This is the second installment of my commentary on The Human Body: a sign of dignity and a gift by Fr. Richard M. Hogan. For publication details, see the blog for September 9, 2007.
The use of a person: good and bad
At the end of his Introduction, Fr. Hogan makes the point that when we use someone’s body, we use that person. Further, “…we should never use someone’s body or treat it like a thing. The human body should never become an object of use. To use the body is to use the person.” I agree. In the context of this booklet, it is clear that Fr. Hogan is addressing the common problem of people using each other as tools for sexual pleasure. How many hearts have been broken when one of the persons realized he or she was just being used in this very negative sense and then discarded.
There are, however, two distinctly different meanings of “using” other persons. There is a good sense and there is a bad sense. The classical example of the good sense is the Virgin Mary who responded to God through the Angel Gabriel, “Be it done unto me according to your word.” Okay, that’s a very special case dealing with supernatural realities. But something like that happens at the purely human level. Some people join communities, religious or secular, with a Rule in which they place themselves under complete obedience to the Superior. In effect they are saying, “Use me to help achieve the goals of this community and my personal growth as well.”
A common case of one human person being used by another human person is the employment relationship, and it is here that some people treat others with the dignity due them as human persons while others treat them as things, to be used and then discarded. Every realistic person knows that sometimes things happen in organizations that make it necessary to disemploy one or more employees. Where there is proper management, the manager will explain the reasons for the decision and make some effort to convey that he or she appreciates the personal pain and difficulty the separation is causing. Some companies offer separation packages that respect the dignity of human persons. On the other hand, imagine a company that had long-time relationships with certain employees. Imagine that there was a change of management. Imagine that the new management disemployed these long-time employees simply by not giving them any work to do. No discussion. No reasons given. No letter of disemployment. Just nothing. Would you say that such a treatment was in accord with respect for human dignity? Or would you say it was an example of using people in the bad sense and discarding them as things?
The marriage act
After his Introduction, Fr. Hogan treats of Marriage and Family Life, calling this a Theology of the Family. Here he distinguishes between the theology of the body and the theology of the family. He believes that the former emphasizes “man’s dignity, especially in regard to the body” while the latter emphasizes “the noble and almost unbelievable vocation of man and woman to enter into a familial communion in imitation of the Blessed Trinity.” Personally, I don’t find such distinctions helpful in a booklet such as this. It comes across to me as too many uses of the word “theology” and distinctions that are more important for academic tests than for the real life needs of young people today.
This section proceeds well until the very last paragraph. Here he writes eloquently about the marriage act, but he carries it too far. “Even though other human relationships of love are expressed in and through the human body, the union of husband and wife in marriage is of a totally different order because marriage depends on the body in a way that no other human relationship does! The act of married love is the defining characteristic of marriage.” While I certainly agree with the last sentence, I have to wonder what Fr. Hogan means when he says that “marriage depends on the body in a way that no other human relationship does.” Certainly, the propagation of children doesn’t depend on marriage; just look at the increasing rates of out-of-wedlock sex and births. Further, I think Fr. Hogan has forgotten another important human relationship. We can also say “Breastfeeding depends on the body in a way that no other human relationship does!” Literally, for most of human existence, a baby’s life depended upon the bodily act of breastfeeding. In her book, Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood, Sheila Kippley makes eleven comparisons between the marriage act and breastfeeding.
• Both the marriage act and breastfeeding are voluntary acts between two persons.
• Both acts are normally essential for life.
• The wife offers her body to her husband in the marriage act and to her baby in the breastfeeding act.
• Both acts are used in Sacred Scripture to describe God’s love for his people.
• The Pope’s theology of the body applies to both acts.
For an explanation of these and the remaining six comparisons, please read this light-shedding book.
The fact that there are artificial substitutes today does not take away from the unique bodily relationship of breastfeeding any more than out-of-wedlock sexual behavior takes away from the unique character of the marriage act. But what is that unique character?
In my opinion, what is unique about the marriage act is that it ought to be a renewal of the marriage covenant. The physical act ought to be much more than physical. I believe it is intended by God to be, at least implicitly, a renewal of the marriage covenant. The marriage act ought to reflect and renew the commitment, the fidelity, the openness to life, the caring love, and the for-better-and-for-worse permanence of the marriage vows they pledged on their wedding day. This, of course, is the covenant theology of sexuality that Father Hogan has dismissed as objective, deductive and principled and therefore irrelevant today.
It seems to me that the best explanation of Fr. Hogan’s assertion that “marriage depends on the body in a way that no other human relationship does” is to explain it in terms of the marriage covenant. When the physical act is truly a renewal of the marriage covenant, the spouses are implicitly pledging that they will raise their children in a family setting and that they will strive to raise that child in the ways of God. That is what marriages need, not just more and more sex but marriage acts that serve to renew their commitment to God and to each other.
Next week: Is natural family planning well defined as just knowledge and study? What is the difference between a course on the human reproductive cycle and a course on natural family planning?
John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book, a short, easy-to-read, free, downloadable e-book available at
www.NFPandmore.org