St. Jerome: Moralistic Quibbler [repost]

[This is an old post from 2015 for the feast of St. Jerome. The opposition of the holy Church Fathers to current ecclesiastical trends remains, of course, very relevant.]

(Francisco de Zurbarán)

My dear Amandus,

I find joined to your letter of inquiries a short paper containing the following words: “ask him, (that is me,) whether a woman who has left her husband on the ground that he is an adulterer and sodomite and has found herself compelled to take another may in the lifetime of him whom she first left be in communion with the church without doing penance for her fault.”

As I read the case put I recall the verse “they make excuses for their sins.” We are all human and all indulgent to our own faults; and what our own will leads us to do we attribute to a necessity of nature. It is as though a young man were to say, “I am over-borne by my body, the glow of nature kindles my passions, the structure of my frame and its reproductive organs call for sexual intercourse.” Or again a murderer might say, “I was in want, I stood in need of food, I had nothing to cover me. If I shed the blood of another, it was to save myself from dying of cold and hunger.”

Tell the sister, therefore, who thus enquires of me concerning her condition, not my sentence but that of the apostle. “Do you not know, brethren (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives? For the woman which has an husband is bound by the law to her husband, so long as he lives; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. So then, if, while her husband lives, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress.” And in another place: “the wife is bound by the law as long as her husband lives; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord.” The apostle has thus cut away every plea and has clearly declared that, if a woman marries again while her husband is living, she is an adulteress.

You must not speak to me of the violence of a ravisher, a mother’s pleading, a father’s bidding, the influence of relatives, the insolence and the intrigues of servants, household losses. A husband may be an adulterer or a sodomite, he may be stained with every crime and may have been left by his wife because of his sins; yet he is still her husband and, so long as he lives, she may not marry another.

The apostle does not promulgate this decree on his own authority but on that of Christ who speaks in him. For he has followed the words of Christ in the gospel: “whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced, commits adultery.” Mark what he says: “whosoever shall marry her that is divorced commits adultery.” Whether she has put away her husband or her husband her, the man who marries her is still an adulterer. Wherefore the apostles seeing how heavy the yoke of marriage was thus made said to Him: “if the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry,” and the Lord replied, “he that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” And immediately by the instance of the three eunuchs he shows the blessedness of virginity which is bound by no carnal tie.

I have not been able quite to determine what it is that she means by the words “has found herself compelled” to marry again. What is this compulsion of which she speaks? Was she overborne by a crowd and ravished against her will? If so, why has she not, thus victimized, subsequently put away her ravisher?

Let her read the books of Moses and she will find that if violence is offered to a betrothed virgin in a city and she does not cry out, she is punished as an adulteress: but if she is forced in the field, she is innocent of sin and her ravisher alone is amenable to the laws. Therefore if your sister, who, as she says, has been forced into a second union, wishes to receive the body of Christ and not to be accounted an adulteress, let her do penance; so far at least as from the time she begins to repent to have no farther intercourse with that second husband who ought to be called not a husband but an adulterer.

If this seems hard to her and if she cannot leave one whom she has once loved and will not prefer the Lord to sensual pleasure, let her hear the declaration of the apostle: “ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils,” and in another place: “what communion has light with darkness? And what concord has Christ with Belial?”...

Wherefore, I beseech you, do your best to comfort her and to urge her to seek salvation. Diseased flesh calls for the knife and the searing-iron. The wound is to blame and not the healing art, if with a cruelty that is really kindness a physician to spare does not spare, and to be merciful is cruel.

Your affectionate sourpuss,
Jerome

(From Letter 55 of St. Hieronymus, Presbyteris Confessoris et Ecclesiae Doctoris)

(Leonello Spada)

A Dirty, Jovial and Unscrupulous Crew

Reading through the accumulation of modernist novels one has gathered over the years of graduate school is much like a slow and careful mining operation. One might occasionally find a rich vein of valuable ore, but must be careful of cave-ins, pockets of poison gas, and societies of mole men. I had never read much of Ford Madox Ford's fiction before now, just part of a science fiction collaboration with Joseph Conrad and a few essays. The Good Soldier is probably Ford's most famous novel, a story about bourgeois indolence and cuckoldry. The narrator is the victim of his wife's infidelity and of his friend Edward's apparent trustworthiness. While the novel is not especially worthy of the attention it has received, one passage jumped out at me as I was desperate to find anything memorable within:

I have given you a wrong impression if I have not made you see that Leonora [Edward's wife] was a woman of a strong, cold conscience, like all English Catholics. (I cannot, myself, help disliking this religion; there is always, at the bottom of my mind, in spite of Leonora, the feeling of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman, that filtered in upon me in the tranquility of the little old Friends' Meeting House in Arch Street, Philadelphia.)[...] For Edward was great at remorse. But Leonora's English Catholic conscience, her rigid principles, her coldness, even her very patience, were, I cannot help thinking, all wrong in this special case. She quite seriously and naïvely imagined that the Church of Rome disapproves of divorce; she quite seriously and naïvely believed that her church could be such a monstrous and imbecile institution as to expect her to take on the impossible job of making Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband. She had, as the English would say, the Nonconformist temperament. In the United States of North America we call it the New England conscience. For, of course, that frame of mind has been driven in on the English Catholics. The centuries that they have gone through—centuries of blind and malignant oppression, of ostracism from public employment, of being, as it were, a small beleagured garrison in a hostile country, and therefore having to act with great formality—all these things have combined to perform that conjuring trick. And I suppose that Papists in England are even technically Nonconformists.

Ford himself was a Catholic, at least at one time. He had been received into the Church at the age of nineteen (1892), but by the writing of this novel his marriage had fallen apart and he and his lover attempted unsuccessfully to secure German citizenship in order to procure a divorce. To Ford's credit, I suppose, he never exploited his fellow Catholics as a readership like the pseudo-Catholic Graham Greene later would. His bitterness about the Church's doctrine against divorce and remarriage makes The Good Soldier an interesting kind of anti-Catholic propaganda, and also grants readers a glimpse into his own soul.

The passage continues:

Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew. But that, at least, lets them be opportunists. They would have fixed poor dear Edward up all right.

Perhaps this is true or perhaps it is wishful thinking. Leonora's Irish Catholicism (her religion is described alternately as English and Irish) has the kind of strength that comes from embattlement, and those who have lived for years comfortable in the practice of their faith do tend to slouch into laxity. Certainly the slothfulness of our own days bears this out.

I have no idea if Ford, like Conrad, finally died reconciled to the Church. There is little indication he cared to move past the "feeling of shuddering" at the thought of Papistry or to repent of his war against marriage.

St. Jerome: Moralistic Quibbler

(Francisco de Zurbarán)

My dear Amandus,

I find joined to your letter of inquiries a short paper containing the following words: “ask him, (that is me,) whether a woman who has left her husband on the ground that he is an adulterer and sodomite and has found herself compelled to take another may in the lifetime of him whom she first left be in communion with the church without doing penance for her fault.”

As I read the case put I recall the verse “they make excuses for their sins.” We are all human and all indulgent to our own faults; and what our own will leads us to do we attribute to a necessity of nature. It is as though a young man were to say, “I am over-borne by my body, the glow of nature kindles my passions, the structure of my frame and its reproductive organs call for sexual intercourse.” Or again a murderer might say, “I was in want, I stood in need of food, I had nothing to cover me. If I shed the blood of another, it was to save myself from dying of cold and hunger.”

Tell the sister, therefore, who thus enquires of me concerning her condition, not my sentence but that of the apostle. “Do you not know, brethren (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives? For the woman which has an husband is bound by the law to her husband, so long as he lives; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband. So then, if, while her husband lives, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress.” And in another place: “the wife is bound by the law as long as her husband lives; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord.” The apostle has thus cut away every plea and has clearly declared that, if a woman marries again while her husband is living, she is an adulteress.

You must not speak to me of the violence of a ravisher, a mother’s pleading, a father’s bidding, the influence of relatives, the insolence and the intrigues of servants, household losses. A husband may be an adulterer or a sodomite, he may be stained with every crime and may have been left by his wife because of his sins; yet he is still her husband and, so long as he lives, she may not marry another.

The apostle does not promulgate this decree on his own authority but on that of Christ who speaks in him. For he has followed the words of Christ in the gospel: “whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causes her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced, commits adultery.” Mark what he says: “whosoever shall marry her that is divorced commits adultery.” Whether she has put away her husband or her husband her, the man who marries her is still an adulterer. Wherefore the apostles seeing how heavy the yoke of marriage was thus made said to Him: “if the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry,” and the Lord replied, “he that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” And immediately by the instance of the three eunuchs he shows the blessedness of virginity which is bound by no carnal tie.

I have not been able quite to determine what it is that she means by the words “has found herself compelled” to marry again. What is this compulsion of which she speaks? Was she overborne by a crowd and ravished against her will? If so, why has she not, thus victimized, subsequently put away her ravisher?

Let her read the books of Moses and she will find that if violence is offered to a betrothed virgin in a city and she does not cry out, she is punished as an adulteress: but if she is forced in the field, she is innocent of sin and her ravisher alone is amenable to the laws. Therefore if your sister, who, as she says, has been forced into a second union, wishes to receive the body of Christ and not to be accounted an adulteress, let her do penance; so far at least as from the time she begins to repent to have no farther intercourse with that second husband who ought to be called not a husband but an adulterer.

If this seems hard to her and if she cannot leave one whom she has once loved and will not prefer the Lord to sensual pleasure, let her hear the declaration of the apostle: “ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord’s table and of the table of devils,” and in another place: “what communion has light with darkness? And what concord has Christ with Belial?”...

Wherefore, I beseech you, do your best to comfort her and to urge her to seek salvation. Diseased flesh calls for the knife and the searing-iron. The wound is to blame and not the healing art, if with a cruelty that is really kindness a physician to spare does not spare, and to be merciful is cruel.

Your affectionate sourpuss,
Jerome

(From Letter 55 of St. Hieronymus, Presbyteris Confessoris et Ecclesiae Doctoris)

(Leonello Spada)

Bringing Back Sinners: A Personal Reflection on Communion for the Divorced & Re-Married

My perspective here is hardly original or unique to my own experiences, but it is a perspective that no one has discussed in the forensic exercises over Cardinal Kasper's proposal to admit the divorced and re-married to Communion under some pastoral regulations that everyone knows full well will not be enforced strictly. The reason the Church does not admit, and historically has not admitted, those who left their spouse and married again to Communion is because the Church wants sinners to repent and turn back to God. The matter really is not theological, but pastoral. It is that simple. Get sinners to turn back to God.

Daily I witness two intensely close and violently torrential cases of ex-communication, restriction from receiving Communion, that perturb me. Those cases are of my father and one of my best friends.

My father married during the year the Second Vatican Council convened, fathered three children (of whom I have met two, and only seen one in the last seven years once), divorced in 1972, received a letter of ex-communication shortly thereafter, and married my mother in Methodist rites in 1974. He goes to Mass perhaps once a year if the good Lord disposes him to do so. The setting varies: the old Mass, the Pauline Mass, and once the Divine Liturgy (which he insisted was not really Catholic). Religiously my father is a product of the 1950s. He never knew what happened at Mass. He just knew all the respectable people went there for their 25 minute service and followed it up with an omelette. A few times a year he would go to Communion, of course after confessing all his major sins and fasting. No one goes to Communion in sin and without preparation. Having been ex-communicated since 1972 he still knows and believes that much. Once he attempted to go to Confession, but found the priest meddlesome and unhelpful, which turned him off from reconciling with the Church. The shell of his 1950s Catholicism is all he has left. He is my father and I love him dearly, but his life could be called one of disappointments and some bitterness to boot.

A friend of mine was raised in a lesbian household with a distant father and, after having gone through some 1980s Catholic education, drifted away from a faith which I do not believe he ever really understood. He was a rambunctious child straightened out by a decade and a half of service in the infantry of the United States Army. He worked ground zero after 9/11 and toured Afghanistan, burning out his lungs in the process. During his army stint he married in a secular ceremony a wonderful woman who has never been anything but kind to me. Since then he has strayed in the annals of academia and all the dismaying tendencies therein. Whenever I visit him in his house I am received with the greatest affection and hospitality. He always takes me to Confession on Saturday night and Mass on Sunday. And on Saturday nights he stares at the Confessional, joins the line, and then walks away at the last moment saying he will take too long. At Mass he refrains from Communion, instead remaining on his knees in meditation.

According to the laws of the Church and the Church's traditional understanding of marriage there is no way either my father or my friend are married. They are both lapsed Catholics who married without the witness or blessing of the Church and remain in such arrangements. They cannot take Communion and in no way do I wish for this situation to change.

The de facto ex-communication of these two loved ones is the only thing keeping them close to the Catholic faith, to taking it seriously. My father's mind clings to two facts about Catholicism, that one must be clean of sin to partake of Communion and that he cannot partake of Communion. My friend's matter is the same way, although my friend's conscience does tear at his heart. It is my hope that these two dear people will one day return to the Church, even if it be the hour of death, when all worldly attachments and interests that mire us in sin fade to dust and we must see God, not as we imagine Him to be in our tinted looking glass, but as He actually is. I hope that before death they both wish to ask God's forgiveness and petition the Church to receive the Body of Christ worthily.

The Church always places repentance before the celebration of the holy things of God. Both the new and old Roman Masses begin with a general confession of unworthiness. In the older rite the people, or the deacon, repeat this confession prior to the reception of Communion. At Compline, the hour prayed before going to bed, our must vulnerable state, we again pray for the forgiveness of sins by saying the Confiteor and asking for the Lord's protection. In the Byzantine rite the priest prays "Lord, forgive me the sinner and have mercy on me" before the celebration of Orthros (Mattins and Lauds) and Vespers; he will say "God have mercy on me a sinner" after the anaphora and before his own Communion. And lastly there is the long "Lord, I truly believe and confess...." before the Communion of the congregation. One must turn from sin to God prior to participating in the sacred rites of the Church. Is not the same true in eternity? Must not one repent before entering into the Kingdom of God?

What of the Orthodox approach? What of it? I think it is wrong, but I cannot see how it would be helpful in this day and age. When the Church of Constantinople decided that marriage can die and one can re-marry twice given the proper state of mind and a heavily penitential effort prior to the new union, the spirit of penance was alive and well. People fasted from all meat and dairy products during Lent, the pre-Christmas fast, and the Dormition fast. Even though I think the practice wrong, I cannot deny that it could be done in the right spirit. All of that is gone now. The Church now requires fasting two days of the year: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Further more, the modern age would confirm that the Church was changing her outmoded teachings, not forcing people who failed their vocations to do penance. The adaptation of the Chalcedonian-Orthodox discipline would be a disaster in practice in this day and age. To admit the divorced and re-married to Communion will not make those in question grateful to the Church for her mercy and understanding. Rather they will hear all the talk of the "Body of Christ" and the confessions throughout the liturgy and think to themselves "So it was not really such a big deal after all."

So again I say the only thing keeping my father and my friend close to the Church is the very fact that they cannot go to Communion. They know that the Church guards something sacred which they still, on some level, believe and would like to receive yet cannot. When time purges these men of all that ties them to the world they will have the option of repenting and reconciling to God before death or the other, less attractive option. It is precisely because they cannot repent now that they still believe in God, Christ, the Church, and the Eucharist. To remove their barrier from Communion will not bring either my father or friend to Mass with any regularity. It will merely tell that the Church does not consider what she does at Mass very important. It will tell them that the Church was bluffing all the time.

If the Church does not admit these men to Communion then they may still believe something important resides in the Catholic Church and wish to return to it. I can very much envision this one fact returning my father to the Church at some point before he dies and my friend sooner than that. My friend especially wants to repent and to go to Communion. Why remove the impetus? I want nothing more than for these two men to enter heaven, but not without repentance first.

The Church's power to loosen and to bind the sins of men has brought back into the fold men like Oscar Wilde, Voltaire, and John Wayne. Why not my father and my friend, too?