The cardinal heading Pope Francis’ new Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life says clergy are ill-equipped to prepare couples for marriage. Msgr. Lopez-Gallo disagrees. (CNS photo/L'Osservatore Romano)
The family is the oldest institution created by God himself, who said: “ ‘It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate.’ So God made the man fall into a deep sleep and took one of his ribs and enclosed it in flesh. He built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man, who exclaimed: ‘This is to be called woman for this was taken from man.’ This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife, and they become one body. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it.” (Gen 2:18-24).
No wonder Pope Francis, as soon as he was elected, felt it was necessary to renew the theology of the sanctity of marriage, even exaggerating when he said: “The great majority of our sacramental marriages are null because the couple says ‘Yes, for the rest of my life’ but they don’t know what they are saying!” What the Pope meant was many couples do not understand that a sacramental marriage is a bond that binds them to one another for life.
Couples can be so cynical as to even arrogantly affirm: “Yes, we do. We want to marry, but if that does not work, we will divorce.” The divorce mentality is deeply ingrained in the minds of a multitude of Catholic youth. Because of this, Pope Francis created a new Vatican Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, suppressing the Pontifical Council for the Laity and the Pontifical Council for the Family.
He assigned Cardinal Kevin Farrell prefect of the new dicastery, but as soon as he took up his new job, the cardinal surprisingly, declared: “Catholic priests lack credibility to prepare the faithful for the sacrament of marriage because they have never been married … Priests are not the best people to train others for marriage. They have no credibility. They have never lived the experience; they may know moral theology, dogmatic theology in theory … but to go from there to putting it into practice every day … they don’t have the experience.”
These comments from Cardinal Farrell were made in a recent interview with Intercom magazine, a publication of the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference. His assertion that lack of marital experience is a handicap conflicts with Pope St. John Paul II’s pivotal 1960 work Love and Responsibility, written when he was a bishop. Karol Wojytla said that priests have a different and wider experience that allows them to minister to couples. He wrote: “It is sometimes said that only those who live a conjugal life can pronounce on the subject of marriage, and only those who have experienced it can pronounce on love between man and woman. In this view, all pronouncements on such matters must be based on personal experience, so that priests and persons living a celibate life can have nothing to say on questions of love and marriage.
“Nevertheless, they often do speak and write on these subjects. Their lack of direct personal experience is no handicap because they possess a great deal of experience at second-hand, derived from their pastoral work. For in their pastoral work they encounter these particular problems so often, and in such a variety of circumstances and situations, that a different type of experience is created, which is certainly less immediate and certainly “second-hand,” but at the same time very much wider. The very abundance of factual material on the subject stimulates both general reflection and the effort to synthesize what is known.”
This is not the first time Cardinal Farrell has made such comments. A year ago, while addressing a gathering of Catholic leaders in Ireland, the cardinal said priests have no credibility when it comes to living the reality of marriage and the laity should organize and administer marriage preparation programs.
We do not accept the Cardinal’s proposition. In our Archdiocese of Vancouver and in many other dioceses worldwide the laity do conduct marriage preparation courses, but the role of priests is to prepare couples for marriage by instilling in them the spiritual and theological components of matrimony. Many dioceses enlist lay sponsor couples to prepare engaged couples for the daily elements of married life and this is done in tandem with the spiritual preparation provided by priests.
Recently, Cardinal Farrell said one of his immediate priorities would be to develop a marriage program based on the controversial apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. He added this exhortation is faithful to the doctrine and to the teaching of the Church, and it is carrying on the doctrine of John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio.
Laity, family and life are the glorious gifts which God entrusts to his Church to be sanctified by the sacraments and to achieve our eternal happiness in heaven.