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Gulf Pine Catholic
•
October 10, 2014
Pope Francis has called a special session of the
Synod of Bishops, which will meet from Oct. 5-19
and prepare the agenda for the ordinary session of
the Synod that is scheduled for the fall of 2015; both
sessions will focus on the family. In my view, the Synod
should focus on two related themes: marriage culture is
in crisis throughout the world; the answer to that crisis
is the Christian view of marriage as a covenant between
man and woman in a communion of love, fidelity and
fruitfulness.
To focus the conversation elsewhere is to ignore a
hard fact and a great opportunity.
The collapse of marriage culture throughout the
world is indisputable. More and more marriages end in
divorce, even as increasing numbers of couples simply
ignore marriage, cohabit and procreate. The effort to
redefine “marriage” as what we know it isn’t, and to
enforce that redefinition by coercive state power, is
well-advanced in the West. The contraceptive mentality
has seriously damaged the marriage culture, as have
well-intentioned but ultimately flawed efforts to make
divorce easier. The sexual free-fire zone of the West is
a place where young people find it very hard to commit
to a lifelong relationship that inevitably involves
sacrificing one’s “autonomy.” And just as the Christian
understanding of marriage is beginning to gain traction
in Africa, where it is experienced as a liberating
dimension of the Gospel, European theologians from
dying local churches are trying to empty marriage of
its covenantal character, reducing it to another form of
contract.
Rome, we have a problem.
Pope Francis understands the
crisis of marriage culture in its
multiple dimensions, just as he
understands that the family, which
begins in marriage, is a troubled
institution in the post-modern world;
that’s why he’s summoned two
Synods on the topic of the family.
And that’s why the Synod, fully
aware of the gravity of the situation,
should begin, continue and end on
a positive note, offering the world
a pearl of great price: the Christian
understanding and experience of marriage.
The Synod discussion, in other words, should take
the crisis of marriage and the family as a given and
then lift up Christian marriages, lived faithfully and
fruitfully, as the answer to that crisis. The Synod should
begin with what is good and true and beautiful about
Christian marriage and Christian family life, and show,
by living examples, how that truth, goodness and beauty
respond to the deepest longings of the human heart for
solidarity, fidelity and fruitful love.
It’s quite obvious that the Church faces real pastoral
challenges in dealing with broken marriages and their
results. But to begin the discussion of marriage and the
family in the 21st century there is to begin at the wrong
end of things. For it is only within the truth-about-
marriage, which was given to the Church by the Lord
himself, that compassionate and truthful solutions to
those pastoral problems can be found.
The Synod might also do well to reflect on another
piece of good news: the Church has far more tools
with which to try and help fix what’s broken in 21st-
century marriage culture than it did 40 years ago. John
Paul II’s
Theology of the Body
has given Catholicism
the world’s most compelling account of sexuality and
its relationship to marriage: a vision of the nobility of
human love that is far more attractive than anything
on offer in
Playboy
and
Cosmopolitan
, not to mention
what’s being taught about “marriage” by jihadists. And
John Paul’s teaching is having an impact -- it’s hard to
find a college or university campus today that doesn’t
have a Theology of the Body study group, often self-
organized by students.
We’ve also come a long way since “marriage
preparation” involved choosing music and quarreling
with the pastor about rice-throwing on the church steps.
Couple-to-couple marriage prep is a major development
in alert diocese and parishes, and a great expression
of Pope Francis’s call that all Catholics understand
themselves as missionary disciples.
So, message-to-Synod: think positive.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
The
Catholic
Difference
Weigel
Wanted: A Synod of affirmation
The attendance at our daily
Mundelein Seminary on Labor Day
weekend was sparse. Many of the
students had gone home while oth-
ers were on a special tour of Chi-
cago churches. The celebrant and
preacher for the Sunday Mass was
Fr. Robert Schoenstene, our vet-
eran Old Testament professor. Fr.
Schoenstene offered the best inter-
pretation I’ve ever heard of a partic-
ularly puzzling parable of the Lord,
and I wanted to make sure his read-
ing got a wider audience.
The parable in question is the one concerning the
rich man who gives talents to three of his servants and
then sets out on a journey. Upon his return, he assesses
the situation and discovers that the servant to whom
he had given five talents had invested them fruitfully
and that the servant to whom he had given three talents
had done the same. But he finds, to his chagrin, that the
slave to whom he had entrusted one talent had simply
buried the wealth and had garnered neither gain nor in-
terest. Angered, he orders that the one talent be taken
from the timid servant and given to the servant who had
invested most boldly. And then comes the devastating
moral lesson: “For to everyone who has, more will be
given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has
not, even what he has will be taken away.”
The standard reading of this story -- on display in
thousands of sermons and fervorinos -- is that the tal-
ents symbolize gifts and abilities that God has given to
us and that he expects us to “spend” generously or “in-
vest” wisely. This interpretation is supported by the fair-
ly accidental relationship that obtains between “talent”
in the ancient Biblical sense of the term and“talent” in
ordinary English today. Fr. Schoenstene specified that a
talent in ancient times was a measure of something par-
ticularly weighty, usually silver or gold. A single talent
might represent as much as 50 pounds of precious metal
and, as such, was not something that one carried around
in one’s pocket. We might make a comparison between
a talent and a unit of gold kept at Fort Knox, or an ingot
of silver preserved in a safe deposit box. What the con-
temporary reader will likely miss, and what the ancient
Jewish reader would have caught immediately, is the
connection to heaviness: a talent was weighty, and five
talents was massively heavy. Heaviness would have
brought to mind the heaviest weight of all, which was
the kabodof Yahweh. That term was rendered in Greek
as doxa and in Latin as gloria, both of which carry the
connotation of luminosity, but the basic sense of the He-
brew word is heaviness, gravitas.
And this kabod Yahwehwas to be found in the Jeru-
salem Temple, resting upon the mercy seat within the
Holy of Holies. Therefore, what was heaviest (most
glorious) of all was the mercy of God, which abided in
infinite, inexhaustible abundance in the Holy Temple.
In light of these clarifications, we can read Jesus’
parable with fresh eyes. The talents given to the three
servants are not so much monetary gifts or personal ca-
pacities; they are a share in the mercy of God, a partici-
pation in the weightiness of the divine love. But since
mercy is always directed to the other, these “talents” are
designed to be shared. In point of fact, they will increase
precisely in the measure that they are given away. The
problem with the timid servant who buried his talent
is not that he was an ineffective venture capitalist but
that he fundamentally misunderstood the nature of what
he had been given. The divine mercy -- received as a
pure gift -- is meant to be given to others as a pure gift.
Buried in the ground, that is to say, hugged tightly to
oneself as one’s own possession, such a talent necessar-
ily evanesces. And this is why the master’s seemingly
harsh words should not be read as the punishment of
an angry God but as an expression of spiritual physics:
the divine mercy will grow in you only inasmuch as
you give it to others. To “have” the kabod Yahwehis
precisely not to have it in the ordinary sense of the term.
What comes to mind here is the most famous of all
of Jesus’ parables, namely, the story of the Prodigal
Son. Using a term that also carried a monetary sense
in ancient times, the younger son says, “Father give me
my share of the ousia (substance or wealth) that is com-
ing to me. Notice how in one sentence, he manages to
mention himself three times! The father gives away his
ousia, for that is all he knows how to do, but the foolish
son squanders the money in short order. The spiritual
lesson is the same: the divine ousia is a gift and it can
The parable of the talents
Word on
Fire
Fr. Barron
SEE FATHER BARRON, PAGE 15
