Eamonn Clark, STL

Today we continue on in my notes for a book on Amoris Laetitia – or, rather, a book on its bad interpretations. These ones are rougher notes. I’ve removed some undeveloped or underdeveloped sections, including one on the Matthean exception and another on the Pauline and Petrine Privileges

Previous entries here (on clerical compromise) and here (on Cardinal Coccopalmerio’s booklet).

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Adultery defined

The Sixth Commandment (Ex. 20:14) states, “You shall not commit adultery.” The Hebrew: לֹא תִנְאָף (lo tin’aph); the Greek Septuagint: οὐ κλέψεις (ooh kle-pseis); the Latin Vulgate: Non mœchaberis.

Adultery, strictly speaking, is sexual activity between a person presumed to be married and another to whom he or she is not presumed to be married. (For various reasons, we leave aside here the old scholastic method of specifying sexual sins, namely, only on the part of the “matter,” viz., the woman in her diverse conditions, i.e. unmarried, married, consecrated, etc.) Notice that one can commit adultery as an unmarried person with a married person, or as a married person with an unmarried or with a married person. The old scholastic definition is “access to another’s marriage bed.”

It is important also to note that the presumption of marriage, whether psychological or juridical, suffices to specify an extramarital sexual act as adulterous. For example, a man thinks that a woman is married to another man, but really she is not. His sexual activity with her constitutes adultery in the formal sense (that is, according to the consent of his will), even though materially (in external reality) it is only fornication. (A stranger example, which yet illumines this case further, is if two spouses have relations with each other, each thinking the other to be a stranger or perhaps the spouse’s twin – like the inverse of the case of Jacob and Leah.) An example proper to Catholics is the following. A Catholic man thinks there is a good case to be made that the woman he attempted to marry actually is not his wife, but he has not bothered to approach a tribunal to petition for nullity. This would not suffice to reduce his extramarital sexual activity to mere fornication. It is adultery, plain and simple.

Bigamy defined

The term “bigamy” has been used in diverse ways. The etymology is “bi,” two, “gamy,” marriage. The first and strictest sense in historical and even legal usage is remarriage after the death of a spouse. We do not use this sense here. A second sense, which we also do not use here, is a specific case of polygamy, namely, one woman married to two men, or one man married to two women. The sense we mean here is more specific – it is the act of attempting marriage with any person while oneself or the second person is presumed to be married. (Astonishingly, Cardinal Kasper conflated this third sense with the first, in his famous consistory speech about divorce and remarriage, when referencing Canon 8 of Nicaea I – there was suspicion in those days over the practice of remarrying after the death of a spouse, so the issue was addressed with “pastoral tolerance,” “indulgence,” “clemency,” etc. This is altogether different from what is being addressed in Amoris, clearly.)

The three senses obviously overlap. However, the third sense is exclusively what is meant in this text from hereon. When speaking of “bigamous” relationships, what is meant is a relationship proceeding from the attempt of marriage while one of the parties is still presumed to be married to another. (Clearly, this is not limited to “two” unions but could include a third attempted marriage, a fourth, a fifth, etc.)

“It is better not to marry”

The apostles immediately perceived the difficulty of marriage as taught by the Lord. They saw that in fact celibacy would be a more freeing way of life. Perhaps, due to their still imperfect understanding of the Messiah and His Kingdom, they did not yet perceive the eschatological and evangelical significance of celibacy but rather simply noted the difficulty of staying with one person for life. In other words, theirs was a realization in favor merely of their own convenience.

People in today’s Western world would do well to follow the apostles’ example and marvel at the doctrine of indissolubility of marriage. It goes without saying that if indissolubility were really taken seriously by all who were going to attempt marriage, the overall state of the Western family – and therefore of the Western world itself – would be much healthier. (This is part of why it is so important for the Church not to give the impression, even “indirectly,” that divorce and remarriage is acceptable.) The Church takes the baptized faithful seriously when they promise fidelity to each other, frequently more seriously than the couples take themselves. However, instead of saying “it is better not to marry,” in view of continent celibacy, people now say either, “it is better to ignore this teaching and marry and remarry as we wish,” or, “it is better not to marry and to sleep around anyway without any commitments.”

What occasioned the onset of no-fault divorce in the USA was the wide availability of cheap, safe, and effective oral contraceptives (“the pill”), which came in 1960 (increasingly accessible until universally legal in 1972). The first no-fault divorce law came in California in 1970, shortly followed by many other states. The gross expansion of abortion access came in 1973, with Roe v. Wade. Now, we are already in the twilight of the “gay rights” movement and are deep into transgender paranoia with little hope of recovery short of a full cultural implosion and reset. We see the natural progression: first, the obstruction of the natural fecundity of the sexual act which destroys the need for monogamy, let alone lifelong fidelity. Through contracepting, one is able to have as many partners as he or she wants, and any monogamous sexual relationship bears offspring contingent on one’s will. Second, the need for monogamous fidelity having been undermined, the logical step is to ratify this by declaring marriage to be a temporal project of self-gratification which one can escape at any time for any reason; thus, no-fault divorce. Third, the permanent consequences of “mistakes,” from contraception failing or not being used, must be dealt with, as one’s self-determination is threatened by children – whom we would be more comfortable pretending are “subhuman” enough to kill rather than deny our will and raise them. After destroying the logic of fidelity and fecundity, the very nature of biological order is called into question, as homosexual activity is just as much willed by some as heterosexual activity is willed by others, and who are we to stop it? Because there is no longer any real connection between fidelity, fecundity, the idea of marriage, and marriage’s legal framework, there is no reason why people of the same sex should be prevented from entering into such a union. Finally, after having utterly destroyed the meaning of marriage and torpedoed the reality of the most fundamental biological order as a basis for governing sexual activity, the very reality of biological sex is declared irrelevant or even illusory. What matters is one’s desires and how one wishes to express those desires. What matters is the will.

We see that the entire progression rests on the denial of one’s sexual faculty’s natural end for the sake of self-gratification, which is itself a bizarre reversal of the Lord’s loving invitation to celibacy as the way of perfection: instead of making oneself a “eunuch” for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven by withdrawing from the life of sexual activity and marriage altogether, the idea is to make oneself a “eunuch” within one’s marital or extra-marital sexual activity for the sake of one’s own kingdom, so that all of one’s temporal desires can be fulfilled with as much convenience as possible. Instead of freeing oneself for the Will of God, contraception frees oneself to pursue one’s own will. And it ends with people even really making themselves true eunuchs, as we can see not only with contraceptive sterilization procedures, but also with the rise in popularity of the most ghoulish kinds of “gender reassignment” surgeries. Truth be told, many such “transgender” persons have been mentally ill for years before their surgeries and “therapies”; they are therefore frequently minimally responsible for such terrible acts. However, the signs of the times are that nobody stopped these sick individuals from harming themselves – instead these poor people are encouraged in their delusions and even celebrated for living them out. These pitiable men and women are made eunuchs by others.

“Some have been made eunuchs by others”

Sometimes one is made a eunuch by others metaphorically. There is clearly a “contingent” or “conditional” call to continence. This vocation is manifested by one’s life circumstances beyond one’s control. Perhaps there are no people available in one’s purview for marriage; perhaps one’s spouse is dangerously ill with a heart condition and cannot safely engage in sexual relations; perhaps one’s spouse is alive but is in prison, gone on a long voyage, or otherwise physically inaccessible. The inability to marry or access a spouse is no grounds for extramarital sexual activity. One must necessarily have the grace available to live continently in these cases.

This reality of a conditional vocation to continence, at least temporary continence, applies in many cases of divorce and civil remarriage. If a man is truly married to a woman who is unwilling to reconcile and return to conjugal life he must necessarily have the grace to live in continence, despite having contracted a civil marriage with another woman; if his duties toward the children born from his second union oblige him to live day and night under the same roof as the woman in his second union, then he must have the greater grace to live in continence even while being so close to temptation. Likewise, he must have the grace to confront and endure whatever backlash might come from refusing sexual intimacy with the woman. (The same applies to women vis-à-vis men.)