I’m going to mention this post again, because in light of a stray (and on its own terms quite sensible) remark in an interview with Chicago’s new Archbishop Cupich [ https://www.facebook.com/news.va.en/posts/957325920998092 ] and other comments I’ve seen, it seems relevant.

There are several word/thing relationships that we really MUST distinguish (not sever, sunder, separate, or believe to be exclusive–but observe that the terms do not refer to precisely the same thing in precisely the same way). Let me just enumerate as briefly as I can manage:

1. marriage per se, or “natural marriage”
2. marriage of the baptized, or “sacramental marriage”
3. civil recognition of marriage
4. ecclesial recognition of marriage

Each of these deals with either a state of affairs (1 & 2, a describable, observable, intelligible, verifiable condition) or an official notice that such a state of affairs exists, needed in order to adjudicate its consequents (3 & 4, instruments whose meaning is wholly contingent on acknowledgement of a state of affairs).

In dealing with these, we potentially encounter a whole realm of “other” terms, as well, terms which describe states of notification or transition or discovery with regard to #1-4: attempted marriage, putative marriage, nullity, “annulment,” marriage license, divorce, “remarriage,” etc.

What happens to people deeply confused by the radical nominalism that undergirds our entire system of Constitutional laws and classical liberal presuppositions about politics–that is, my fellow children of the Enlightenment (made children of dubious legitimacy by the discovery that we are also Heirs of God in Christ Jesus)–is that we confuse arguing about how to settle arguments about words about things with the actual constitution of things. We barely even notice that we have quit believing we can know things, know them good and well, without our knowing being subject to renegotiation by clever wordsmiths.

I spent over a decade of my life working hard to be a card-carrying post-structuralist literary critic/theorist while also arguing that «il n’y a pas de hors-texte» opened modernity to Biblicist interpretation of divine revelation. I do know well how profoundly we are ensorcelled by our own spelling of words, friends.

But it is quite impossible that any real state of affairs–in a community, in a family, in a nation-state, in a communion–should meaningfully persist across generations merely by continuous renegotiation of words.

We must–it is utterly essential that we do this–return to an understanding in which our language (including our legal language, and especially including our “science” of humanity, which has been so badly vitiated by the separation of the reality from the data) is subordinate to reality, serves our understanding of reality, and therefore can only carry authority to the extent that its claims are demonstrably about reality.

In such an understanding of reality, a cleverly construed counterexample to one register of a word’s meaning would not justify erasure of that word’s connection to the reality which is always, intrinsically, greater than the word. Where such an understanding of reality is institutionalized, nihilism is not permitted to win; it is prevented, with authority backed by power, from doing so. Only such an understanding preserves human life and provides for the flourishing of those who, body and breath, have “become a living soul” and may, by becoming “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” cause others to do the same.

And so, I apologize to those whose critiques of post-structuralist hermeneutics I scoffed at when I, like some who read me now, mistakenly believed that I could see the trajectory better than they. Their vantage was superior, and what I have said above is deeply dependent on the words of others.

But it really does come to this: a state of affairs exists; that state of affairs has consequences; those consequences implicate civil society and ecclesial communion; and the only just way to acknowledge that state of affairs and adjudicate those consequences is one which preserves the essential distinctions between one sort of thing–a marriage, that is, a potentially fecund, indissoluble, voluntary bond between a man and a woman–and whatever other sorts of things you might like to arrange.

It is this distinction, and not any larger “religious” versus “secular” distinction, which is really at issue, here. It is not a question of whose will is to be imposed, though our incoherent politics makes it so, but of what really *is* and whether we plan to compel each other to lie about it.

And it is the situation of this question at present as “you must all lie, or you will be treated as beyond-the-pale, as those who have no claim on justice while you persist in these views” to which the faithful have no choice but to vigorously and vehemently object, and which we are obligated to use all just means to resist, reverse, undermine, and nullify.

Or, as I said in the linked post:  

A man and a woman inclined to marriage—or a man seeking a woman, or a woman seeking a man, desiring marriage—have begun to receive the seed of marriage, in their desire for permanence and their inclination to exclusivity, especially as those two are linked to their sexual behavior. However, the planting of this seed remains uncertain until all of the elements that determine marriage—the elements the Church has recognized in the dominical sayings, as well as the rest of revelation—are manifested in the marriage.

Thus the divine pedagogy, and the Church’s Magisterium as its submissive agent and authoritative recognition, require of all responsible people an earnest teaching that marriage must be an indissoluble, exclusive union of a man and a woman ordered to the engendering and education of their children. That is, the divine pedagogy through both nature and dominical teaching establishes this meaning, and this responsibility for teachers, with regard to natural marriage. (We must at all times avoid confusing “natural marriage” with “civil [recognition of] marriage,” which is related to but not constitutive of “marriage” per se.)

In the Sacrament of Matrimony, Christ and His Church bless, witness, and enlarge the spiritual and practical benefits of marriage. In the order of generation, the family—the society formed by natural marriage—stands prior to the Church, and is not constituted by her. However, the action of Christ in determining within history what might have been obscured by human sinfulness also teaches us to recognize a special grace, and a special obligation, that a man and a woman may minister to the Church who witnesses their marriage. The Church has clearly recognized that the man and the woman together are the ministers of matrimony, and as ministers of grace for the whole Church, the man and the woman have both a privilege and an obligation which honors their calling and holds them responsible, not alone to themselves, but to a whole community.

The Church’s “pastoral activity,” therefore, must continually work to annex to the desires of man of woman, and woman for man, the ideas of fruitfulness and permanence; to annex to the desires of man and woman for permanent, fruitful union the ideas of responsible and blessed service, in rearing children and in sharing the blessings of holy matrimony with the whole Church; and to clarify that there is not, and cannot be, any other “marriage” but that which by nature has been clearly set forth, but revelation underscored, and by dominical saying determined beyond all contingency.

To that end, the Church must clearly state the distinctions between marriage and “civil [recognition of] marriage,” which is valid when there is a natural marriage actually recognized by a civil document, and a dead letter (or perverse folly!) when there is no such natural marriage. Two men, or two women, or whatever else is not one man and one woman mutually consenting to indissoluble, exclusive union ordered to fecundity, cannot be the subjects of marriage, and no regime can cause them to be so. Nor, indeed, can the Church; the Church can no more make a “marriage” of a same-sex union than she can make Aphrodite a member of the Holy Trinity.

It is therefore urgent that the Church clearly define her own deference to the authentic definition of “natural marriage,” so as to distinguish both the “ecclesial [recognition of] marriage” that is part of the discipline of the Sacrament of Matrimony and the “civil [recognition of] marriage” that is part of a just civil order’s response to the realities of marriage and family life, without appearing to muddle categories or to speak in Gnostic fashion of a secret “sacramental marriage” invisibly exalted above mundane “civil marriage.” These incoherent terms must be abandoned at all costs, lest we add confusion to a disordered world, rather than speaking as the “experts on humanity” we once claimed we could be.

(source: Survey 2015 | Inkandescence)

I hasten to say that in a technical sense, that deference is not only abundantly defined but loudly trumpeted–yet it would be good to hear the Church dictate to the world the terms in which marriage is understood, and let the world strive against reality with no shade of confusion to hide from conscience in.