Questo articolo è disponibile anche in: Italian English

Question

Hello Father Bellon,

I would like to thank you for your pastoral service and I would appreciate it if you could read this email of mine.

I apologize if you’ve found the previous email messy and difficult to understand.

I have two doubts at the moment.

I. Do we all have the same rights and the same duties?

In his latest encyclical All Brothers, Pope Francis affirmed that all men [as well as women] have the same rights and duties.

So far so good but, unless His Holiness was referring only to some (fundamental) rights and duties, this may seem contrary to the teaching that the Church has spread over the centuries. Precisely, men are equal in dignity, but the inequalities of rights and powers come from the same Author of nature (SS Leo XIII, encyclical Quod Apostolici Muneris, 1878), and that the disparities of culture, possessions and social position are in conformity with the divine and natural law are not necessarily contrary to the spirit of brotherhood and community (SS Pius XII, Christmas Radio Message of 24 December 1944, 1944).

Not to mention the doctrine (see for instance Leo XIII) according to which democracy is only one amongst the legitimate forms of government.

Can the Church be a reliable guide in the faith if it contradicts her own teachings? 

If there is no contradiction between today’s magisterium and the old one, could the magisterium be a little clearer about these fundamental principles?

II. According to the Bible, should wives and husbands have the same role within the family?

Father Bellon, I believe that the relations between the members of the family must, in part, be established by traditions and civil laws (SS Pius XI, encyclical Casti Connubii, par. II, 1930, and SS Giovanni Paolo II, encyclical Familiaris consortio , art.25, 1981), my question, however, concerns the essential aspects of marriage as established by the Holy Scriptures.

In the Bible, reference is often made to the duty of wives to be submissive to their husbands, but a passage from the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, the one in which we read be submissive to one another, seems to refer to a more equal relationship between the spouses.

Some say that the scriptures are influenced by the culture and mentality that dominated the centuries in which its authors lived. However, the Church teaches that God inspired biblical authors to write only what He wanted (Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, art.106), therefore each verse more than the culture of the writers should reflect the wisdom of the Holy Spirit who inspired them. 

So we should consider that God asks Christian spouses to be submissive to one another, and He strengthens this commandment over wives alone in many other passages.

Reflecting on it, I thought that perhaps God asks for two different types of submission to wives and husbands: He asks obedience to the wives and to the husbands to take care of their wives, even giving up their hobbies or always pushing for what they want.

For example, the Apostles (the hierarchy of the Church) were subjected to Jesus Christ as the Messiah and consubstantial Son of God, but even Jesus was in some way subject to the Apostles when he had to give up his interests to worry about those slow-thinking men, especially when he humbly washed their feet. 

It seems to me that Blessed Giuseppe Toniolo (Treviso, 1845 – Pisa, 1918) saw in this last gesture an example for the human hierarchy of every time.

All this without omitting that, as S.S. Pius XI said, the “human” laws can determine in a more precise way the characteristics of this submission, and I add, by bringing the rights and duties of the spouses closer to make them more equal.

What do you think? Did I go completely astray? Am I too slow to understand?

Answer from the Priest

Dear friend,

with some delay (almost a year) I reply to your email. I beg your pardon.

1. With reference to the two questions you asked me:

About the first one: Pope Francis said that all men, clearly including women, have the same rights and the same duties. Which is very true.

The expression “all men” is equivalent to all people.

All people, including children, have the same rights and duties.

2. In the Instruction Donum Vitae (it is an instruction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of February 22, 1987) we read: “The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life”(DV I, 1).

3. Distinctions are implicitly included in this statement, in particular the distinction between absolute rights and conditional rights. 

For example: every person has the right and the duty to participate in social life through elections. Children are also people. Do they have the right to vote?

Obviously yes, as they are people. And yet, since going to vote requires at least a minimum knowledge of public life, it is required to carry out an act of such responsibility when the subject has acquired a level of maturity.

Similarly, children as persons also have the right to marry. But in fact society prevents it because marriage requires the maturity necessary to assume the marital rights and duties.

4. If you keep these distinctions in mind, you will realize that there is no contradiction between the various interventions of the Magisterium,

Sometimes, in fact, the magisterium simply refers to absolute rights.

While other times it refers to conditional rights, which are regulated by society.

5. The opinion expressed on democracy, considered as one of the legitimate forms, is also correct. We cannot deny a priori that the democratic system can be improved in the future.

6. The second question concerns husband and wife having the same role within the family.

The expression you used is quite vague, because if the spouses have the same rights and duties as spouses, they nevertheless have different duties within the family. Some of them derive from nature, such as the task of carrying children in one’s womb, of giving birth to them, of nursing them. Others, on the other hand, derive from customs or cultures. In the past, certain tasks were entrusted to husbands and others to wives, such as cooking or keeping the house tidy.

It cannot be denied that women are more predisposed to cleanliness and order. We see it in their own behavior and in their clothing.

7. Regarding submission, you did well to remember Ephesians 5:21 where the Holy Spirit says: “Be submissive to one another in the fear of the Lord”.

Precisely because he is speaking of mutual submission, St. Paul explains in the following verse: “You wives are subject to your husbands” which goes along with the first verse.

8. St. Paul also says that the husband is “the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church”.

The fact that he is a leader does not affect the equal dignity of the spouses.

Precisely by appealing to the equality of spouses, the Church rejects polygamy, which manifests a superiority of man over woman because it would be up to man to decide how many wives to have.

Nor does it mean that the husband is the owner of the wife.

But just as the Church is all for the Lord, so also the wife is all for her husband. She is happy to live for him.

And this in the same way in which the husband is happy to give himself to his wife down to the last drop of blood as Christ did for the Church, of which he made himself a servant.

9. It is true that St. Paul as an inspired author wrote everything that the Holy Spirit willed.

But it is also right to recognize that the Holy Spirit also inspired him in drawing from the society of the time the concept of submission of the wife to her husband.

However, not to place an inequality between the two as was believed in those days, but to purge submission from any possible interpretation of man’s domination over woman, to lead to a new concept of submission, which is that of mutual submission.

And it’s not only about mutual submission, which is already a great thing, but of reciprocal submission in the Lord, the only Lord of the husband and wife, the first and irreplaceable spouse of each of them.

10. Starting precisely from the divine affirmation that “the two are one flesh” it is out of place to speak of the superiority of the husband over his wife and vice versa.

Mutual submission is the fruit of that love for which we give ourselves in totality to one another and voluntarily make ourselves servants for the good of the other.

It is submission in love, which leads us to be happy to give ourselves to each other to the last drop of blood.

This mutual service emerges in a particularly beautiful text by Tertullian, a Christian writer of the second century: “How will I be able to expose the happiness of that marriage which the Church unites, the Eucharistic offering confirms, the blessing seals, the angels announce and the Father ratifies? … What a yoke that of two faithful united in one hope, in one observance, in one servitude! They are both brothers and both serve together; there is no division as to spirit and as to flesh. Indeed they are truly two in one flesh and where the flesh is one, the spirit is one ”(Ad uxorem, II; VIII, 6-8).

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify these concepts.

At the same time I am pleased with you because if I am not mistaken you are that young man who is approaching faith, or better said, our Lord.

I accompany you with my prayer and I bless you.

Father Angelo

08 January 2022 | A priest replies – Moral theology – Cardinal virtues