| Eugène Delacroix Orphan Girl at the Cemetery (1824) Musée du Louvre |
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski
In light of the publication of the somewhat vague and suggestive Instrumentum Laboris for the October Extraordinary Synod on the Family, I found the following crystal-clear passages from Frank Sheed's marvelous book A Map of Life to be extremely pertinent. Here, in a book first published in 1933, is how the Catholic Faith used to explain itself -- with clarity, charity, and a deep realism that trusted the Law of God and humbly submitted to it, rather than looking for loopholes, accommodations, and relaxations. Sheed's more famous book Theology and Sanity in a way captures the confident profile of preconciliar Catholicism: true theology is both the cause and the sign of human sanity. If we look elsewhere, or even worse, if we contradict divine revelation and the Church's tradition, we will end up with sheer insanity.
As citizens of the United States continue to worry about federal incursions on the freedom of Catholics to practice their faith and even to follow the dictates of the natural law unmolested, American Catholics should be concerned about an even more frightening shift in the ecclesiastical polity, namely, the growing acceptance within the Church, among the faithful and in the hierarchy, of sexual aberrations, libertinism, and antinomianism in all of their forms, open or subtle, whether institutionalized or still private and arbitrary. The Church is the last and only bulwark of sanity against the rising flood of irrationality and perversion. Wherever the Church militant fails on earth (and remember, we have no guarantee of the perpetuity of any local or regional church), all is lost, and no political activism will be able to stand in the breach.
Let us pray, then, for wisdom and fortitude -- the wisdom to adhere to the truth given to us by our Lord, and the courage to follow it to the very end, for love of God and neighbor. And let us pray especially for the bishops and the Holy Father, that the Spirit of truth will be with them in October to ground their deliberations and decisions in natural and supernatural sanity.
_______________________
Frank Sheed, A Map of Life (1933)
This fact that the essence of sin is offence against the law of God sometimes—in fact most often—misleads the sinner as to the true nature of sin. He imagines himself in a small field, bounded by a fence put there to prevent him from breaking out of the field to sample the rich possibilities of life outside. Here, he says, am I: a being full of the possibilities of development, yet my development is checked at every turn by some absurd law. This view arises from a failure to understand the nature of God’s laws. His laws are no mere whims, like the laws of some stupid despot. They are, on the contrary, the expression by God of His own knowledge of man’s nature and destiny. He knows the kind of being man is, for He made him. And for the same reason He knows what man is made for. God’s laws, then, are a precise statement of how this particular kind of being may avoid destruction and reach his particular goal. The man who makes an engine is not limiting your freedom when he tells you not to run it beyond a certain speed. He knows that if you do you will smash the engine. And if you should plead that your nature demands more speed, that you feel stifled by such slow running—he may very well grow impatient. He knows what speed is right for the engine, for he made it.
[…]
THE resistance to sin nearly always involves some degree of suffering: in some cases it involves terrible suffering. And there are those who would relax the moral law when the suffering caused by obedience to it appears to be extreme.
Now, no one can alter God’s law. Even the Church cannot do that: within the framework of His law she may make what we call by-laws, binding upon her members, but these must be in accord with God’s law, which she cannot change.
This point is not always grasped. The Church has received from God the power to make laws binding upon her members. But this power, as I have said, is subordinate to the laws stated by God Himself as binding upon men. The distinction may be illustrated in the case of marriage. The Church cannot grant any of her children a divorce because when they make the contract of marriage (that is to say, agree to take each other as husband and wife for life) God brings into being a new relationship. Now, by God’s act consequent upon their contract, they are man and wife. This new relationship, though it follows upon their contract, is not created by their contract, but by God. The Church can no more make them cease to be husband and wife than it could make a father and son cease to be father and son. But within the law laid down by God, the Church can legislate. It can, for instance, decree that for the marriage of a Catholic, the presence of a priest as witness is necessary. These laws being its own the Church can alter. But she cannot alter the laws given to her by God to be taught to men. Nor does she want to.