I was catapulted back to October 8, 1980. It was a Wednesday, and I was a 23-year-old junior sister stationed in St Louis. Two of us were making door-to-door visits in a gritty street that ran along the curve of the Mississippi, and at noon we had just reached a hardware store. Ding! The bell over the door rang just as the gong of the radio news on the store speaker system sounded. Among the other international headlines that day, the announcer mentioned Pope John Paul who that day had taught that a man "could commit 'adultery in the heart' against his own wife." Right away a spokesperson for the National Organization for Women began criticizing the papal teaching in the name of women's autonomy. I stood there, surrounded by hammers and buckets and pipe fittings, thinking, "Lady, don't you get it? He's on your side!" Even with that bare-bones snippet of the Pope's Theology of the Body talk (#43), even with my own very sheltered (but thankfully healthy) upbringing, I grasped what the saint was intimating: If marriage is no cover for "adultery"--if a man sins by looking at his wife merely as an object for his use--then neither can marriage be used as a cover for rape. Christian marriage is a sacramental sign of the mutual self-giving love of Christ and the Church. Forcing oneself on a spouse is a sacrilege.
In retrospect, it's not really surprising that the Pope's words, which could have inspired a whole movement of ministry to women in unhealthy marriages almost 40 years ago, were unacknowledged. 1980 was the statistical high point of clerical sexual misconduct in the US. Moral relativism was in the seminary air just about everywhere. I remember the sophisticated sneers of some of the clergy and the way Pope John Paul's wartime sufferings were invoked as a way to diminish the seriousness with which his teachings needed to be taken. I can only imagine that even the most faithful priests were so distracted by the evils within their own brotherhood that there there was little mental space left to consider the situation of women or ponder the vast new vision that the Pope's Wednesday talks were opening up. (A young woman myself, I knew good news for women when I saw it, even if the priests couldn't recognize it. From then on I avidly followed the Wednesday talks in the Vatican newspaper: sometime later, he would declare, in words that the suffering writer linked above really needed to hear, "Woman is the master of her own mystery.")
There is a work of repairing that needs to be done for those minds and souls that have been damaged by falsehoods and habits of sin. Causes and aggravating factors need to be addressed, and that includes anachronistic understandings of marriage, transferred from societies that were built around the extended family and applied tout court to the nuclear household, leading to erroneous and superficial interpretations of biblical passages and Church teachings, heavily weighted with fundamentalism and totally missing the contributions of the Polish Pope and the dozens of couples he accompanied throughout their married lives. (As in the case of the woman's husband in the story linked above, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that often certain biblical passages and Church teachings are invoked more as an excuse than an actual cause, but everything needs to be brought out into the open and corrected.) It is also probably true that up to the 1960's, Catholic marriage prep did emphasize things like "wifely duties" (but how long has it been since pre-Cana couples heard anything remotely resembling that?). Most likely a primary cause is all around us, especially in the mainstreaming of pornography.
There is also a kind of ministry that needs to be spearheaded by women for women, and by men for men. And I have no idea what form it needs to take; surely it would be as individual as the cases themselves. But pastors have to be 100% behind it, and especially when it comes to the different forms of domestic violence, need to be well prepared to address the spiritual wounds inflicted at times by sloppy or platitudinous instruction, some of which women (and men) may have unconsciously absorbed from unofficial "Catholic" sources claiming to offer "traditional" teachings; from the blend of complex emotions and idealism with the spiritualizing of terrible wrongs as "crosses to be borne for Jesus"; or simply from the absence of a genuine formation in the Christian vision of the human person. We just do not know what it means to be male and female, created in the image of God for the sake of living in a mutual gift of self. (This is not something that can be sprung on couples at their engagement.)
But that is only the negative side, on behalf of the wounded and broken. The positive is even more important: Giving children a healthy vision of the human person and human relationships from the very start, to make such behavior as that of the violently lustful husband as unthinkable as it actually is. This is not going to happen with a superficial, rules-based understanding, or even an orthodox "marriage prep" that gets the "use NFP" message across, but doesn't fundamentally alter the couple's understanding of what it means to be "man and woman, the image of God."
What is more necessary than anything (and more needed now than ever!) is a complete worldview in which we all exist for the sake of giving and receiving love; our minds and bodies, the gift of time, our talents and everything within reach, all are for the sake of gift: for enhancing the good of the other, for making life flourish around us.
In Lent we will hear the Gospel challenge frequently: the one who seeks his life will lose it; the one who loses his life for the Gospel will find it. If we understand this as a command to become a doormat, that would be an indication of some incorrect ideas about God's plan. It would be good to seek spiritual formation and advice to begin to set a course correction on that.
Meanwhile, here is one young man's life-changing realization:
Tales from TOB1: Brendan from Cor Project.
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Read a rough translation of the Theology of the Body talks here. Talks # 41 and 43 give the gist of Pope John Paul's thought on "adultery in the heart" as reducing the woman to an object for the man's use.
For a video lecture with the backstory and a general introduction to the Theology of the Body, go to www.pauline.org/DiscoverTOB
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