be one with it. One would thus be striving to accept its doctrines and discipline and yet be permitted the right to make constructive criticism in the light of the Church's collective effort to be a better sign. The model thus avoided the static, "perfect" (complete) impression given by the previous models, since human expressions of the divine are never adequate!”

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What about marriage under this model? Well, one thought that occurs to me is this: The notion of striving to be a better outward sign, of working at being an ever more effective embodiment of the inward mystery, gives us a helpful and realistic perspective from which to see the sacrament of matrimony. We struggle, we work at a marriage, trying to get it to embody the mystical presence of Christ’s enduring love, but sometimes, being human, we fall short. This idea of imperfection in the Church brings up one final model that I’d like to consider.

THE CHURCH AS A PILGRIM PEOPLE

The dominant model of Vatican II was "The Pilgrim People of God". Several decades of important work in the fields of scriptural, patristic and liturgical studies gave a renewed sense in the Church of "sacred history", the gradual unfolding through history of God's plan to unite all human beings in Christ by means of a single people. This people is itself on pilgrimage through history like the rest of humanity. But this is a favored people; because it has hope, it is enabled to walk by faith, led by the Spirit of God. It sees itself in this model as in the vanguard of the whole pilgrim human race not, hopefully, in the old triumphalist way, but specially graced in order to lead the rest of them on their pilgrimage to their ultimate destiny.

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In this model the Church is no longer seen as an immobile, supra-terrestrial institution unaffected by time, change and history. It is a historical community on pilgrimage. Not only has it not "arrived", it still has a long way to travel; it has limitations that are to be overcome with the assistance of the Spirit of God. It is not exempt from the common human lot of having to live with uncertainty and make its way tentatively, often by trial and error. The people have the consolation that all along the way God travels with them, and the providential guidance of the Spirit will always be with them. New insights, ideas, methods and approaches are continually to be expected. There is no provision made for "things" to settle down into a new static stability after a period of transition and updating. Yesterday was yesterday - today we have new ground to cover.
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Leo Joseph  Suenens 1904-96

Cardinal Suenens stated that "the change of imagery imposes a kind of mental revolution". Once the mental revolution had been accomplished - if that is what the bishops were about in the Council - the real revolution had to begin: the Church had to start to assimilate the consequences. Cardinal Suenens pointed out that in the Exodus, a basic category that goes with this model, the people were trained to be content with few cumbersome accessories and stocks of provisions, but traveled with tents that could be quickly folded up and moved. Once one begins to apply the model one catches a glimpse of how radical it is. It affects all concepts of Church structures, traditions, liturgy, education in the faith.

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And what about marriage under this model? I think that the “Pilgrim Church” model might suggest yet another important perspective. As members of this Pilgrim Church that is on the way, we are a Church of imperfect sinners. We make mistakes, tragically things get broken sometimes (including committed relationships like marriages). Can Cardinal Suenens’ “mental revolution” extend to our outlook on broken marriages? Does not a “Church of Sinners” have room in it for people who are victims of disastrous, failed relationships? Would not the members of such a Church immediately gather around such hurting members to support them, re-affirm them as God's children, and be sure that they stay close to the Church and its sacraments in a time when they need it most?

"This man eats with sinners!"

So, when we talk about “the Church’s position” on the sensitive topic of marriage and divorce it seems to me that all of us, clergy and laity alike, would do well to keep in mind that there are various complementary ways of looking at ourselves as “Church,” and the way we see divorce will depend very much on which model of the Church we choose. And not all models help us to be compassionate and Christ-like toward one another. 
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Now, here's a quiz for you: What model of the Church was Pope Benedict XVI using when early in his pontificate he spoke to pastors about Catholics who divorced and remarried without an annulment. "None of us has a ready-made solution, each person's suffering is different". The pope saw their presence at the Eucharist as "involvement in the mystery of the Cross and resurrection of Christ. Given that it is the sacrament of the passion of Christ, the suffering Christ embraces these persons in a special way.... They can feel embraced by the crucified Lord who falls to the earth and dies and suffers for them and with them."

COME, HOLY SPIRIT!

In any case, let’s all pray that the Holy Spirit will guide us to approaches and solutions that are as compassionate and life-giving as our Lord’s were toward people he met who were in "irregular relationships" (Jn 4:7-42, and 7:53-8:11).   
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