MARRIAGE IN OUR CONTEMPORARY WORLD: PASTORAL OBSERVATIONS FROM AN AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE

AUGUST 31, 2015

IN AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM ELEVEN CARDINALS SPEAK ON MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY: ESSAYS FROM A PASTORAL VIEWPOINT, THE ARCHBISHOP OF ABUJA, NIGERIA ADDRESSES CHALLENGES FACING MARRIAGE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY.

JOHN CARDINAL ONAIYEKAN

 

 

 

 [Editor’s note: The following is an exclusive excerpt from the book Eleven Cardinals Speak on Marriage and the Family: Essays from a Pastoral Viewpoint, which will be published by Ignatius Press September 15. The book also includes contributions by Cardinals Robert Sarah, Carlo Caffarra, Baselios Cleemis, Paul Josef Cordes, Dominik Duka, Joachim Meisner, Camillo Ruini, Antonio María Rouco Varela, Willem Jacobus Eijk, and Jorge L. Urosa Savino. Topics addressed in the book include marriage and family life, divorce and civil marriage, marriage preparation, and secular challenges to family life.]

 

 

 

Introduction

 

Today, marriage has become a matter for great debate both within and outside the Church. The debate has come even right into the sacred places of the Church of God, to the extent that a lot of our Christians are getting worried even to the point of panic. A good demonstration was what happened during the first session of the synod on the family, which took place in Rome in October 2014. Somewhere along the line, the mass media became full of rumors to the effect that finally the Catholic Church was changing her rigid position and was at last catching up with the rest of the world, not only in the reconsideration of divorce and remarriage, but also with regard to homosexuality and same-sex unions.

I was not in Rome. I was in my house in Abuja. Phone calls were coming to me from both Nigeria and abroad from very concerned Catholics wondering what was happening to the Church. Interestingly enough, I receive calls from even non-Catholics, including Muslim friends, asking what was happening to our Church. My reply to them all was: “No need for panic. The boat of Peter may be in turbulence. But it will never sink. It will always arrive at its shores because Jesus is in it.” We must have faith in the Holy Spirit guiding his Church. We must believe especially in the special grace of the Holy Spirit guiding the Vicar of Christ, the successor of Peter, our pope. I was glad and thrilled the next day to receive reports of the proceedings from the synod hall that went on to confirm my faith in the Church and that I passed on to those who a day before had reached out to me. We are in much the same situation today. It is a question of whether, indeed, there is such a thing as a doctrine of the Church that is firm, solid, and immutable or whether the Church will have to follow the latest developments and trends around us rather than lead humanity to salvation.

 

 

 

1. Contemporary developments

 

The issues of marriage and family should be placed within the general context of developments in the world of our day, especially in those societies that claim to be developed. Those societies also control the mass media, through which they almost succeed in misleading the rest of the world along the same line of error they have taken. Our modern world has made great strides in science and technology, with a lot of positive possibilities at the disposal of humanity. In fact, science and technology have reached the stage where the solutions to the great problems of the world, for example, hunger, disease, and even war and peace, are all within our reach. However, the same science and technology have evoked in the modern mentality, at least in some quarters, a sense of utter autonomy, the feeling that God and the spiritual do not matter.

We do not need God. Humanity and nature are within the control of man himself. This is why we have many projects involving the total re-engineering of human nature.

It is in this context that we should place the tendency to see marriage in a completely different way from what humanity has been used to. This explains why homosexuality and same-sex unions are being vaunted as normal, perhaps even the preferred option. This is the world we have now around us, with its secularist approach to human society in total disregard for God, even if God is not being explicitly denied.

 

Obviously, to this kind of environment, the Church does not matter. If God does not matter, how can the Church matter? We should, therefore, not be surprised that this so-called modern society completely rejects the position of the Church. Furthermore, while we try to engage in dialogue with this society, there is a limit to how much we can adjust our message to be acceptable. The Lord Jesus has already warned us that the world would prefer darkness to light.

 

 

 

2. The great apostasy

 

For a long time, all Christians had a common position on the main attributes of Christian marriage. Neither the great schism that gave rise to the Orthodox churches nor the Protestant Reformation that gave rise to the many Protestant churches tampered with the essential properties of marriage. All agreed that marriage is between a man and a woman, in unity and indissolubility. It is only recently that we have begun to see major shifts on the part of many Christian bodies. In the last couple of decades, it is as if a doctrinal earthquake had overtaken the Christian churches. It is difficult to explain the calamitous changes that have taken place without reference to the strong influence of the evil one. We must believe in diabolic forces; otherwise, a lot of things cannot be explained.

And so we have a situation where it seems that it is only the Catholic Church that continues to uphold marriage as a sacred institution from God and, indeed, as a sacrament into which we enter with a strong commitment to unity and indissolubility. We now see many around us claiming to be Christians and yet making provisions for polygamy and divorce in various forms. And, worst of all, they are approving the homosexual way of life to the extent of “blessing” the union between people of the same sex, which, they claim, is of equal status to marriage. It is bad enough when secular governments decide through their “democratic” processes to approve such aberrant situations. But the Church can live with that. What is more disgraceful, however, is that some Christian churches, in the name of the message of the Lord Jesus, have also given in to these aberrant positions. They have raised the homosexual way of life to the level of a normal Christian life-style.

Lay Christians who are openly homosexual have been given full recognition and approbation. Even the clerical state, including the episcopacy, is now open to openly gay persons. And in all this, even the words of Scripture are not only reinterpreted, but simply laid aside in favor of the fait accompli. The Catholic Church, however, thanks be to God, has up till now continued to maintain in her official doctrine that marriage is between one man and one woman and that once a marriage is validly celebrated, it is indissoluble. Of course the Church is aware of the difficulties of marriage and has designed pastoral ways of dealing with them. What we are now faced with is the fact that the errors mentioned above, which have eroded other Christian communities, are now invading our Church. Efforts to introduce changes in Church doctrine and practice are being persistently inflicted on our Church, not only by fringe theologians on the margins of the Church, but sometimes by people quite high up in the ecclesiastical realm. This is what we saw during the 2014 synod. We can only hope that the battle has now been laid to rest. It is important to realize that it is our faith that is at stake. The pressures out there are not likely to ease off, for the evil one has not surrendered.

 

 

 

3. Other religions today

 

In the face of the present confusion, it is ironic that the position taken by other religions seems to be even far more reasonable than that of some who claim to be Christians. Our experience has shown that the Muslim faith has remained firm on the fact that marriage is from God and that it has to be between a man and a woman. Of course Islam has always made provisions for both divorce and polygamy. But even those provisions are within the confines of Islamic law. While there are Muslims who are homosexuals, they have not gone to the point of raising homosexuality up to the level of a life-style to be promoted. From what we hear from other religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions in the East—they, too, have retained the basic understanding of marriage as a sacred institution to be handled with care and attention. They have also generally rejected the whole idea of homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

The order given to man by God to increase and multiply is reflected in the social life of humanity in every culture. That is why almost everywhere, there is recognition of the importance of the male and female sexes in the raising of families, reproduction, and the education of the next generation. Every culture has rules to guide this very important aspect of our human existence. Similarly, almost every culture has a clear conviction that this is not just a human affair but has sacred underpinnings.

That is why marriage is often celebrated within the context of worship and ritual. Almost invariably, therefore, marriage and its consequences in terms of offspring and family are recognized as coming from God. This is surely what Jesus means when in Matthew he refers back to Genesis, saying: “In the beginning, it was not so” (Mt 19:18).

 

 

 

 

 

4. African traditional society

 

Let us now look specifically at the situation of marriage in our African traditional culture. My observations in this regard are meant to illustrate concretely the strong convictions of our people from their age-old traditions even before they were exposed to the Christian tradition.

We want to stress that in our own culture, marriage is clearly the union of a man and a woman. Homosexual behavior does exist but is always considered an abomination and punished as such. Therefore marriage is always between a man and a woman.

Marriage has also always been regarded as sacred. Before marriage, consultations are made through the instrument of divination. It is believed that God must be consulted to sanction the intention of a young man and woman to marry. There is also the belief that, along with God himself, the ancestors are involved in the process. All this stresses the fact that marriage is a sacred institution. Our people are therefore not surprised at the Christian doctrine of marriage as a sacrament, which they take squarely in their stride.

Also noteworthy in our concept of marriage is the importance of offspring. Marriage is meant especially for the continuation of the human species. The love of offspring in marriage is so strong that children are almost considered a necessary condition for the validity of marriage.

A marriage without children is difficult to sustain. However, strictly speaking, it is not true to say that in African tradition, marriage without children is considered invalid. There are therefore no grounds for trying to promote any theological hypothesis aimed at making barrenness a ground for dissolution of a Catholic marriage in Africa, as some people have tried to suggest.

But what often happens is that when a marriage is childless, the man invariably seeks a second wife from whom he hopes to have children.

Sometimes it is the barren wife herself who takes the initiative to bring another young girl into the family so that her husband will experience the fulfillment of children of his own. This reminds us of the story of Sarah and Abraham in the book of Genesis (Gen 16:1–3).

Sometimes too, because of barrenness, some women leave their husbands to try their luck with another man from whom they hope to have children. Sometimes they do begin to have children with another man. A possible scientific explanation for this could be that the first two people were genetically incompatible. Another example is when there is repeated infant mortality. Very often a woman leaves her husband for another man, and the children begin to survive. Today we may suspect that these were cases involving genotype incompatibility, a problem that is removed with a change of spouse. The same can happen when in a family the children are all girls and the man urgently needs a male heir who will take over the name of the family. Oftentimes the man will marry another woman simply for this reason.

All these cases underscore the importance of offspring in traditional African life. This is also an important element in the institution of marriage in the Christian faith.

It is often said that in Africa we practice polygamy. Often this is exaggerated. The most we can say is that polygamy is a respected form of marriage in many parts of Africa. That does not mean that every African male marries two or three wives. Demographically speaking, this would be impossible. There would not be enough women for every man to marry more than one, because the population of women is not two or three times that of men. Rather, polygamy is generally first and foremost the expression of affluence and status. Thus we find kings and chiefs acquiring many women as wives, resulting in large families. This in turn confers on them great respect in society.

It should be noted that in Africa, polygamy was never actually considered the norm, nor was it considered the ideal. In Yoruba culture, the Ifa Oracles are a compilation of the religious wisdom of the ancestors to guide the lives of the people. One of the texts in theEji Ogbe chapter states:

 

Okan soso porogodo l’obinrin dun mo n’ile oko.

Bi nwon di meji, won a d’ojowu.

Bi won di meta, won a d’eta ntule.

 

The translation is as follows:

 

One and only one is the best number of women in a man’s house.

Make them two and they bring in jealousy.

Make them three and they scatter your home.

 

This means that our people in their deepest spiritual values consider monogamy the ideal form of marriage.

As for divorce, there are provisions for it in the African traditional religion. Generally it is done with regret in cases where a marriage has broken down, sometimes through sheer incompatibility. At times the wife complains of being badly treated, and she decides to move somewhere else where she will receive better treatment. This does not mean, however, that the woman in Africa is a constant object of abuse. The normal scenario is that the woman is the respected mother in the family. Sometimes, as already mentioned, divorce is a result of barrenness. In this case, it is only a last resort. This again affects Christian marriage.

 

 

 

5. Some challenges in Catholic marriage in Africa

 

On the whole, our people admire Catholic marriage. They wonder how it is possible to marry only one wife and stay with that wife for life. Of course we must constantly remind our members that Catholic marriage, one and indissoluble, is a sacrament in which God himself takes the initiative.

It is therefore not through our strength that we are able to live successfully a marriage that is consistent and indissoluble.

A major challenge, frequent in the early era of evangelization in our lands, was what to do about polygamists who embrace the faith and seek to be admitted into the Church. The pastoral practice has always been to encourage their life of faith, including participation in the worship of the Church. But they have never been admitted to reception of Holy Communion unless and until they gave up their state of polygamy.

This has meant choosing and keeping only one of the wives. This raises the question of what to do about the other women who cannot be simply thrown out of the house through no fault of their own. To devise a solution that respects the law of the Church as well as the demands of charity and even justice is often very difficult. Many, therefore, remain as they are, trusting in the mercy of God, without asking to receive Communion, regardless of their good intentions.

The considerations and interests mentioned in relation to marriage in traditional African society sometimes affect Catholic marriages. A major issue has to do with offspring. When a man is married in the Church and, after about ten years, is still without children, he is under great pressure from his family to marry another woman in order to have children. Very often in this case, the wife may not object and may even intervene in favor. Of course from the pastoral point of view, we do all we can to encourage people to sustain their marriage with or without offspring.

Sometimes even the lack of a male child becomes a temptation to take another wife. This again is a constant concern in our pastoral care of marriages among Christians.

It is clear that our pastoral challenges are different from the situations we hear about in the so-called Christian lands. We hear that some people marry and do not want any children. Some even resort to abortion regularly when pregnancies occur. This should be a cause for great concern in the Church. We know that in our modern, globalized world, our own Christians in Africa are not totally free of the pressure from the so-called developed world to stop considering children to be a blessing from God. By and large, however, in the majority of cases, children are still very much considered a blessing from God. That does not exclude the need for responsible parenthood in the face of rampant poverty.

With regard to indissolubility, the desire for offspring has often created a special pastoral challenge for us even today with respect to premarital sex. Young couples know that they ought not to be living together and engaging in sexual activities before their wedding in the Church.

However, in many situations, the couples already consider themselves married after the completion of the traditional marriage customs. The two families consider them married. It is very difficult to convince the young couple to refrain from sexual activities at that stage until the wedding has taken place in the Church. This is because of their strong desire for offspring. They firmly believe in the indissolubility of marriage once it is contracted in Church. They do not want to take the chance of entering into an indissoluble but barren marriage. Therefore, before they submit themselves to the commitment of marriage for life, both families want to ensure that both young people wanting to marry will be able to have children. And so even good Catholics often do not frown on this behavior and may sometimes even encourage the young couple to make sure that the betrothed wife is pregnant before they go to Church to make a lifelong commitment. In other words, even if today one can scientifically prove the possibility of offspring in a couple that intends to marry, the normal tendency is to prove this capacity first by means of a clear pregnancy and only then to enter into marriage in the Church.

Of course, there are couples who, out of respect for Catholic moral norms, refrain from sexual contact before their marriage in the Church.

These are heroes we need to congratulate. After marriage some of them may encounter difficulties and be without a child for many years. With all the concomitant anxieties that accompany this situation, we need to pay special pastoral attention to such couples who are anxious for what they call “the fruit of the womb”. Such pastoral care should not exclude adequate scientific and medical attention.

We know very well that our ideas about Catholic marriage are not shared by everybody around us. But we proudly uphold them as the ideal we have received from the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ has redeemed the whole world; and in the case of marriage, he has restored it to the level of a sacrament of faith. This has become a model for all, including those who may not be able to live up to its demands. This is where Catholic marriages and families can and must become the light of the world.

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

In conclusion, we should not forget the aim of the ongoing synod on marriage and the family. The synod has not been called to decide whether or not divorced and remarried couples can continue to receive Holy Communion. This is certainly not the purpose of the synod. Nor has the synod been called to discuss the issue of homosexuality and whether or not two Catholic men or two Catholic women can present themselves at the altar for marriage. That is not the purpose of the synod, nor indeed is it an issue in the Catholic Church. These are issues that are already clear in our doctrines. Synods are not called to change the doctrines or teachings of the Church. Rather, our synod has been called to confirm our faith, to study the pastoral challenges that face us, and to allow bishops to compare notes with each other so as to know how best to deal with these pastoral challenges. In this way, our people can be helped to live their Christian lives in marriage before God and as a witness before the entire community to the love, mercy, and fidelity of God himself to us. We hope that through the synod experience, the Catholic Church, through her pastors, with and under the successor of Peter, will emerge ever more powerful, vibrant, and vocal in proclaiming the truth of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The more the world of our day is sunk down in immorality, the more there is need for the Church to be a light to the world for all to see. The model of Christian marriage is the Holy Family of Nazareth: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. We place all our efforts under its patronage.

 

 

 

About the Author

John Cardinal Onaiyekan

 

John Cardinal Onaiyekan is archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria, and former president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria.

 

 

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