October 2, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    In the eyes of the Church, the Church is a divine institution against which no worldly or devilish forces can prevail. Of course, the Church is also a human institution, and as such it can fail and has repeatedly failed. The point is that, to the extent that the Church is divine, God ensures that there will always be a saving remnant, a divine spark that God can blow back to life. History shows how such rescues have repeatedly occurred. When the Church seemed irredeemably corrupt at the end of the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation was in the wings, and when the Protestant Reformation, in its success, seemed bloated with power, the Counter Reformation came into being to restore the balance. And, in our time, when Christianity cools alarmingly in the developed world, it catches fire in the developing world.

    If this is true of the Church as a whole, it is also true of its sacramental parts, among which one of the most important—important, that is, to the Church's role in this world rather than in God's Kingdom—is marriage, or as the Church puts it, "holy matrimony." A reason why marriage is holy—why it is a sacrament—is that it is an outward symbol of the marriage between God and His Bride, the Church. The union between God and the Church is indissoluble. Likewise, the coupling of Adam and Eve, and of all devoted couples ever since, with, however, just one proviso, necessitated by the fact that, after all, marriage is merely an earthly enactment, symbolic rather than real, of God's marriage with His Church. And that proviso is death: at death the human marriage dissolves. Still, even with this proviso, marriage is an extraordinary human/divine institution that deserves our respect, and we should do our best to maintain it. But is it within human power to do so? In the affluent West, marriage seems to have become just a contractual arrangement for sexual access over a limited period of time; or, to put it another way, marriage is just a serial affair and does not entail any devotion or commitment.

    But fear not. God is not going to let this sacrament go down the drain. As Pope Benedict XVI (when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger) pointed out, "Paradoxically, homosexuals are now demanding that their unions be granted legal form that is more or less equivalent to marriage" (Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera, Without Roots, 1006, p. 77). In other words, homosexuals have come forth to resurrect the romance of marriage—the romance of total commitment of one human individual to another—and they say that this is not just a fantasy on their part, that they have demonstrated commitment over and over again when they stayed and nursed their partner through the long horrors of AIDS.

    When I read that quoted sentence from the Pope, for a fleeting moment I thought he was going to say something charitable about homosexual marriage as another manifestation of God's coming to the rescue—at the last miraculous moment—of an institution and sacrament that is falling apart. Well, this is a complete and, indeed, comical misreading of the Pope's line of thought. It just goes to show how naive a man can be even in his seventy-sixth year.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu