Building On The Past . . . A Look Back At The 1980 Synod On Marriage And The Family

By LOUISE KIRK

(Editor’s Note: Louise Kirk is an author and journalist in England, with specialties in Church teaching on the family and natural family planning. She will be covering the upcoming October Synod on the Family for The Wanderer.)

+ + +

Scanning through The Wanderer’s reports on 1980 Extraordinary Synod on the family and marriage, familiar terms pop out at me: the need to respect individual conscience, calls for a more positive response to the “Spirit of the Age,” the principle of gradualism, and in particular the desire of divorced and remarried couples to receive the Eucharist.
I am surprised. This is not the Extraordinary Synod of last year we are talking about, but the Fifth General Synod which took place 35 years ago, in 1980. It was this which led to St. John Paul’s Familiaris Consortio a year later, the benchmark for all modern Catholic teaching on the family.
Familiaris Consortio and the personality of John Paul are both so prominent that it is interesting to peak behind them at this synod which came first. And there it is in black and white on now graying paper: the repeated question of how one might give Holy Communion to the divorced and remarried (sadly, the Sacrament of Penance never features quite so prominently). Also up for discussion are the problems of polygamy and onerous dowries, and the call to give children better formation in the faith in an age where family life has become increasingly unstable.
Does this indicate that despite the teaching of John Paul we have come nowhere in the last three and a half decades? Actually no, not at all. Sometimes one needs to read back just to realize how far we have come, for the good and for the bad.
For the second issue which was prominent in 1980 was the problem of contraception. Remarkably, this hardly featured as a point at issue in last year’s Extraordinary Synod, even in the controverted and regrettable midterm report which gave such shock. It is there among papers from dissenting bishops and their colleagues, but tends to be sneaked in behind other subjects.
In public last year the synod fathers came behind the Church’s teaching on openness to life, leading up as it did to the beatification of Blessed Paul VI. Even the journalists didn’t dig at it.
This is an achievement which I think hasn’t been made enough of, and it was the 1980 synod which made it possible. As Philip Trower wrote in The Wanderer at the time, 1980 was the first time the bishops of the world stood with the Pope behind Humanae Vitae.
There is another way in which we have moved forward positively in the last decades and that is on understanding why the Church’s teaching against contraception makes sense in purely human terms.
I notice the bishops of yesteryear sticking up for Humanae Vitae in a rather dry manner. It is good Catholic teaching, it makes sense in theological terms, it is something we must go forward with, but there is little apparent understanding of why it makes sense from a human rather than spiritual point of view, or even why it might be important to find out.
At one point in his coverage, Philip Trower quotes Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as saying that bridges need to be found between the secular and Catholic understanding of the teaching, which Trower questions, presumably assuming that any bridge will bend Catholic doctrine. How pleasing it is to know that the reverse has happened.
This year the U.S. hosts two major international pro-family events: the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in September and the World Congress of Families in Salt Lake City in October. One is hosted by Catholics and the other by persons of mixed faith, but, at both, Catholics and non-Catholics will rub shoulders in friendship alongside each other.
There will be no visible division on the subject of contraception. I know this having been to various World Congresses of the Family myself in the past, and been repeatedly struck by how at these events persons of every faith, every nation, and every profession can contribute to a single, multifaceted picture of family which holds together in unity.
Central to it is a realization that contraception has been a major root cause behind the social problems we face today. Put the other way around, taking charge of fertility by managing it naturally leads to healthy and happy families and a great diminution of divorce. This is not just a Catholic issue but a social one which affects whole societies. We need to broadcast it.
It is therefore a cause for celebration that in the last decades interreligious cooperation has continued to grow outside the big events. I was lunching this week in London with Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali. He was speaking warmly of the Humanum colloquium which was organized at the Vatican immediately after the Extraordinary Synod last autumn, to which he contributed alongside our former Chief Rabbi Lord (Jonathan) Sacks.
He has invited me to join a group of Christian educators that he chairs on the strength of my book explaining natural sexuality to parents. Family policy is often seen to divide Christians but what is also happening is that it is drawing Christians together across ancient divides.
One issue which is both dividing and uniting us is homosexuality. This did not feature at all in what I read from the 1980 synod. Homosexuality was evidently not yet a sufficiently troubling issue doctrinally, although only six years later a first major statement was drawn from the Vatican naming it an objective disorder. It came in the form of a Letter to Bishops from Cardinal Ratzinger as prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (1986). I remember our own archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Robert Runcie, saying that, if you accept contraception, you demolish the case against homosexuality.
Unfortunately few Anglicans, in public at least, had then seen the case against contraception. They, alongside many Catholics who practice it, have had their resistance to homosexuality diminished.

The Role Of The Laity

We take for granted now that the lay faithful play a prominent role in the Church’s pro-family work, but this itself has been a new growth within the Church and does not make much of an appearance in the papers of the earlier synod. There was consultation beforehand, but questionnaires only went as far as diocesan bishops. Troublesome countries on Humanae Vitae are named as the United States and England.
Philip Trower might have picked up more of what these English-speaking bishops were saying, but I note the contrast with today when the U.S. continues to produce some of the most outspoken and knowledgeable bishops for the family.
Raymond Cardinal Burke — most unfortunately — will not be a member of the synod this autumn, but the book which he did so much to produce, Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church, ensures his continuing influence.
A last and obvious point is that the Eastern European bishops, and indeed the African ones, did not have anything like the prominence back in 1980 that they do now. Prominent among the Africans in last October’s synod, for example, was Wilfrid Cardinal Napier of Durban, South Africa. Cardinal Napier, a moderator of one of the small circles at the synod, openly dismissed the midterm relatio during an October 14, 2014 briefing with journalists.
In rounding off his comments on the last press conference of 1980, Philip Trower shows how far the five American synod fathers had moved during the three weeks. Gone was their earlier prevarication, the remarks that might have meant something else. Expanding the theology of Humanae Vitae and showing compassion to the divorced did not mean changing the Church’s teaching. “So the hungry reporters left the press conference still fasting. They had not been given the meat they wanted.”
Overall, in 1980, there was “a good outcome.” May we continue to pray with great hope that we shall be able to say the same of the synod this coming October, and that sound Catholic teaching on life and family will win the day.