The Problem

It is not difficult to show from the New Testament that dialogue is built into the structures of the Christian community. Ep. 4:11-16, for example, ‘proves that in the New Testament there is no opposition between ministerial authority and an emancipated laity. Rather the relation between the two is the fact that the first gives rise to the second.’ Other texts (for example, Rm. 1 :12; 2 Co. 1 :24; 1 Pt. 5 :3) show that the apostles’ authority over the local communities was not all one way: the latter had something to give the apostles. The same conclusion follows, too, from the fact that the Word of God has been committed to the whole community. As Augustine once said, God speaks to every member of the Church ‘from the bishops right down to the last of the faithful’. There is thus a pooling of experience, a fruitful interchange of opinion.

Now there is a sense in which this dialogue in the Church between ministers and laity takes the form of preaching on one side and obedience on the other. The official proclamation of the Gospel in the community provokes a response which Paul calls ‘the obedience of faith’ (Rm. 1 :5; 16:26) and Peter ‘the obedience of truth’ (1 Pt. 1 :22), so that to genuine exposition of the Gospel message the people respond by accepting the Word in faith. However, no human dialogue can be totally active on one side and totally passive on the other. Every form of communication involves a giving and a receiving on both sides if it is not to degenerate into monologue and silence.

As the spirit of the age proclaims a new freedom from the traditional sexual ethic, discussion about marriage in the church today runs the risk of becoming bogged down in what are in one sense peripheral issues. Marriage is seen as an institutionalisation of eros, as the expression of a sexual ethic, and the question of any specifically Christian meaning of marriage is lost in ethical discussion.

This is not to imply that the ethical dimension is unimportant; but it is not the only dimension to be considered. The revolt against the late medieval and modern tradition, with its attendant rigidity, should not be allowed to obscure the search for a theology of marriage as a sign of the Kingdom, as a sacrament.

This has been tied to a hard line on the question of divorce and remarriage, to a doctrine of indissolubility that has been seriously questioned in recent years. Even more common perhaps is a pastoral praxis that, while freeing people from the more oppressive features of the old ideology, may also reduce the discussion of marriage as a sacrament to the status of a non-question. In justice it should be pointed out that the defence of an absolute indissolubility has been driven back to the question of sacramentality. In the practice of the modem church, as expressed in the Roman Curia, non-sacramental marriages are not indissoluble. Nor in fact are all sacramental ones; the maze of technicalities involved in this practice often defies the comprehension of the layman.

Consideration of marriage as a sacrament often appears indissolubly linked to this world of the canonists, to a legal structure that is more easily bypassed than challenged. At the same time, questions of sexual ethics retain their relevance against the background of the new praxis as they did against that of the old.

At the time of the Reformation the catechism began to assume a new importance. The rapid diffusion of printed works coincided with the spread of new reforming ideas. Luther had a catechism printed in 1529. This was followed by a Catholic catechism published at Augsburg in 1530. Most of the leading reformers produced similar manuals and Peter Canisius and John of Avila were in the field before the Catechism of the Council of Trent. But catechisms can tell us more than the way in which Protestant differed from Catholic. Not all correligionists agreed about the relative importance of doctrines nor indeed about method. We are reminded of this by the appearance of a new edition of the ‘Commentaries on the Christian Catechism’ by Archbishop Carranza. This work was first published in Antwerp in 1558, put on the Spanish Index of Prohibited Books in 1559 and officially condemned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1576. Four hundred years later in 1972, a new critical edition, with the Imprimatur of the Bishop of Salamanca, was published to commemorate the International Year of the Book.

Bartholomé Carranza, born 1503, was a Dominican of the Province of Castille. He was a consultor to the Inquisition at Valladolid and also censor of books, he attended the first two stages of Trent as one of Charles V’s theologians. At Trent he was a powerful advocate of episcopal residence and his experience at the council gave him first hand contact with religious controversy and the political situation outside Spain.