Abraham Lincoln once asked, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” “Five,” people would answer. “No,” Lincoln would state, “the correct answer is four.” Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg. The same is true for marriage.
All the debate, all the ink spilled, all the talk and all the discussion in books and in the modern areopagus that is the Internet’s blogosphere, it all boils down to this. We can call, phrase, rename, do anything we want with the name marriage, but marriage cannot be anything other than what it is – a permanent, life-giving union between a man and a woman.
The readings of the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, which happened to be the Sunday on which the Synod of Bishops began at the Vatican powerfully reminded us of this truth.
Natural law, divinely revealed Sacred Scripture and the consistent Magisterium of the Church clearly tell us what marriage is. Nothing can change this. Pope Francis, a consistent champion of traditional marriage, stated in his homily on the occasion of the opening of 2015’s Synod on the Family: “These words show that nothing makes man’s heart as happy as another heart like his own, a heart which loves him and takes away his sense of being alone. These words also show that God did not create us to live in sorrow or to be alone. He made men and women for happiness, to share their journey with someone who complements them, to live the wondrous experience of love: to love and to be loved, and to see their love bear fruit in children, as today’s Psalm says.”
Therefore, we cannot change what marriage is because we cannot change what reality is. Don’t expect the Church to recognize same-sex marriages. She can’t because to do so would be to violate the very nature of reality. However, we can expect the Church to continue to be the mother that she is, a loving mother who is loving, ready and willing to run to her children, even those who are hurt and wounded, and to offer them the loving embrace of mercy that only she can give.
Doctrine doesn’t change, but a consistent pastoral practice, going to the peripheries, seeing all with the eyes of mercy, will be the guiding force in the Synod.
A case in point is Msgr. Krzysztof Charamsa, a Polish priest who has been living in Rome for 17 years and has worked at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 2003. He recently called a press conference in which he stated: “I want the Church and my community to know who I am: a gay priest who is happy, and proud of his identity. I’m prepared to pay the consequences, but it’s time the Church opened its eyes, and realized that offering gay believers total abstinence from a life of love is inhuman.”
The priest, who, due to what truly was grandstanding and trying to co-opt the Synod on the Family with his press conference, has lost his position at the Vatican and it is up to his local bishop to decide his future. This lack of prudence on his part is shocking. Who calls a press conference for something like this? It is all part of an orchestrated plan to divert media attention from the actual working of the Synod and the actual words of the Holy Father. Without judging this priest’s motives, one truly wonders what it was he was trying to accomplish.
So many people fear that the Synod will change the belief of the Church. Do not be misled or distracted by headlines. Understand that the Church is simply looking for ways to strengthen its teaching and make it understandable in a more compassionate way.