After Pope Francis on Thursday said “the great majority” of Catholic marriages are religiously null because people don’t understand the concept of a lifetime commitment, some prominent traditional Catholics lambasted the pontiff as “irresponsible” and that his statement could possibly discourage people from working on their marriage relations.The quote below is from an earlier interview with the pope's favorite theologian, Cardinal Kaspar:
Kasper: That’s a real problem. I’ve spoken to the pope himself about this, and he said he believes that 50 percent of marriages are not valid
I find the pope's comment hard to understand. Does he think that people in general learn about marriage from romance novels, or does he consider that a marriage that is not within some epsilon of perfect is therefore null? I would identify two ways of "understanding the concept of a lifetime commitment": formally, i.e., knowing what the words mean; and through the experience of some number of years of marriage, perhaps ten or some tens. The latter is obviously not in general available to those lining up for a Catholic marriage. I have no idea how the former can be improved beyond the point of seeing that both parties are mentally competent. I do not think that assuring the population that they mostly don't mean it is a way to get them to understand. And I think that if the human race relied for reproduction on couples meeting such a definition as he seems to have in mind, then we would be much outnumbered by white rhinos.
ReplyDeleteBut then I'm not a theologian.