In early 2015, our Archdiocese like many others was offered a 47-question open-ended survey in order to gather information about what people throughout the world understand about the Church’s teaching, her pastoral practice, current conditions, and the reality of marriage and family life. The survey was probably a poor translation, and the questions were ill-structured, so I ended up writing about 15,500 words in the one week window for completing it. I have chosen to share a few of these, here, as well, for your comments. I will quote the question, and what follows is my answer. I have edited the answers slightly for brevity, politeness, and clarity.
21. How can people be helped to understand that no one is beyond the mercy of God? How can this truth be expressed in the Church’s pastoral activity towards families, especially those which are wounded and fragile? (cf. n. 28)
“Do you presume upon the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” St. Paul’s opening discourse in the Epistle to the Romans, especially ch. 2 vv. 1-11, is uniquely appropriate to this conversation; it addresses both the unjustly judgmental and the selfishly “merciful” in one sin-crushing call to repentance and conversion. Gossip and sexual perversity, slander and slaughter, are alike included in the list of sins manifesting the wickedness pervasive in human hearts and human culture. All who recognize some acts as evil, as offenses against a culture-transcending and non-situationally-bounded norm, as personally repugnant to reasonable people and a just God, are bound to admit that they too have committed such acts. In the face of such universal condemnation, we cannot justify ourselves by our innocence of the crimes of others; we cannot shape civil laws so as to incriminate only those who do not share our preferred mix of virtues or vices.
Our only justification is found in our surrender to Christ, our submission to His Church as the conduit of His grace, our love for His Mother as the vessel of His Incarnation; we will never be justified by our own doing, unaided, nor will we be justified by our own delusion, vindicated by being “on the right side of history” or otherwise relatively triumphant or dominant in our transient day. The Church, to whom we have been entrusted by Christ, to whom Christ has entrusted Himself in the Eucharist and His Word in the Gospel, should be clear that we are all sinners, all in need of grace which follows from repentance and becomes evident in conversion; we should never tire of declaring, in the words of a song whose Protestant author likely believed they were contrary to Catholic doctrine, that
I’m only a sinner, saved by grace!
This be my story, to God be the glory,
I’m only a sinner, saved by grace!
But if we are being saved by grace, then we are being transformed by grace, not left to our misery and sin, our self-justifications and our rationalizations, our hostility against hard and healing truths, our rejection of goods harder and more worthwhile than our little pieces of the good. If we are being saved by grace, we will think of substantial beauty rather than of consumptive passions or consumer pleasures.
The more “wounded and fragile,” the more they must be included in our hospitable and generous attachment of those who do not enjoy the blessings of family. Some will be best attached to mentoring couples past parenting age, who often make excellent “surrogate families” for the unattached and damaged. I can personally attest to the healing power of more than one couple who took me “under the wing,” bought and cooked meals, helped me move, and found me avenues of participation in local Christian groups. I can personally attest to the value of spending time among young families and families with growing children, especially as a thirty-something single man in a strange place, an experience I repeated in several cities on two continents.
There is no substitute for honesty about our own struggles (Non Sum Dignus) and kind firmness about the call to repentance, but its necessary adjunct in the case of people seeking healing and re-introduction to the norms of “natural marriage” and family life as a preparation for life in the Church (and, if so called, the Sacrament of Matrimony) is a definite, promoted, supported involvement in the life of faithful families active in the Church.