Room for dithering

The media last week were full of criticism of ‘dithering’ politicians such as the Prime Minister, and churchmen, such as the Archbishop, on the subject of divorce. In particular, Lou Bondi wrote: “The Archbishop and his Gozitan counterpart, having initially endorsed these clerics’ position, distanced themselves from it only a few days later.” As one of the clerics referred to, what is your reaction?

The bishops, in their pastoral note, if I read it correctly, focused on a rather different although related question to that dealt with by us, the priestly seven.

The quandary at the centre of the bishops’ attention seems to me to have been the following: Suppose I am a believer and hold that the Gospel and the Church take a definite position on a moral issue, in the current case that divorce is always wrong (where divorce means a second marriage while a first is still valid).

At the same time using reason and reflecting upon experience I come to the conclusion that divorce is right in certain circumstances. What does my conscience tell me to do in this situation?

My personal conclusion would be, since I know how fallible human reasoning is, that if my rational reflection led me into contradiction with my faith, then I must have committed some mistake in the course of my reasoning. My conscience would undoubtedly tell me to follow the teaching of the Gospel and of the Church, as long as there was no problem about the correctness of the interpretation of the Gospel-Church teaching.

Of course, it could happen that my conscience erroneously told me to prefer my own reasoning to the clear teaching of Gospel-Church, and then my subjectively right path of duty would still be to follow my mistaken conscience, but it would be patently an objectively wrong path.

Since Christ’s mission was not just to enable souls to be saved individually but also to bring about a collective conversion from self-seeking to global solidarity and social justice, it is vital that paths of conduct chosen be justifiable not only subjectively but also objectively.

What was the other question discussed by you?

We, the not-so-magnificent seven, discussed a question that only arises because of the very reasonable Church teaching that not every sin (moral wrongdoing) should be made a crime (punishable by law). Otherwise, there would be the loss of God’s very precious gift to man of freedom. Even more, the teachers of the Church have stressed that the laws by which sins were made crimes should be as few as possible.

Because the stability of marriage was deemed to be crucial for society, (such grounds as Home Affairs Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici set out in this newspaper last Sunday), divorce as defined above was for centuries among the sins that were selected for treatment also as criminal offences.

However, this need not always and everywhere be the case.

It is true that, as a letter-writer in last Sunday’s paper pointed out, Jesus Christ said: “What God had joined, let no man put asunder”.

However, when a court grants divorce, it is not effectively undoing a marriage if it had been validly concluded in God’s eyes, but merely decriminalising an act that would otherwise have been bigamy. (Presumably Catholics who take part in divorce proceedings justify themselves in some such terms).

A legislator who votes in favour of a divorce law (or a voter in a referendum) is in no way declaring that divorce is not a sin, but only that in the existing particular circumstances it is on the whole better for society to suffer the ills of divorce than other ills judged to be rampant without it.

Do you mean that the choice has to be made with reference to the common good and how is this common good to be understood and measured?

I did not use the language of ‘common good’ because I have learnt from experience how difficult it is for people today to understand the concept.

As Stanley Hauerwas puts it, post-modern liberalism has changed the general understanding of what politics is, at least in the Western world. Politics used to be understood to be “the ongoing conversation necessary for the discovery of goods to be enjoyed in common”.

But today it has come to be understood “as the means necessary to secure co-operation between people who share nothing in common other than their desire to survive”.

People have ceased to believe that there exists “the common good” because they have come to think that a “good” can only

be said to be so in subjective terms, or in other words, in relation to individual needs or desires.

A general loss seems to have occurred of the realisation that a being is human on two counts.

A human being is defined as such not only because of his ability to reason and decide on his own on the basis of his individual reflexive consciousness.

He is also a human being because he belongs to a family, to a state as a citizen, to various other groups of which he is a member through sharing a language or other means of symbolic communication, and ultimately to the human species.

In this context, the family is thought of increasingly as a voluntary organisation, discounting the fact that no-one has parents or children of his own choice, and tending towards the idea that I can choose whether to stay married just as I chose whom to marry and when.

This goes radically against the traditional recognition that our lives are the gift of others to us and that the family only makes sense as the cell of a larger organic community, the fulfilment of which is symbolised by the Church, or the Umma or some other eschatological figure of a unified humanity.

It is only in such a perspective that it is really meaningful to talk of the ‘common good’.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.