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.
7. To what extent and by what means is the ordinary pastoral care of families addressed to those on the periphery? (cf. n. 11). What are the operational guidelines available to foster and appreciate the “desire to form a family” planted by the Creator in the heart of every person, especially among young people, including those in family situations which do not correspond to the Christian vision? How do they respond to the Church’s efforts in her mission to them? How prevalent is natural marriage among the non-baptized, also in relation to the desire to form a family among the young?
It is hard to make plain sense of the language of the Relatio here: “People need to be accepted in the concrete circumstances of life. We need to know how to support them in their searching and to encourage them in their hunger for God and their wish to feel fully part of the Church, also including those who have experienced failure or find themselves in a variety of situations.”
What on earth could we mean by this? What people have not “experienced failure” and do not “find themselves in a variety of situations”? What “concrete circumstances of life” are under consideration? Among whom, and for what purpose, do these “people need to be accepted”?
Lung cancer patients are accepted in the oncology ward for treatment; smokers are not accepted in neonatal intensive care, though they can be if they scrub in and agree not to light up. Burn victims are accepted by the burn unit, even if they are also arsonists, but we do not thereby think arson acceptable. We accept children for elementary school, but we insist that adults who can’t read attend literacy programs elsewhere. When we embrace those who are at least open to the idea of sharing in the goods of Creation and, we hope, of Redemption; we do not thereby take into ourselves the smoker’s lung cancer, his addiction, or his defiance of doctors’ advice.
To truly accept the poor in their concrete circumstances is first to regard people without regarding their poverty, and then to regard their poverty as a problem to be alleviated. When we turn to addicts, or white-collar criminals, or violent felons, or asthmatics, or many another voluntary or involuntary, habitual or episodic, moral or incidental problem, we should always regard people first without regarding their ills and evils, and then we should seek to remedy those ills and evils in a manner actually suited to each specific problem. Each person’s dignity is unquestioned, but that dignity can be obscured by sinful action in ways that “concrete circumstances” by themselves cannot accomplish; and every person needs to actually be made a partaker in Redemption, someone to be regarded “in Christ” as a “new creation,” more than to be welcomed into any society not oriented to accomplishing that end.
Those who are not attached to an intact, faithful family need, as a practical matter, to be integrated into the life of families; the hospitality of families and their interdependence with any who belong to the Church and her neighborhood is the means par excellence of achieving this end.
Some notes: The call to marriage bears almost no resemblance to what our commercial and political culture inculcates under such headings as “sexual awakening,” romantic pursuit, coupling, and having a wedding. Unfortunately, even within the Church, we have too often been colonized by the ideology of our culture: Where we should point out that wounds received in our families and from our culture do limit culpability, but also demand education and discipline as a healing remedy, we are all too prone to oscillate between a determinist view (in which our sin is involuntary and overpowering) and a Pelagian view (in which all necessary moral resources are bound up in each individual’s willpower). The Church, even in its most recent teaching, has wisely condemned both of these views.
Training specifically necessary for those young people who will most likely need to know how to work and live as a family fundamentally comes from families trained to serve in the Church. These families model the response to Christ’s call for themselves and for other families. Understanding the outright hostility of our culture to those who embrace this call, though, it is perhaps especially important that those who serve Christian families should work to strengthen and extend existing arrangements for marriage preparation. A lifelong commitment must not seem to hang on temporary emotional intensity or a single day’s training at a classroom “retreat.” Engaged couples to be married in the Church will need examples, companions, pastoral counsel, and Natural Family Planning training sufficient to begin practice months before the wedding night.
Families produce single people; single people become husbands, wives, priests, monks, nuns, and serve God in a wide variety of ways. While both marriage and ordination involve specific sacramental graces, the single person seeking a call and the vowed religious alike share in the universal call to holiness, to membership in the Body of Christ, and to dedicated service. The final vows of those who enter religious orders express the judgment of the individual and the community that a divine call to total commitment according to a certain rule has been understood and embraced. For those who serve Christ in singleness without any such final commitment, the possibility of such a commitment cannot be entirely ruled out; there is therefore always a certain shared sense of “waiting” and “looking” among singles. In this state, single people enjoy significantly greater freedom to change their situation and follow various perceived calls, making singles especially valuable in meeting acute needs and helping to launch new endeavors.
Each single person, however, will tend to also experience certain limitations in ministry: restlessness, loneliness, lack of stability, and a sense of living in the margins of the Church are very real afflictions even for those singles who patiently serve God with their lives. Families and those who serve families in the Church have an obligation to involve singles with married couples and whole families, encouraging them to have a share in the hospitality, shared work, and child-rearing opportunities that both constitute and model the family life. Singles groups and teams of singles tend to reinforce the sense that single service is a “waiting stage.” While such “while you wait” groups sometimes help faithful singles meet suitable partners, they are by no means an adequate description of the single person’s involvement in the concrete life of the Church. Healthy single service is service among, within, and to the families, vowed religious, and clergy who support them and rely on them.
In addition to recognizing that the faithful family is peripheral in our culture, and that the single person needs to be integrated among families, there are other “outlier phenomena” to be considered. The autistic young person will need special training, and the family special care; in a very different way, so will the gifted athlete. The person who struggles with feelings of anxiety and condemnation so relentless that he is tempted to disbelieve the goodness of God needs special training, and his family special care; in a very different way, so will the mother who had her child surgically killed in the womb. The successful businessman whose time and talent are heavily mortgaged in order to secure treasures needs particular admonitions and opportunities, and so will his family. The schizophrenic needs both care and medication; the alcoholic needs help abstaining. The unchaste need help recognizing chastity in a culture militantly opposed to the display of that virtue; the technically chaste need help flourishing and bearing fruit as hospitable, generous lovers.
If there are any other “concrete circumstances” than these, if any “variety of situations” we might be discussing involve matters more profound than autism or schizophrenia, more life-altering than the choice between chastity and porneia, more socially consequential than the choice between commercial success and evangelical poverty, more spiritually wrenching than a mother’s weeping for her murdered baby or the scrupulous soul’s torment, then we may need to specify them clearly in order to discuss them fruitfully.