UK Bishops Marriage and Family Life Project: leaflet on homosexuality (2)

One of the boxes in the Marriage and Family Life Project quotes from some of the things said during the Listening 2004 exercise. This national exercise involved meetings in a number of diocesan and other contexts in which people came together to talk about their experience of marriage and family life.

At the time I remember thinking: what exactly did this exercise wish to listen to? In practice, I think it ended up listening to anything and therefore to everything. Without any discernment. When I asked some families in the parish to give testimonies during a time of Eucharistic Adoration that coincided with the celebration of the Fifth World Meeting of Families in Valencia, I gave them a steer. I asked them to talk about how they lived out the idea of the Husband-Wife relationship in marriage as an imaging of the Christ-Church relationship (cf St Paul's letter to the Ephesians). The families involved were not by any means restricted by this; they kept and used their freedom to talk about their experience as they wished to do. Some of the families were keen to run their testimonies by me in advance; but I made a decision before reading them that I would not suggest any changes of content (I think I typed up a script for one family, editing for sentence structure but not for content). But they had a focus on the Christian concept of marriage. The result was a series of very powerful testimonies, ranging from younger parents with young children through to widowhood, and a profoundly moving witness to the sacrament of marriage. Difficulties not by any means absent, I should add.

The difficulty with Listening 2004 was that it was not given any doctrinal direction. It would have been very useful to hear how families were trying to live up to their Christian vocations - but without a doctrinal steer, this is not what happened. Instead, what we have in the experiences quoted in the leaflet in question, is anything and everything, regardless of any relation it might have to Christian marriage. Beyond evidence of the dangers of lack of charity, and lack of skill in charity, the experiences quoted in the leaflet - "The church has been very intolerant of him", for example - are of little use.

The lack of a doctrinal reference of any sort in the content of the Marriage and Family Life Project (and the documents referred to in the "Useful Resources" box do not make up for this - the selectivity of the resources listed leaves out, for example, The Catechism of the Catholic Church) is in my view a major weakness. This is not to say that I think the leaflet should contain a purely dogmatic restatement of the Church's teaching; but the reference to that teaching should be discernable and form a basis for the pastoral presentation in the leaflet.

Linked to this lack of doctrinal reference is the underlying idea of "welcome" - "everybodyswelcome.org.uk". The word "welcome" can be used in a very dissimulating way. It can mean that we approach all people, including those who have different beliefs than our own, in a way that is charitable. We conduct ourselves in charity towards them, without in any way saying that what we are doing is agreeing with their beliefs that are different than ours. However, it can also be used in a way that means we are accepting as legitimate Catholic belief things that are in conflict with the teaching of the Church. In this second sense, "welcome" is indifferentism. However, a concept of "welcome" as the underlying concept of the Marriage and Family Life Project does not appear to be making clear which of these two ideas of welcome is in play. The lack of doctrinal reference allows readers to indulge in this dissimulation.

To follow in a future post: a more detailed analysis of how the doctrinal reference can be given its due place, without being just "dogmatic".