Theology Essays Familiaris Consortio

divinity Essays Familiaris ConsortioIn 1981, as a resolvent of a Synod of Bishops speci e very(prenominal) last(predicate)y devoted to further consciousness of the ( whence) current understanding of sexual pith and the Christian family in the modern populace, pontiff tin capital of Minnesota II promulgated an apostolic provocation entitled FamiliarisConsortio (On the family).The well-kn suffer biographer of John capital of Minnesota II, George Weigel, claims that in private conversations held with the holy father he came to learn that the pontiff regarded Familiaris Consortio as wizard of his favorite letters he had ever compose as pope to the family of God (Witness to Hope, 385). The document is a wide-ranging and colossal one in terms of the sheer breadth of the content cover therein, and it is therefore hardly any wonder that a prominent Catholic encyclopedia should say of the apostolic exhortation that it is one of the close to fundamental sources for the theologi cal meaning of the sacrament of Marriage (Stravinskas, Catholic Encyclopedia, 628).Many writers who w be come ton this exhortation as their springingpoint to launch into various issues, which argon accessory to espousal per se, develop neertheless been able to employ specific portions of FamiliarisConsortio, owing to its sizeableness of content. What we bequeath focus on in thefollowing pages is a kind of reply of the document by Catholics (whetherclergy or laypeople) and its teachings over the more than two decades since itspromulgation. at that place be certainly areas of overlap among those who grantcommented on the document, and these ought to be paid tending to in coming toan understanding of an authentic bothy Ro pitying bes Catholic awareness of the variousaspects of married life among Christians.Opening Observations Made in Familiaris ConsortioSectionone of the document channelly opens up the contents and applications of thedocument to a broad audience. It is written for (1) those living in fidelity tothe church buildings extant teachings and practices in the area of matrimony, (2) thosewho have fix befogged by the contemporary challenges encroaching upon thefamily, and even to (3) those who live in foul unawareness of the freedom andhuman rights guaranteed to them to have all the fullness that marriage mightoffer. In separatewise words, the intended audience of the document is anintrinsically ecumenical one. It is non notwithstanding addressing Catholics in goodstanding with the Church, just the holy father reaches his hand out to assisteveryone essay with the sundry difficulties in contemporary married life.This is signifi backsidet, since well-nigh prior documents, whether Casti Connubiiof Pope Pius XI, charitableae Vitae of Pope capital of Minnesota VI, or even documents of theSecond Vatican Council, the intended audience has been, if not exclusively,certainly mainly Catholics.PopeJohn Paul II notes in section six of the exhortation that the incident ofmarriage and the family in contemporary life is an ironic one in the sense thatthere are both commendable advances being made in Western culture and enormoussetbacks. It is not so simple a situation as to claim that Western culture isdoing nothing other than contend and hindering the family and married life.Some of the good understandings reached by the contemporary Western world arethe following an appreciation of human freedom for both sexes, a publicity ofeducation and bask for boorren, and a promotion of the dignity of women andresponsible procreation. However, some of the setbacks against the familyshould also be noted. They include the following the respective freedom of thespouses has been carried to an extreme sense of autonomy, the misconstructionof effectiveness and the handing on of note values with respect to the relation ofparents to their fryren, and the ongoing scourges of abortion, growingdivorce rates, sterilization, and an ove rall encumbrance mentality. It is forthese efforts and many others besides that the Synod of Bishops met and wishedPope John Paul II to be the special spokesperson for their conclusions reached.Everything is not well for the contemporary family, and Pope John Paul IIreasons that the family is not merely a part of an overall society(rather, it is the very metrical unit of all society, as we shall explore later),any attacks on its welfare must(prenominal) not go unanswered. Social injustices toward thefamily must be dealt with directly, and this is a primary reason for the style of Familiaris Consortio.Building on Prior Teaching for Fundamental PreceptsPrior to the appearance of this apostolic exhortation, there hadappeared two very important documents on the personality of marriage and the family.They were the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae and an authoritativedocument coming out of the Vatican II Church Council called Lumen Gentium.Pope John Paul II, as all popes throughout floor have done, takes the priorteaching on marriage and the family (especially that essayn in the twentiethcentury) as his starting points on which to build. He references several generationthroughout his apostolic exhortation the encyclical Humanae Vitae (HV),especially when the content of his teaching has to do with the most explicitportions of HV on the connubial act and contraception.Freedom Versus familiarityThere appears in this succinct encyclical Humanae Vitae a veryprofound line, which undoubtedly could be expounded upon. In section 21 of theencyclical, Pope Paul VI declares that selfishness is the oppositeness of true make do. This recalls an earlier pointmade in our essay. John Paul II notes the hazardous tendency of contemporaryspouses to exemplify an isolationist and autonomous attitude in marriage (FC,6). In fact, for the problems listed above which are antithetical to marriageand family life, the Pope believes there is one problem most fundamentally thecause of the others. He writes, At the root of these disallow phenomena therefrequently lies a corruption of the mentation and the experience of freedom,conceived not as a capacity for realizing the truth of Gods plan for marriageand the family, but as an autonomous former of self-affirmation, often againstothers, for ones own selfish well-being. And if selfishness is thought to bethe enemy of true honey, then any spouse acting almost exclusively in his ownself-interest is unhealthful toward the very bond of his marriage to hisspouse, which bond is love itself.There is an kindle irony involved in selfish individualismversus a flourishing and interchangeablely reciprocating action of love toward anotheroutside of oneself. Whereas one would suppose that, as is often franklyadmitted, couples will tend to not want to marry because they solely want tocontinue enjoying the other person in the relationship without giving over to aserious commitment (Cf. Barbara Markey, Cohabitation repl y over Reaction).Or, further than this, some married couples will either target off childrenindefinitely or decide to not have them at all for the expressed purpose ofwishing to sexually enjoy the spouse in an unrestrained manner. The strangeconsequence though, as Pope Paul VI noted in Humanae Vitae, is that thiseventually leads to decorous overly self-centered sexually, which eventuates inman (or woman) coming to see the other as a mere instrument of selfishenjoyment and no longer as the desired bloke for life (HV, 17). primeval Alfonso Lopez Trujillo notes that the having of a family ina natural and ordered way (such as the Church teaches couple to do) does leadto the exact opposite of selfishness and isolationism in a marriagerelationship. And this is a necessary consequence (as in, it is intrinsic innature itself) of having children. Cardinal Trujillo offers some examples thatit is the nature of family to be other-centered in even the simplest ways. Henotes, Everyone has to help everyone else in thefamily, (FC and the Family, 3). It is simply a thing of beingpractically impossible to be rapped up in oneself in the context of a familywith numerous children. The older children will have to help the younger onesat times (e.g., to put on their shoes before they go outside), and the adultswill constantly have to help all of the children to grow into responsibleadults. It is simply intrinsic to the nature of having a family that one growsto be concerned with the well-being and interests of others around.In these comments by Cardinal Trujillo there isan explication of the fundamental doctrines expressed in sections 42-43 of Familiaris.In these sections, Pope John Paul II notes that the daily life of a good familyis characterized by overlap and deep communion. The comm concurrence of a family isthe very answer collected to sweep selfish isolationism. This theatrical role ofother-centered communion is seen in various aspects of which the Cardinal haselabo rated. For example, the family is head by an overriding rule offree giving, and this free giving takes the form ofheartfelt acceptance, adopt and dialogue, disinterested availability,generous service and deep solidarity (FC, 43). Children helping youngerchildren whenever there arises a need for such help is a ready example ofdisinterested availability. The older child helps the younger not because he isgaining something for it, but rather because when a child needs help,especially your own sibling, you simply help that child. This also fosters arecognition of the intrinsic value in each individual human being.Love and Life the very Foundation of Marriage and FamilyIn his recent speech Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo concord with Pope JohnPaul II in seeing the family as that which forms societies. According tothe Pope, the family is societys foundation, which continually bolsterssociety by being its continual giver of life (FC, 42). Cardinal Trujillonotes that this sentiment is in op position to current worldly sentiment mostreadily embodied by the United Nations in their recent conferences. The generalattitude expressed in these U.N. conferences has been to think that societiesare simply collections of individuals (Familiaris Consortio and theFamily, 3). But, nature seems to argue against this mistaken idea. Societiesare not the ones producing and nurturing and giving the individuals to thesociety. These duties are carry out by families, and the individuals producedusually repeat this fundamental cycle of nature by creating their own familiesand producing and nurturing their own offspring.Underlying the teaching of the family as the ultimate antidote toisolationism, are the two most fundamental realities of marriage love andlife. The two are hardly mutually exclusive, reasons John Paul II. On thecontrary, conjugal love expressed as it out to be expressed correspond to thenature of man tends toward the creation of life. Procreation is a naturalfruit of the con jugal act, according to Humanae Vitae. Many thinkerssince have latched on to this fundamental Catholic point, including John PaulII in this exhortation. According to Catholic teaching, man is a hylomorphicunity. That is, he is composed of matter and form, which for man typify tothe body and soul, which are fundamentally united. That is, what it is to bea human is to be a soul-body unity (FC, 11). But, man is also created inthe image and likeness of God, who is love. It follows that Love is thereforethe fundamental and indispensable vocation of every human being, (11). In marriage,the love that man longs to express is done so most fundamentally in conjugallove, the mutual and masterful self-giving of a man and a woman. So sexualitycould never be seen, on this understanding as something purely physical, norpurely psychological either. It is the whole human who engages in the sexualact, so the act itself is intrinsically physical and spiritual. This is how onecommunicates his or her love for another, by the mutual self-giving in theconjugal act.However, love is not the just principle intrinsic to conjugal acts.This fact is easily demonstrable by noting that give control contraceptionamounts to midget more than artificial means of birth prevention. But since itis ever thought that this or that birth is needing to be prevented, it must bethe case that there is a natural product of conjugal love. So, Donald Ascireasons, this is the other aspect of Pope John Paul IIs immortal of theconjugal act. The body by its very nature in sexuality is fecund it is opento fertility (The connubial make out as a Personal Act, 138). Totalunion occurs with the giving of ones body and all of its finalities. In maleclimax, a finality is the releasing of semen, in which is contained thepossibility of forming a current human life (if united with the gift of thewoman-the ovum). There is a principle of totality inherent in this reasoning -the giving of ones total self his spirit ual, physical and (innatelycontained inwardly the physical) his fecundity.But, if by some various means the conjugal act is not completedaccording to its intrinsic order something like a contradiction takes place,according to Christopher West who cites section 32 of Familiaris Consortio.West argues that one cannot possibly hold that he gives his entire self to theother if at the most important (i.e., climactic) moment of coition thevery moment when the unity between the two ought to be felt most of all onewithdraws him or herself from the union. Fecund is what adults are bynature. Therefore, when one does such a thing as what West describes, he isengaging in a type of lie a serious contradictory statement which says, Igive you all of myself however my fertility. I receive all that you are exceptyour fertility, (Good News about awake and Marriage, 108). Thus, as JohnPaul II reasons in this section of FC cited by West, the innatelanguage of the total and mutual self-giving inh erent in the conjugal act hold outs overlaid with a contradictory idea when man acting as the ultimatearbiter of his own being and sexuality decides in a moment to nottotally give of his self (since his whole self includes, as Asci has shownabove, his fecundity as well).The Essential Tension of Becoming What You AreThe preaching thus far leads naturally to what many later came tosee as a profound and highly important teaching of Familiaris ConsortioFamilies, you are to become what you are This passage so often quoted runsthus,The family findsin the plan of God the Creator and deliverer not only its identity, what it is,but also its delegating, what it can and should do. The role that God calls thefamily to make out in history derives from what the family is its rolerepresents the dynamic and existential instruction of what it is. all(prenominal) familyfinds within itself a summons that cannot be ignored and that specifies bothits dignity and responsibility family, become what y ou are (FamiliarisConsortio, 17).Of course, such anexhortation is paradoxical at first blush. As David Michael doubting Thomas remarksconcerning this papal principle, This pope is a complex blend of realism andidealism. The accent between the two is not relaxed for a minute (Pope JohnPaul IIs Advice for Families, 7). And Cardinal Trujillo asks, how cansomething become what it is? (7) More specifically, how does a family becomewhat it already is?Donald Asci has some insight to share on this front. It isessentially a cart-and- one dollar bill dilemma. It is not always easy, in terms ofaction, to identify which is the horse that is pulling the cart. The family hasa nature, and it is given this by God. However, it also has a mission, which isalso given by God. These are two dimensions of the same reality namely, the family(Asci, 126). The family has a static nature, but it also has a dynamic mission,which is to be realized. But the mission is never realized without an alreadyextant fami ly, which has the necessary nature to realize the mission. Nofamily no mission. However, part of the mission is the having, nurturing, andpromulgating of good families. No fulfillment of mission no families. It is ascenario of interrelation and reciprocation. Each gives rise to the other.Ecclesia DomesticaA phrase that first appeared in recent times in the Second VaticanCouncil document Lumen Gentium with reference to the nature of thefamily was that of ecclesia nationala (the home(prenominal) church). As DavidMichael Thomas notes, the Council got this phrase from the writings of theChurch fathers, and rightly so since from the very beginnings of the Church ithas always been comprised of those who wished to convert together with alltheir household, as the official Catechism of the Catholic Church states onthis matter (413). The metaphor to describe this in the Catechism is that thefamilies of converts were as little islands of Christianity lived out in apagan world. Leon Suprenant offers the biblical metaphor of the body of Christ(which is the Church, according to St. Paul) being comprised of the littlecells of families. Furthermore, for those Catholics living in fidelity to theteachings of the Church and having children as the natural core of conjugallove, they have as their primary responsibility the education and system ofthese children according to the Gospel of Christ (The Real Presence of theMarriage Bond, 253). Surely, individual parishes in union with the Holy See ofthe Catholic Church contribute to the education and formation of children, butthis is primarily to be done in the home which is one of the qualities thatmake it the domestic church.In continuity with all this, Pope John Paul II in FamiliarisConsortio employs the phrase with some frequency and further elaboration. Itis a result of parents begetting in love and for love that they procreate newoffspring, for which they in turn take the responsibility of educating thesenew beings who stand in potential of great growth and development (FC,36). It is their duty, but more to the point of love, it is their solemnprivilege to be able to take the dedicated product (i.e., their own child) oftheir mutual love for each other and see its development through to completion.In this way, the parents fulfill their own duty and honor to be the firstevangelizers of their own children in teaching them of the love of Christ.Concluding ThoughtsAs wasstated at the outset of this brief essay, the apostolic exhortation FamiliarisConsortio is a document teeming in depth and broad in the topics to which itextends its teaching. However, we have only assay here to give what seem to besome of the most important and widely commented on portions of the text. Itcertainly seems to have had a welcome reception by many of the most well-knowncontemporary Catholic writers on marriage and the family. It also appears tohave filled a avert that existed to some extent in the wake of Catholic teachingon conjugal love and marriage prior to the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.One can reasonably expect that future pontificates will continue to focus onthe theology of the body so ably developed by Pope John Paul II in FamiliarisConsortio.BibliographyAsci, Donald P. The Conjugal Act as aPersonal Act A Study of the Catholic Concept of the ConjugalAct in the Light of Christian Anthropology. SanFrancisco Ignatius Press, 2002.Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2d ed. Vatican City Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997.John Paul II, Pope. The Theology of theBody Human Love in the Divine Plan. Boston,Pauline Booksand Media, 1997.Familiaris Consortio.Vatican Translation. Boston St. Paul Books, 1982.Markey, Barbara. Cohabitation Responseover Reaction. The Priest, November, 2000,19-24. Availableonline from Catholic Culture.Thisencyclical in its entirety is contained within a work listed in ourbibliography. The Theology of the Body, which is a compilation ofvarious teachings of Pope John Paul II on ma rriage and conjugal love, has HumanaeVitae as its first appendix. The reader may freely find the encyclical hereand many places elsewhere (including the Vaticans official website).