Teologi

Kardinal Kasper holdt et langt foredrag om ekteskapet for en stort antall kardinaler, i Vatikanet 20. februar. Det gikk ikke lang tid før hele foredraget nådde pressen, og siden er det blitt diskutert ganske så grunding – mest fordi kardinal Kasper gjerne ville finne en løsning slik at skilte og gjengifte katolikker likevel kunne motta nattverden. Denne artikkelen av professor Robert Fastiggi i Detroit, USA,tar på en interessant måte opp hele innholdet i foredraget, og jeg tar med noen utdrag under:

…. In his March 5, 2014 interview with the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, Pope Francis was asked about the Cardinal’s presentation. The Holy Father remarked that Cardinal Kasper had given “a most beautiful and profound presentation” (una bellissima e profonda presentazione). He indicated, though, that section five of the Cardinal’s talk is likely to generate an intense discussion, which we should not fear because it can lead to theological and pastoral growth. …

… Cardinal Kasper provides a very rich anthropological and biblical synthesis of the theology of marriage. He also takes note of the many challenges facing the Church with regard to the present state of marriage and family life. His address is divided into five parts with two appendices. The five sections are: 1) the family in the order of creation; 2) the structures of sin in the life of the family; 3) the family in the Christian order of redemption; 4) the family as domestic Church; and 5) the problem of the divorced and remarried.

I agree with Pope Francis that there are many beautiful insights about marriage in this presentation, especially in the first four sections. Cardinal Kasper highlights the foundation of marriage in the natural law (section 1); the importance of children (section 2); the family as the fundamental cell of society and a school of the virtues (section 3); the Church’s need for the family and the family’s need for the Church (section 4). In my opinion, these first four sections provide a very beautiful synthesis of the key points of the Catholic theology of marriage.

The fifth section of Cardinal Kasper’s address is the most controversial. In this section he discusses the difficulties faced by Catholics who are divorced and remarried civilly. He affirms the indissolubility of sacramental matrimony and the impossibility of a new marriage while the other spouse is still living. He describes this as “part of the tradition of the binding faith of the Church and it cannot be abandoned or dissolved by an appeal to a superficial comprehension of a cheap type of mercy.” Nevertheless, the Cardinal wonders whether the door might be open to further development regarding the pastoral care of the divorced and remarried without abandoning the binding tradition of the faith. By way of comparison, he mentions how Vatican II was able to develop the Church’s response to the questions of ecumenism and religious freedom without violating traditional doctrine. In this regard, Cardinal Kasper suggests that divorced and remarried Catholics can be allowed to receive Holy Communion in individual cases under certain conditions after an appropriate penance. …

I denne artikkelen problematiseres spesielt fire punkter i kardinal Kaspers foredrag:

1) The move beyond Church tribunals: Cardinal Kasper states that it is not divine law (iure divino) that cases of the divorced and remarried must only be handled by juridical means. He wonders whether the bishop might not entrust these cases to a priest with pastoral and spiritual experience as a type of penitentiary or episcopal vicar. This evasion, though, of the Church’s juridical process seems to have many potential dangers. If the priest is going to make a declaration of nullity of the prior putative marriage, on what basis can he make this judgment other than through the Church’s canon law? ….

2) The need to move from general rules to the consideration of the unique situation of the human person ….

3) The ancient Church provides examples of allowing the divorced and remarried to be re-admitted back to ecclesial communion and the Eucharist. ….

4) The Catholic Church has never rejected the practice of the Eastern Orthodox on allowing divorce and remarriage. ….

Hvis en katolikk ikke gifter seg i Den katolske Kirke (eller i alle tilfeller med tillatelse fra Kirken) regnes han/hun ikke som gyldig gift, men for protestanter (og medlemmer i andre trossamfunn) gjelder ikke en slik ekstraregel – som ble innført ved konsilet i Trent. (Jeg lærte selv om dette da jeg var på katolsk presteseminar i London året 1997-98, i lutherske prestestudier tas ikke ekteskapet opp i noen særlig grad.) Den kjente kirkerettseksperten Edward Peters skriver i et blogginnlegg (som delvis handler om noe annet) følgende:

For more than 50 years, a quiet undercurrent of (if I may put it this way) solidly Catholic canonists and theologians has been questioning whether canonical form—a remedy that nearly all would agree has outlived the disease it was designed to cure (clandestine marriage)—should be still be required for Catholics or whether the price of demanding the observance of canonical form has become too high for the pastoral good it might serve.

Canonical form is an immensely complex topic. It has huge ramifications in the Church and it has major reverberations in the world. I am not going to discuss those here. But if the upcoming Synod on the Family and Evangelization is looking for a topic that needs, in my opinion, some very, very careful reconsideration, that topic would be the future of canonical form for marriage among Catholics. There is still time to prep the question for synodal discussion.

I et senere innlegg skriver han mer om hvorfor bispesynoden om ekteskapet til høsten bør ta opp dette temaet – i 9 punkter. Og han begynner på denne måten:

1. Canonical form, as a requirement for the validity of marriage, is only about four hundred years old; it has been universally demanded in the Church for less than 100 years. By far the greater part of Church history did not know canonical form.

2. Canonical form was hotly debated at Trent; there were serious sacramental and canonical objections raised to imposing form.

3. Canonical form was effective at eliminating clandestine marriage in places where the requirement was imposed. Whether clandestine marriage is still a great social problem is obviously a question. …. ….

De siste ukene er det i mange land dukket opp spørreundersøkelser som forberedelse til en ekstraordinær bispesynode om familien i Vatikanet i oktober 2014. For Norges del ble denne spørreundersøkelsen lagt ut på nett for et par dager siden. En ganske stor gruppe mennesker (Geistlig – Tilknyttet avdeling i bispedømmet – Tilknyttet råd, kommisjon eller utvalg i bispedømmet – Ordensmedlem – Menighetsrådsrepresentant – Forelder – Kateket – Lærer ved katolsk skole – Annet (Spesifiser)) er blitt spurt om å svare på 39 spørsmål. Og andre interesserte kan svare på 10 enklere spørsmål.

Noen katolikker ser dette som en mulighet til å fortelle Kirken at den er for streng når det gjelder synet på seksualetikk og ekteskap – det har jeg selv hørt flere ganger – men disse har misforstått hva undersøkelsen handler om. For å illustrere det, kan jeg trykke de to første spørsmålene i den store undersøkelsen:

1. Om formidlingen av hva Den hellige skrift og Kirkens læreembete forkynner vedrørende familien
a) Hva kjenner folk til i dag av hva Kirken sier om familiens verdi på grunnlag av Bibelen, Gaudium et spes, Familiaris consortio og andre postkonsiliære dokumenter fra Kirkens læreembete? På hvilken måte blir våre troende instruert i hvordan de skal leve familielivet i samsvar med Kirkens lære?
b) I de tilfeller der Kirkens lære er kjent, blir den fullt ut akseptert? Forekommer det vanskeligheter med å praktisere den? I så fall hvilke?
c) Hvordan formidles Kirkens lære innenfor de pastorale programmer på nasjonalt, bispedømme- og menighetsnivå? Hva slags katekese gjennomføres om familien?
d) I hvilken utstrekning – og spesielt: under hvilke former – er denne læren faktisk kjent, akseptert, avvist og/eller kritisert i miljøer utenfor Kirken? Hvilke kulturelle faktorer er det som hindrer full tilslutning til Kirkens lære om familien?

2. Om ekteskapet i følge naturretten
a) Hvilken stilling har naturrettsbegrepet i samfunnskulturen, det være seg på institusjonelt, utdannelsesmessig eller akademisk nivå, og blant folk flest? Hvilke antropologiske syn ligger til grunn for diskusjoner om det naturgitte fundament familien bygger på?
b) Er naturrettsbegrepet i forbindelse med foreningen mellom mann og kvinne allment akseptert blant de døpte?
c) Hvordan utfordres – teoretisk og praktisk – naturrettsprinsippet for foreningen mellom mann og kvinne med tanke på hvordan familier stiftes og/eller blir instruert? Hvordan blir det fremlagt og utdypet i samfunnsmessige og kirkelige organer?
d) Når ikke-praktiserende katolikker eller erklærte ikke-troende ber om å feire bryllup (i Kirken),
hvordan bør de pastorale utfordringer som følger av dette håndteres?

Ganske dyptgående og kompliserte spørsmål, ikke sant? De ti kortere spørsmålene (som forøvrig er laget her i Norge) er enklere, og lyder slik:

A. Hvordan kan Kirkens lære om ekteskap og familie gjøres bedre kjent blant de troende, og hvordan kan unge forberedes på ekteskap og familieliv i vår tid?
B. Hva er de vanligste problemstillinger familier støter på når de skal etterleve Kirkens lære om ekteskap og familie?
C. Hvordan kan par og familier trekkes mer aktivt inn i Kirkens liv? Hvordan kan Evangeliet forkynnes mer levende og relevant for ektefolk og familier?
D. Hvilke vellykkede former for familierettede tiltak i kirkelig regi er særlig verdt å gå videre med?
E. Hvilke årsaker ligger bak det økte antallet samboerskap blant unge katolikker?
F. Hvordan forklares Kirkens sakramentspraksis overfor skilte og gjengifte? Hvilke hensyn bør Kirken være særlig oppmerksom på i sin pastoralomsorg for samboere, skilte og gjengifte?
G. Hva oppfatter legfolk som de største vanskelighetene forbundet med de kirkerettslige prosesser med å få ekteskap erklært ugyldige?
H. Hva kunne dere ønske dere av tiltak (åndelige og praktiske) lokalt og sentralt for å øke småbarnsfamiliers mulighet til å delta i Kirkens liv?
I. Hvordan kan Kirken gjøre livsvern – læren om menneskets ukrenkelighet fra unnfangelse til naturlig død – bedre kjent, både blant de troende og i det offentlige rom?
J. På hvilke måter kan Kirkens legfolk i dag arbeide for økt anerkjennelse av verdiene som omsorgsarbeid tilfører samfunnet, med tanke på organisering av arbeidslivet, velferdsordninger, familiepolitikk, osv?

Besøk gjerne denne nettsiden, og svar på spørsmålene!

The prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, has lamented a Protestantization of the image of the Catholic priest. Catholics are no longer aware that there is an “essential difference” between the ordained priest and, as Protestants call it, the priesthood of all believers. The Vatican daily “L‘Osservatore Romano” published the piece by Müller on Thursday, October 31, a day of historical importance for the Protestant Reformation. The text consists of excerpts from a speech the archbishop gave on Wednesday in Palermo for the introduction of the 12-volume collected writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in Italian.

Müller gave as a reason for the current crisis in the priesthood the opening of Catholicism to Protestant scripture scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s, without recognizing the prejudices contained therein. This allowed the radical critique of cult and the priestly mediator role to enter into Catholicism. Furthermore, the biblical foundation of the priesthood was called into question. ….

Dette interessante innlegget kan leses her – med en hel del kommentarer som kritiserer erkebiskopen.

Danske Katolsk Orientering skriver om den tyske erkebiskopen Robert Zollitschs uttalelse om muligheten for kvinnelige diakoner, at dette skaper forvirring om (preste)embedets karakter. De skriver:

… Ifølge nyhedssitet thelocal.de (se her) afspejler Zollitschs udtalelse et årelangt ønske hos de tyske katolikkers centralkomité om at tillade kvindelige diakoner. I samme forbindelse udtalte ærkebiskoppen, at Den katolske Kirke er nødt til at reformere sig for at genvinde sin troværdighed og styrke.

Konferencen drøftede også muligheden for at tillade gengifte at bestride stillinger i kirkeligt regi, fx menighedsråd, og give dem mulighed for at modtage kommunion og bodens sakramente. ….

Zollitsch’ ønske om oprettelsen af et diakonat for kvinder blev dog hurtigt imødegået af flere af hans tyske kolleger. En talsmand for kardinal Reinhard Marx af München, som pave Frans har udpeget til at sidde i sit nye rådgivningsorgan, udtaler, at ordinerede kvindelige diakoner ”ikke er på agendaen”.

Og biskop Rudolf Voderholzer af Regensburg har udtalt, at diakonembedet er uløseligt knyttet sammen med præste- og bispeembedet og ordinationens sakramente, og ”traditionen om at kun mænd kan ordineres bygger på Bibelen”.

Kvinnelige diakoner tror ikke jeg personlig at vi kommer til å få. Og at «gjengifte ikke kan motta kommunion eller botens sakramente» er det faktisk noen katolikker som ikke kjenner til.

Jeg har nå lest 2/3 av Eamon Duffys bok «The Stripping of the Altars». Jeg er ferdig med første halvdel av boka, som tar for seg kirkelig og liturgisk praksis i England fram til 1530, og kommet et stykke inn i hva som skjedde etter kong Henriks brudd med paven, lest om flere av reformene (men det var ganske uklart de første årene om de protestantiske tendensene kom til å føre fram til endelige resultater. Jeg har bl.a. lest at hl Thomas Beckets relikvier i Canterbury var blitt ødelagt; graven åpnet, beina knust og spredd for alle vinder. Slik skriver Wikipedia om denne viktige boka:

…. The main thesis of Duffy’s book is that the Roman Catholic faith was in rude and lively health prior to the English Reformation. Duffy’s argument was written as a counterpoint to the prevailing historical belief that the Roman Catholic faith in England was a decaying force, theologically spent and unable to provide sufficient spiritual sustenance for the population at large.

Taking a broad range of evidence (accounts, wills, primers, memoirs, rood screens, stained glass, joke-books, graffiti, etc.), Duffy argues that every aspect of religious life prior to the Reformation was undertaken with well-meaning piety. Feast days were celebrated, fasts solemnly observed, churches decorated, images venerated, candles lit and prayers for the dead recited with regularity. Pre-Reformation Catholicism was, he argues, a deeply popular religion, practiced by all sections of society, whether noble or peasant. Earlier historians’ claims that English religious practice was becoming more individualised (with different strata of society having radically different religious lives) is contested by Duffy insisting on the continuing ‘corporate’ nature of the late medieval Catholic Church, i.e. where all members were consciously and willingly part of a single institution.

Much previous historical work on the Reformation, says Duffy, assumed it was a straightforward progression from the decaying Catholicism to the more morally pure but also more functional Protestantism. Duffy acknowledges that his thesis demands explanation of how, given the popularity of Catholicism, Protestantism was able to wipe away centuries of accumulated tradition, and do so in an incredibly short space of time. Duffy does this by proposing what he feels are a number of salient explanations — the political power of the militant Protestant clergy undertaking visitations to England’s parishes and that continued loyalty to the monarch allowed the word of the King to play a significant role in influencing public behaviour. Duffy also articulates the fact that while Catholics had the capability of rebelling against laws and edicts it was difficult for such rebellion to be sustained; there were simply no concepts of revolution or working-class solidarity by which Catholics could provide continued resistance to unpopular events.

The second part of Duffy’s book concentrates on the accelerated implementation of Protestantism in the mid sixteenth century. It charts how society reacted to Henrician, Edwardian and Elizabethan reform and the changes in religious practice this entailed. Duffy uncovers a succession of records, notes and images that individually reveal an assortment of changes to liturgy and custom but taken together build up to demonstrate a colossal change in English religious practice.

So we see how candlesticks and church plate had to be melted down and sold off, altar tables removed, rood screens defaced or torn down and chasubles unstitched. How walls were whitewashed, relics discarded and paintings of saints hidden in parishioners’ houses. And we also read how the other aspects of the Catholic community, such as the guild groups or particular local feast days, quickly collapsed without the economic or religious practices on which they depended. It was a painful process for Catholics, and Duffy vividly illustrates the confusion and disappointment of Catholics stripped of their familiar spiritual nourishment. …

Eamon Duffy kjenner kirkehistorien svært godt, og skriver i sin artikkelsamling «Faith of Our Fathers» om hvordan prestene hadde vært i middelalderen, og hvordan dette forandret seg med motreformasjonen:

The humble massing-priest of the Middle Ages, a sort of spiritual plumber called in only to do a job and paid off at the servant’s entrance, had acquired a mystique formerly limited to the religious. In the process, the priesthood was monasticized — clerical training, clerical dress, clerical culture, clerical spirituality were all designed to mark off the priest’s vocation and state of life as unique, mysterious, awesome in its responsibility and privilege. Friendships between priests and their parishioners were discouraged (only partly in the interests of maintaining celibacy). The priest was indeed like Melchizedek, without parentage, without roots, a man apart from other men (and especially women!).

It was a noble ideal, and carried with it the notion of the priest as lonely spiritual warrior or explorer, spending long days and nights on his knees, suffering for his people, enduring loneliness and spiritual pain for their sakes. …

I dag har mange (mest typisk for 70- og 80-tallet) enda et ideal for hvordan prestene skal være:

By contrast, we increasingly demand of our clergy that they should be animators, not masters, that they should be approachable, friendly, involved, on first-name terms. There is often among lay people a cruel naïveté about the demands that these new expectations place on clergy. We need to understand the scale of Trent’s achievement, in its refashioning and elevation of priesthood, but we need also to grasp the price and the methods which that achievement demanded. We need also to understand that the Tridentine vision is slowly but surely collapsing under the joint pressures of theological and social change. Without Tridentine structures and attitudes, we cannot have Tridentine priesthood: we cannot have our cake and eat it.

The Middle Ages had a vision of priesthood which was modest and limited. The priest was to be to the Church what the local blacksmith or carpenter was to the secular community, a conscientious workman providing essential services. He must provide with decency the sacraments and sacramentals, he must instill the bare essentials of Christian doctrine and morals into his people, dispense charity to the poor, make peace when neighbours quarrelled, avoid open scandal in his private life. He was not expected to be a preacher, or a guru, nor indeed, in any very serious sense, a spiritual expert of any sort.

Trent and the Counter-Reformation had a different, more exalted vision. The priest was to be a man apart for the people, but, it followed, also a man apart from the people: his life must be conformed to the miracle he performed each day at the altar. He was to be a man of prayer, an example of personal sanctity. He was to be expert in theology and ethics, a spiritual guide to others, and the voice of a teaching magisterium which was ever more detailed and comprehensive in its concerns. When in doubt, you should ask the priest. He was, in fact, to be what the Middle Ages had expected in a monk, though he was expected to live without the support of community.

Our present system of clerical training was designed to provide that sort of priest: it is the product of the Tridentine moment, a moment that lasted from 1560 to 1960, and those of us whose Catholicism was formed by it owe it a profound debt of gratitude. But the Tridentine moment is passing, perhaps has already passed. The sort of expertise the Tridentine priest was expected to have is now within the reach of us all, and in the West we do not need or at any rate no longer want the sort of clerical guru which Trent set itself to produce. As society changes, as the Church calls on all the laity to claim and exercise their priesthood, and as we discover that the charisms which help form the life of the Church can be given to all and not just to the clergy, we are confronted with an urgent need to reimagine the ordained priesthood, as the Counter-Reformation reimagined and reinvented it. ….

Etter konsilet kastet mange katolikker vrak på Kirkens tradisjoner, skriver Eamon Duffy. Duffy er ingen forsvarer av Kirken slik den hadde blitt i 1960, men han er samtidig svært kritisk til måten man kastet vrak på tradisjonen etter Konsilet – og at man ikke erstattet det man kastet med andre elementer fra Kirkens skattkammer. Han skriver mot slutten av sitt forord i boka ‘Faith of Our Fathers’:

It is a mystery because by and large in the past Catholic theologians advocating change, even radical change, have been as anxious to invoke the notion of tradition as those seeking to maintain the status quo. At the heart of the ‘New Theology’ of De Lubac, Congar and the other theological midwives of the Council, was a passionate call to rediscover the tradition. They set about freeing the Church from the narrow straitjacket of a debased nineteenth-century neo-scholasticism by opening up the riches of the deep tradition of the Church, in the scriptures, the liturgy, the Fathers. For them the past was not a sterile cul-de-sac to be escaped from, but an inexhaustible well of Christian experience and wisdom, which liberated theology and the Christian imagination by demonstrating how diverse, subtle, endlessly inventive the Church has been, and is called to be, in her journey through time.

Within Ultramontane Catholicism, however, the notion of tradition had been in danger of narrowing to mean little more than the current Roman theology. Pio Nono’s notorious 1870 aphorism ‘I am the tradition’, was a telling reflection of the day-to-day reality of an increasingly powerful central authority, which strangled Catholic theology (and episcopal teaching) for a century. Most of the citations in the (rejected) draft declaration of faith drawn up for the Second Vatican Council by the Holy Office under Cardinal Ottaviani, for example, were from the writings and speeches of Pius XII and his immediate predecessors: no church document earlier than the Council of Trent was cited, and there were no quotations from scripture. Tradition had shrunk from being a cathedral of the Spirit to a storeroom in the cellars of the Holy Office.

The Conciliar reforms did a great deal to correct this sterile and authoritarian notion of tradition, to recover a sense of the variety and richness of the Christian past as a resource for the Christian present. But whatever the roots of reform, much of the practical liturgical, theological and catechetical reform carried out since the Second Vatican Council was informed by a search for immediacy or authenticity of experience, rather than attentive encounter with the diversity, depth and wisdom of the tradition. In place of a philistine authoritarianism, cut off from the riches and complexity of the Christian past by a mindset described as ‘non-historical orthodoxy’, we have tended to substitute a non-historical liberalism, which has even less to offer.

Reaction was inevitable, and drew strength from the fact that the years immediately before the Council proved to have been the high-watermark of institutional Roman Catholicism in Britain and North America. In the wake of the Council, thousands and priests and religious abandoned their vocations to marry, clerical recruitment plummeted, and Catholic practice eroded. Unsurprisingly, the blame for this institutional erosion was often laid at the door of post-Conciliar change. Accordingly, over the last 20 years there has been a growing call for ‘restoration’, endorsed at the highest levels of the Church, and manifesting itself in a revived clericalism and a strong-arm exercise of ecclesiastical authority which many find deeply alienating. ‘Tradition’ has become a fraught and difficult term, invoked by self-styled ‘traditionalists’, to call a halt to change and herald a return to the forms and mindset of the recent past, rather than as a resource for change.

The essays in this book were written out of a quite contrary conviction, that an understanding of the richness of the Church’s past is a liberation, not a straitjacket. The tradition offers us a point of vantage from which to criticize the present, certainly, but it is also a source of confidence in launching into the uncharted future. Cardinal Newman once famously declared that `in another world it may be otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’. The Church’s past, in all its complexity and contradictoriness, is abundant evidence that change, not stasis, is the sign of life. …