Virtue and Family in Amoris Laetitia

Well, thank you all very much. God bless you. Good morning. Can you hear me okay? No. Not working? Who can help me with the mic? Is it not working right? How's that? Better? No? Higher? How's that? Better? Excellent. Alright, well listen, good morning everybody again and delighted to be here with you. You know, I'm Irish by heritage, both sides of my family. My father's family is from... My father's family is from Waterford. And my mother's family is from right here in Dublin. My grandfather, whom I never knew, he died 10 years before I was born, but he was carried away from Dublin in the arms of his sister. His parents had died, and his sisters carried him out of the immigrant ship to come to America. So even though I never knew him, whenever I come to Dublin, I think very much of my grandfather. But my roots are all here culturally in this great country. You know, some of you might have seen my Catholicism series where we... Thank you. And we filmed, of course, all over the world. We filmed in Africa, in India, other parts of Asia, and so on. And finally we came here to Ireland, and we filmed in a number of places. And the cameraman, John Cummings, we were filming, I think, in Glendalough. And he said, you know, Father, it's the first time you've seemed completely natural on camera. Like, this face didn't look right in the Middle East and Africa, but somehow it looked right in Ireland. So, delighted to be here, and also delighted to be talking to you about chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Amoris Laetitia that was assigned to me as the talk. And I was very grateful to get that assignment because, as you know, everyone and his brother and sister has talked about chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia because of all the controversy. And the result of that is we often overlook these very interesting, very helpful parts of the letter. And especially chapter 7. as I reread the whole thing, I found very powerful. So I'm going to focus on 7 and 9 with maybe just a word or two about chapter 8. But in 7, we have this wonderful reflection on formation in the moral and spiritual life. And chapter 9, we have a beautiful reflection on the spirituality of the family. So that's going to be my focus in the talk today. So let's cut to the chase and look at chapter 7. I think what appears, everybody, in chapter 7 is that Pope Francis is very much in a tradition that goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas and before him to Aristotle. And what I mean is the tradition of a virtue ethics as opposed to a rules ethics. Now, don't get me wrong. There are rules in the moral life. There are certain acts that our tradition recognizes as intrinsically wrong. And so there are clear rules against them. The direct taking of an innocent life, therefore abortion. Slavery, for example, is intrinsically evil, etc. But the Pope's point, it seems to me, throughout this letter is, if we present the moral life simply in terms of rules and prohibitions, We're presenting a very impoverished account of the moral life. He prefers, as I say, the Thomistic and Aristotelian virtue ethic approach. Now what does that mean? It means that moral formation is finally about the inculcation of virtue. What's a virtue? What's a virtue but an inner and consistent disposition toward the good. An inner and consistent disposition toward the good. How do we get virtue in us? Again, go right through St. Thomas, back to Aristotle, through habit. Listen to the Pope's line here. Without the conscious, free, and valued repetition of certain patterns of good behavior, moral education does not take place. How do we become better people? By having virtue in us. How do we get virtue? Through repeated habit. So that's the tradition that he's standing in. And see, bottom line for Pope Francis, the family. is the place par excellence of formation in virtue. And there's chapter 7 in a nutshell. Now, I mentioned this virtue ethics tradition. A couple names come right to mind. One is Alistair McIntyre. A second one, there's McIntyre's one fan or family member over there. I'm glad you're here. Okay. let's see if Stanley Hauerwas has any family members here because he's the second name I want to mention. These are two great figures in the virtue ethics tradition today. And I'll say a word about Hauerwas because Hauerwas is from Texas. Any Texans? All right. Texas and his dad was a bricklayer and so as a kid Stanley Harawas learned the sort of art and technique of bricklaying and he compares learning the moral life to learning how to lay bricks. How did it happen? Well not just through a set of rules. But rather through a daily and steady practice, through trial and error, through watching the work of great bricklayers, through being corrected when he did something wrong. In this long, steady process, he internalized the virtues of being a bricklayer. and thereby was able to do it well. So, Hauerwas says, and Pope Francis is right in that tradition, that's how we tend to learn the moral life. Listen now, again, here's a quote from Francis. How do we become virtuous? Listen. Through ideas, incentives, practical applications, stimuli, rewards, examples, models, symbols, reflections, dialogue, and a constant rethinking of our way of doing things. Now see, what's cool about that, the reason I read it that way, is it's this compilation of different ideas and methods and practices that place the virtuous life in us. It is not simply a matter of learning a few abstract rules. That's the point. It's a lived thing. You know, now this won't make sense here in Ireland, but when I was a kid, my game was baseball. Yay, baseball players. Here I'm sure it'd be football or hurling or something right in Ireland. But how did I learn to be a baseball player? Oh good, you know the symbol for baseball. Very good. I just saw that. She's good. She's good. You know, I started playing baseball when I was about seven, and nobody laid out for me when I was seven the rules of the game. Rather, I remembered vividly, I had coaches who brought us out onto the field and had us smell the field. and get down on our hands and knees and kind of feel the field. And then through a series of practices, they put the moves of baseball in our bodies, right? So all the different rehearsals that you go through. Now, in the course of many years then of practice and play, I began to internalize the rules of baseball and I became a baseball player. Now, Having played for a long time, I also learned the rules of baseball. They emerged rather naturally out of the playing of the game. But the heart of the matter was not the rules. It was the habituation that led to virtue. Now, here's a very important connection, and Francis makes it clearly in chapter 7. It's virtue that makes us... free. It's virtue that makes us free. And I know that seems counterintuitive. You think, no, no, I mean, virtue is, I do, or rather freedom is, I do what I want. Don't tell me what to do. I don't like laws. I don't like restrictions. No, but think about this. When the virtues of a game, like baseball or football or hurling or something, when those virtues are placed in you, then you can play play the game freely. You can do what the game demands. You can respond to the ever-shifting demands of the game. It's when you don't have the virtue of the game in you that you're stymied. You're stuck. You can't play. You know, golf, of course. Everyone loves golf in Ireland. And I love golf. I'm lousy at it, though. Now, why am I lousy at golf? Because despite, trust me, 30-some years of effort, effort. I have I've not inculcated the virtues of golf in my body, in my mind, in my hands, right? And so when I'm faced with a difficult shot, I don't have the virtue that enables me to respond freely. but Rory McIlroy does do I get a cheer for Rory? I thought I'd get a bigger cheer in Ireland Graham McDonald does no, no Graham McDonald alright But see, the point is, when you're learning golf, talk about habituation and talk about rules and demands. But see, once they're internalized, now you can soar, now you can play. Freedom is not opposed to virtue. Freedom is the result of virtue. Does that make sense? Listen now to Pope Francis. The virtuous life thus... builds, strengthens, and shapes freedom, lest we become slaves of dehumanizing and antisocial inclinations. Just that first part, though, listen again. The virtuous life builds, strengthens, and shapes freedom. Now, I know everybody. We're all, you know, Westerners. We're all moderns. And that runs counter to our intuitions. No, no, freedom is let me be me. Let me do what I want. I don't want laws, rules, and habituation, and virtue, and restriction. I live the way I want. See, but that makes you a slave. That's the biblical idea. Mind you, Saint Paul can say, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. And I am a slave of Christ Jesus. See, on our terms, that doesn't make a lick of sense. If you're anybody's slave, you're not free. But Paul knows, when you can say, it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Now you're free. Now you're free to be the person that you want to be, are meant to be. That's the Pope's point here, very much in chapter 7. Now, where does all this happen? So, how are we supposed to know? learned bricklaying from bricklaying masters. McElroy learned golf from his teachers and so on. I learned baseball from my coaches. Where does moral formation happen? The family. The family. The family. That's the Pope's point. How do we know how to be courageous? How do we know how to be prudent? How do we know how to be kind? How do we know how to be self-sacrificing? It won't come from a rule book primarily. It'll come from a steady day-to-day habituation in virtue led by the parents in a family, fostered by siblings within a family. In this, and here's the language he uses, in this school of virtue, we find our moral and spiritual education. That's the point he's making. Now, is all of this positive and happy? Absolutely not. Now why? Because learning any craft or any sport or any excellence involves lot of correction doesn't it I mean the years I was learning baseball the number of times I was corrected by my coaches how to hold the bat how to swing how to feel how to position myself think of a golfer like Rory McIlroy how many times as a kid he was cautioned and changed and affected and corrected Any musicians in the crowd will appreciate this. The great conductor, Arturo Toscanini, I read an account by one of his orchestra members who was not playing according to the time that Toscanini was giving. So the maestro came down from the podium and with his little baton, and he tapped the time on his head. One, two, three. And the player, this great, great classical musician said he always can feel the tap, tap, tap of Toscanini whenever he plays, you know. So, the Pope says, in the moral life, lots of correction is needed. I like this. Children who are lovingly corrected feel cared for. They perceive that they are individuals whose potential is recognized. So, there's no room in Francis'vision for a kind of just nicey-nicey, everything's fine, don't worry about it. No, on the contrary. Parents that don't correct, that don't give direction, are not going to produce virtuous children. I love this too. He doesn't like our society today in the measure, I'm quoting again, that it tends to indulge children too much so that everything revolves around the child's desires. Now think of this not as just like, hey, I'm going to be tough on the kids. It's... If my desire becomes the criterion, I'm never going to achieve excellence in any area. I don't want to play baseball that way. Well, I don't care. That's the wrong way to play. Oh, no, but I'd like to do it this way. Who cares? So if we simply indulge our natural desires, we're not going to come to any sort of moral excellence. And so the Pope wants us... Correcting, when appropriate, in this school of virtues. How about this? Again, I'm quoting him. Whenever I'm doing this, by the way, because the light is hitting the page this way, I'm quoting from the Pope. Such children will grow up with a sense of their rights, but not their responsibilities. And that's a good way to sum it up, right? We're very big on rights. But see everybody how typically modern that is, the focus on rights, and there's obviously great room for it, but when that becomes exclusive, then this inculcation in virtue becomes attenuated. Okay, here's something. I love in this tradition I've been describing going back to Aristotle very important role is played by masters and heroes and models Aristotle famously says If you ask, what's the right thing to do? The answer is, find the good person and imitate him. It's a cool answer, isn't it? It's very simple, deceptively so. What's the right thing to do? Well, it's not primarily a matter of consulting the rule book. Rather, find the good person and watch him and imitate him. How do you play baseball? Find a great baseball player. player watch him how do you play golf and see we golfers do it all the time right we're always trying to find ben hogan or jack nicholas or one of the great masters and we spend all this time imitating them watching them studying them so francis says in this tradition the saints play a decisive role Not primarily the rule book, but looking at the saints. What do they do? What are they like? Move like them, think like them, see the world as they do. But then he adds, and it's a typically sort of Franciscan twist, I like this. Adolescents should be helped to draw analogies, to appreciate that values, these virtues, are best embodied in a few exemplary persons. So there's the saints, right? But here's the Franciscan twist. But also realized imperfectly and to different degrees in others. Now, what I like about that is, yes to the saints. Of course, we hold the saints up. But. Sometimes the saints can be a little bit overbearing, or it's too much, or I mean, how could I live that way? And so, how about other figures who might not be completely heroic, maybe flawed in some way, but they still embody something of the life of virtue. And I mean, when I read that, I couldn't help but think of Graham Greene. Think of the power and the glory. And the hero of that story is the famous whiskey priest, right, in Mexico, who's... a deeply flawed, compromised character, but yet who does show forth very powerfully a life of virtue. Or even think of one of my favorite novels in the 20th century, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Thank you. Waugh's one fan is here too. All right. Think of Sebastian. in that story. Talk about a compromised figure, a deeply problematic figure, but yet, but yet, by the end of that book, deeply flawed Sebastian is also, in his own way, a model of the Christian life. Good. The saints and even some of these more compromised figures can be exemplars in the life of virtue. Okay, let me just cut now to the last part of this first section of chapter seven. Paragraph 274, we find this. The family is the first school of human values where we learn the way. Wise use of freedom. That's meant to be a one-line summary of everything I've said so far. Paragraph 274. The family is the first school of human values where we learn the wise use of freedom. Do you see everybody, if the family breaks down, and it is in trouble certainly all over the western world, if the family breaks down, the prime school of virtue breaks down. And if that breaks down... then we're in trouble as a society. Do you see too now why Catholic social teaching has always said the family is the building block of the society? That's why. It's a school of virtue and of the wise use of freedom. Super important point. Okay, the second major section in chapter 7, I'll spend a little time with, is about communication technology. Now I realize that people think of me sometimes as the tech bishop or I'm the... new social media bishop and I've got my iPhone with me. We have cameras over here and so on. Is all this good? Of course it is. I mean, who of us would just throw these things away? These things are marvelous. I think last night when our team got here, we went down to St. Stephen's Green and Grafton Street, and we just had to find our way. They gave us one of those maps at the hotel, but then one of my team members said, we can't go walk around with a map. We'll look like complete nerds. So as though it made us less nerdy, we all took out our machines, and I got my map out. And we made it effortlessly from the hotel to St. Stephen's. St. Stephen's Green and over to the Grafton Street and all that. Great. And then the ways that we can communicate with all these media, it's a miracle. It's a miracle of grace. St. Paul to Fulton Sheen, they would have given their right arms for this kind of technology, right? But the Pope is also, like a lot of thoughtful people today, critical of dimensions of it. And I'll just say a few words about it. He does so, and I find this really interesting, under the rubric of the virtue of hope. You say, hope? What is he talking about? The very best things in life, Francis says. come after a time of waiting. They're not usually just given to us. But we have to learn to accept a certain delayed gratification. We have to be patient. Think of all of the exhortations in the scripture about patience, right? Waiting upon the Lord. Blessed are those who wait for the Lord, who are patient in their expectation. Well, what do these things do to us? And it happened last night. Oh, St. Stephen's Green, where's that? Hang on, I'll go. Oh, it's right over there. Let's go. So, who started that movie from 1945? I'll find out. Ask Mr. Google. Okay. Oh, I know. who it was, is these things, and look, we're all addicted to them. I'm guilty. I'm addicted to them. They give us the illusion, don't they, of instant gratification, that we can get pretty much whatever we want. Isn't it, isn't it, everybody, kind of miraculous that we all carry around in our pockets almost all the knowledge that humanity has ever accumulated? I mean, it's staggering. When I was a kid, if you had told us that, we wouldn't have known. never believe it. I can look up the whole Summa of St. Thomas on this thing. I can call up Dante's Divine Comedy. I could get the collective works of Aristotle right now, right now on this goofy machine. Especially if you grow up with these things. They give you, he says, This illusion of instant gratification. From the standpoint of virtue, that's a problem. Because now in regard to the deepest and most important things, we become very, very impatient. I like this now from the Pope. In our own day, dominated by stress and rapid technological advances, one of the most important tasks of families is to provide an education in holiness. hope. So one of the theological virtues is hope. The family is a school of virtue. One of the most important ones is this virtue of hope. That's part of our job. How about this now? The new technology the Pope is afraid is undermining our capacity for real socialization. Here I'm quoting. This capacity to relate to others, to listen. to share, to be patient, to show respect, to help each other live as one. I might draw your attention to the work of Gene Twenge. Gene Twenge is a psychologist from San Diego, so out in my area. neck of the woods she wrote a great book I recommend it to you called I Jen so I with the small I and then GEN so it's the I generation the the youngest people today who were raised with with an iPhone in their hand right she certainly sees all the the values and virtues of it she does she appreciates everyone does at the same time her research shows and it's it's staggering really as you read it it shows how compromised a lot of young people are becoming precisely in this regard in their capacity to relate to pick up social cues to develop friendships because he and again everybody but a guilty is charged. I'm addicted to this thing like we all are. Look what it does to us. And you see it whenever you see photographs of people with these things, how it focuses in sort of in our little tiny world. St. Augustine defines sin as incurvatus in se, meaning caved in around myself. Well, look what we look like, all of us, when we're looking at these things. She points out that years ago, this is true like when I was a kid, if you were going to see your friend at his house, at the very least, you had to ring the doorbell. And when their parents came to the door, you say, hey, can Johnny come out? to play, you at least had to relate to them. Or you had to call and maybe the parent would answer the phone. You had to be able to deal with the phone. Now, kid pulls up, I'm here. Okay, and out he comes. and and she shows and again this is a little anecdote but she shows with her research that the kids are having a much harder time with this socialization she also demonstrates and i found this very um intriguing and disturbing that kids are tending to grow up more slowly they tend to stay in a more adolescent world longer and part of that she she speculates is because of this you Uncomfortability with greater socialization. Well, the Pope, it seems to me, is very concerned about this too. Here's another quote. granting all the values as the Pope does. Still, it's clear that these media cannot replace the need for more personal and direct dialogue, which requires physical presence, or at least hearing the voice of the other person. I should say, right? I mean, if we lose that, we're losing an awful lot. And then he concludes with this image, which we've all seen. We've all seen it. Is a family sitting around the table, like at a restaurant? but every family member on his or her own device, probably texting each other, you know, pass the salt. There's the problem. And I think families as schools of virtue have to be attuned to this. You know, just one more quote, and it's from the very beginning of chapter seven, but it fits here. Listen, parents need to consider what they want their children to do. children to be exposed to. And this means being concerned about who is providing their entertainment, who's entering their rooms through television and electronic devices, and with whom they're spending their free time. That's good old-fashioned parental advice, isn't it? You know, what's coming through people's minds and hearts through these devices? Okay. So that's a little quick romp through, oh no, I'm sorry, one more little section in chapter 7. An important one. So the family is a school of virtue. We've now heard about the virtue of hope and how it is standing athwart some of this technology today. The third major section, he talks about education in sexuality. Paragraph 280, he broaches this sensitive topic for the first time. He says that sex education was clearly called for by Vatican II, which is true, and that we should certainly use, the Pope says, all of the psychological and biological and didactic sciences to help us understand sexuality. Absolutely. Grazia supponent naturam. Grace builds on nature. So we should use all of the natural sciences we have to understand the phenomenon of human sexuality. Great. But then he adds, but the proper moral... Moral training in sexuality has to go beyond those and include primarily a training in love. Now I know there's that word love which is just problematic in English because it's kind of un-nuanced. What's love? I go back to St. Thomas Aquinas. is my hero. To love is to will the good of the other. Nice, isn't it? Simple, clear bracing. To love is not a feeling, not a Is it loving myself through another? Do you know what I mean? So I'll be nice to you that you might be nice to me. That's not love. That's just sort of indirect selfishness. To love is to break out of the black hole of my self-regard that draws everything into itself and really to want, to want what's good for the other. That's everything, Christians. That's the whole spiritual life. by this they will know that you are my disciples that you love one another love is the height of the mystical life and so like everything else in life sexuality needs to be brought under the aegis of love what's the purpose of human sexuality ultimately to will the good of the other now do we have a fight on our hands in regard to this absolutely because you Almost everything in the culture militates against it. Sex for pleasure, sex for me, sex as a contact sport, you know. No, sex is under the aegis of the willing of the good of the other. It's meant to lead us to self-offering and self-gift. Where do we learn this? The Pope says in the family, in the family, the school of virtue. That's how we learn the meaning of sexuality. The problem is kids, all of us, but especially our young kids, are learning from the culture the exact opposite all the time. And if the family is no longer a school of virtue, this indispensable lesson is not going to be learned. That's, I mean, point number one. I love this, by the way. This is one of my favorite quotes from Amoris Aetitia. The Pope is talking about the virtue of modesty. And you say, oh, modesty. How sweet. How prim. How Victorian. Modesty. Who thinks modesty is a good thing today? But listen to the way the Pope characterizes it. Modesty is the natural means whereby we defend our personal privacy and prevent ourselves from being turned into objects to be used. Isn't that good? It's not a prim little Victorian hang-up. It's someone's way of seizing real power, self-control, because I'm not going to be turned into an object of your desire. The purpose of sexuality is not objectification and use of the other, but rather of self-gift. I love that, that we teach our kids modesty as a path of empowerment. If I can use our our jargon today. That's really good, I think. And then this, the Pope bemoans the fact that so often today when we talk about sexuality, it's in terms of protection and safe sex. The first problem is it tends to see children as this threat from which we have to be protected. You know, keep me safe from the threat of children. But then also, I mean, safe sex that I have to to be safe in my own space and that nothing untoward or unexpected will ever happen. And the Pope says, God, your life is not about you, but rather this surrender to God's providential purposes. And this has to do with sexuality as much as any other area of life. And if we see it under the rubric of protection and safety, then we're never going to enter into the adventure of the moral life. Does that make sense? Yes. So much of our modern sensibility is predicated upon the protection of one's individuality. Ah, but the moral life, the life of real virtue is about adventure, the adventure of love, of moving outside of one's own ego. So the Pope bemoans that language of protection and safety above all. Then this, it's so important, the Pope says, and I'm quoting, to learn the language of the body, which calls for a patient apprenticeship in learning, to interpret the, and to interpret the, Interpret and channel desire in view of authentic self-giving. I love the language of learning the language of the body. This means what the psychological sciences can teach us, etc. But see, the deepest language of the body is meant to be a language of love, of self-gift, of self-offering. Do you want a one-line summary of John Paul's theology of the body? There it is. How to train our bodies in self-gift, the Pope once said. And it's in this context of sexuality that the Pope says some of his strongest things about what I would call a culture of self-invention, and he often calls a culture of neo-gnosticism. now let me just unpack that a little bit it is a common place now in most western most of western culture that we are entitled to invent ourselves now Now, trace the roots all the way back to the Middle Ages in some cases, but coming up through people like Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century, someone like Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century, Michel Foucault in more recent years. But this view is now, I think, in the minds of almost every high school student in America. Namely, I define myself. Through my freedom, I determine the person I'm going to be. I even determine the values that will govern my life. Who are you to tell me what to do? Who are you to tell me what to think? I decide that. Look, by the way, 1992, U.S. Supreme Court, decision called Casey v. Planned Parenthood. And in that statement of the U.S. Supreme Court, we find this, I think, still breathtaking language. That it belongs to the essence of liberty to determine the meaning of one's own life, of the universe, and of existence. That's the language of the US Supreme Court. My freedom determines everything, what everything means. Aye, aye, aye. That's the path, everybody. That's the path to deep unhappiness. Let me tell you, it's exactly like a kid being handed a golf club and told, swing any way you want, off you go. How's that going to work out? No, no, no, the path to real freedom is not exercising my prerogatives. but internalizing these great virtues by which an authentic freedom emerges. Well, the Pope is on to this problem. Does he get it? Listen to this. Thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns often subtly into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Ah, that's it. That's exactly what I'm saying. Oh, my freedom determines the meaning of existence. Oh, that's all. That's all I can do is determine the meaning of everything. Come on. Come on. Listen to this now. If you think that was just a sort of one-off statement, these are from other parts of Amoris Laetitia. An appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves. The Pope rails against a gender ideology, common now in much of the West, that I can determine even my own gender. We don't have that kind of freedom, the Pope says. Listen to this now, paragraph 56 of Amoris Laetitia. I'm outside of chapter 7, of course, but listen. Yet another challenge is posed by the various forms of an ideology of gender that denies the difference and reciprocity in the nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual difference. And this... Let us not fall into the sin of trying to replace the Creator. We are creatures and not omnipotent. Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. Now see, everybody, all those passages from Pope Francis are meant to hold off this, what he calls neo-gnosticism, what I've been calling a culture of self-invention. And see, here's the thing. The problem with the culture of self-invention is it is boring. It is. It's boring. Because... It's my little projects, my little plans, my little ideas, what my freedom is capable of. Ho-hum. What does Paul say in Ephesians? There's a power already at work in you that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine. See, surrender to that power. That's the Holy Spirit. Your little projects and plans bore me to death with that. But there's a power already at work in you. See, over and against you, but at work in you. that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine. See, that's the fun and the adventure. On behalf of Pope Francis, thank you for that applause. No, but that's the thing. I don't think it's like, you know, freedom versus oppressive law. That's the wrong distinction. It's boring versus exciting, I think. When you surrender to these great objective values and allow them to condition you, now you're really going, you know? Okay, you know what? As I'm running out of time a little bit, I'm going to, not out of cowardice, I'm going to skip chapter 8 altogether, I think, because... But yeah, oh no, give us chapter eight, please. How about I'll say a couple words about it? Because they want me out of here by 11. So, um, um, no, no. See, I think now having looked at 7 in some detail, read chapter 8, please, as a continuation of that. In other words, it's about formation in the moral life. Pope Francis is keenly aware, it seems to me, of the challenges and difficulties in attaining... the fullness of the church's teaching about sexuality. It does not mean, everybody, that he's dialing down or negating this great demand. Listen to this passage. Christian marriage is fully realized in the union between a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in a free, faithful, and exclusive love and belong to each other until death and are open to the transmission of life. Well... I mean, could John Paul II have said that any more clearly, any more emphatically? There's the Pope's articulation of what we're about. And see, the church is not interested in spiritual mediocrity. It's calling people to sainthood. To be a saint means to be heroically virtuous, right? The family is a school of virtue. It's a school of sanctity. It's meant to make us saints. We're not interested in a dumbed-down or dialed-down ideal. Now, True. Clap for that. That's true. Having said that, he knows, as anyone involved in the pastoral life knows, that people obviously struggle to attain this level. People struggle to live at that saintly level. And now what do we do? Well, the Pope says, is there's two classical paths. One is the path of exclusion and using the law as a weapon. The other is the path of, let me get that wording right, listen, there are two ways of thinking that recur throughout the church's history. Can casting off and reinstating. The church's way from the time of the council of Jerusalem on has been the way of Jesus, the way of mercy and reinstatement. See, I think that very generous comment gets to the heart of what he's driving at in chapter 8. It's not negating, dialing down, denying the ideal. It is not relativism in regard to the church's sexual teaching. It's sensitivity to this. So, look, what do you do when someone is not living at the highest level of sanctity? Cast you off! The law says this! Well, okay, there is that path, but the Pope says the Church's way has been the way of mercy and reinstatement. I think that's what he's interested in in chapter 8, is our pastoral sensitivity to those in these varying situations. So, that's my very quick word. I have more I wanted to say about it. But I just frankly don't think the way this thing was characterized from the beginning has been helpful as a battle between, you know, an absolutism and a relativism. I just don't think that's right. You know, I'll say this from my own pastoral experience. I taught in seminary for many years. I was rector of Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. And I love the John Paul II generation. A lot of the kids that I taught for many years were inspired by John Paul II. They came to the seminary because of his heroic ideal. And he's my hero. I've got a picture of John Paul in my chapel. California. But if I could say this, the shadow side of the John Paul II generation of seminarians was they often got deeply frustrated when they fell short of the ideal. You know, because he was such a heroic figure. Indeed, he was and held out such a heroic ideal. Indeed, he did. And they properly were called to follow it. But then what do you do when you fail? I think they struggled with that. And I read Francis as being sensitive to that fact, that part of our pastoral experience. What do we do when people fail? And he prefers the path of mercy and reinstatement to the path of exclusion. I think that strikes me as right. Okay. How about just, I'll do one quick thing on chapter 9, which I love. It's very brief, the final chapter of Amoris Laetitia, and it's on a spirituality of marriage and the family. He first comments how Vatican II called us to a lay spirituality. So prior to the council, we tended to associate spirituality with the clerical state. And Vatican II, of course, universal call to holiness. Everyone's called to be holy, and so there should be a spirituality. that comes up out of the life of the laity. Good, and the Pope affirms that. Especially a spirituality of married life and family life. So, quite right. Here's the line that I think is the interpretive key to chapter nine, listen. Today we add that the Trinity is present in the temple of marital communion. Again, today we can add that the Trinity is present in the temple of marital communion. That idea of the temple, and I've developed it in a lot of my writing and speaking, is such a pregnant idea. the temple, the temple in ancient Israel, was the place of right praise, right? There, all the tribes of the Lord go up. They go up to worship the Lord, to engage in adoration. And that word, Pope Benedict taught us a long time ago, ad oratio in Latin. Ad ora means mouth to mouth, right? Ad ora, to the mouth of. To adore is to be aligned. Unto God. All of our powers. Aligned unto God. Working according to God's will. And purpose. Worship. That's from an older English word. Worth ship. What's of highest worth to you? Paul Tillich. The Protestant theologian once said. That all you need to know about someone. You can find out by asking one question. What do you worship? That's dead right, I think. In other words, what's of highest value to you? Once you find that out, and everybody's got it, everyone worships something. Once you find that out, you're going to be a Christian. you will know how that person's life is organized, right? So, the temple is the place where God is worshipped, where we are mouth-to-mouth with God, where all of our powers and all of our interests, our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls are aligned unto God. So what's a healthy marriage? A healthy marriage is a marriage that's like a temple, that's like a place of right praise, where everybody in the family, now listen, this may me is the most important point in the whole letter. Everybody in the family is looking not to him or herself, even not to others in the family, but are together looking to God. Does that make sense? Where everyone in the family is now a little community of worship, looking together to God. Now, some might be old enough to remember the work of Fulton Sheen, the great American preacher. Yay! Do you remember, my parents had this book, I remember as a little kid looking at it, it was called Three to Get Married, remember? And the idea was you need the bride, you need the groom, and you need God. And Sheen was playing with a very old idea, also from Aristotle. Smart guy, Aristotle. Called the transcendent third. So Aristotle said that a friendship will endure only in the measure that the two friends fall in love not just with each other, but together with a transcendent third. and send in third, right? When together they fall in love with truth, or with their country, or with God. Only then will the friendship really endure. If we say, as we often do today, that, oh no, it's the two friends, or the husband and wife, or whatever, they fall in love with each other. That can devolve rather rapidly into a shared egotism. No, no. When together they fall in love with God, now their family, now their relationship will be powerful. Here's the Pope's way of putting it. Listen to this now from paragraph 230. There comes a point where a couple's love attains the height of freedom and becomes the basis of a healthy autocracy. autonomy. Now listen, this happens when each spouse realizes that the other is not his or her own, but has a much more important master, the one Lord. Man, is that good. Listen, let me read that second part again. This happens when each spouse realizes that the other is not his or her own. So you're mine. I love you. You belong to me. No, no. But has a much more important master, the one Lord. Together we are adoring the one Lord. Together we worship God. In that our family and our relationship becomes like a temple and then it becomes really enduring. Then it's really powerful and strong. Do you remember, I'll close with this, do you remember the Bible? Are there family values in the Bible? Well, yeah, but they're often surprising to us. because we tend to sentimentalize that language. Story of Hannah, remember? Hannah can't have children. She begs the Lord at Shiloh. She weeps and she begs. And finally she's given Samuel. What does she do? This child whom she loved, she longed for, she begged the Lord for. Once she had weaned him, she brings him back to the temple and surrenders him to the Lord's service. Was it her relationship... to him undoubtedly of extraordinary sentimental value. Was that the most important? It was his relationship to the Lord that mattered the most. What's the key to a healthy marriage? Together fall in love with God. What's the key to a healthy family? That all of us together fall in love with God. See, then we're going to find, the Pope says, an authentic autonomy, an authentic freedom. Then that family will indeed become a school of virtue and indeed become the building block of the wider society. I think, friends, it's an extremely important letter. Sad in a way that we got so focused on a little part of it. The inculcation of the virtues that makes the family a school of virtue. I can't think of anything more important in the life of our society and church today. Listen, God bless you. Thanks for listening. God bless you all. Thanks.

Well, thank you all very much. God bless you. Good morning. Can you hear me okay? No.

Not working? Who can help me with the mic? Is it not working right? How's that?

Better? No? Higher? How's that?

Better? Excellent. Alright, well listen, good morning everybody again and delighted to be here with you. You know, I'm Irish by heritage, both sides of my family. My father's family is from...

My father's family is from Waterford. And my mother's family is from right here in Dublin. My grandfather, whom I never knew, he died 10 years before I was born, but he was carried away from Dublin in the arms of his sister. His parents had died, and his sisters carried him out of the immigrant ship to come to America. So even though I never knew him, whenever I come to Dublin, I think very much of my grandfather.

But my roots are all here culturally in this great country. You know, some of you might have seen my Catholicism series where we... Thank you. And we filmed, of course, all over the world. We filmed in Africa, in India, other parts of Asia, and so on.

And finally we came here to Ireland, and we filmed in a number of places. And the cameraman, John Cummings, we were filming, I think, in Glendalough. And he said, you know, Father, it's the first time you've seemed completely natural on camera. Like, this face didn't look right in the Middle East and Africa, but somehow it looked right in Ireland. So, delighted to be here, and also delighted to be talking to you about chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Amoris Laetitia that was assigned to me as the talk.

And I was very grateful to get that assignment because, as you know, everyone and his brother and sister has talked about chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia because of all the controversy. And the result of that is we often overlook these very interesting, very helpful parts of the letter. And especially chapter 7. as I reread the whole thing, I found very powerful. So I'm going to focus on 7 and 9 with maybe just a word or two about chapter 8. But in 7, we have this wonderful reflection on formation in the moral and spiritual life. And chapter 9, we have a beautiful reflection on the spirituality of the family.

So that's going to be my focus in the talk today. So let's cut to the chase and look at chapter 7. I think what appears, everybody, in chapter 7 is that Pope Francis is very much in a tradition that goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas and before him to Aristotle. And what I mean is the tradition of a virtue ethics as opposed to a rules ethics. Now, don't get me wrong.

There are rules in the moral life. There are certain acts that our tradition recognizes as intrinsically wrong. And so there are clear rules against them.

The direct taking of an innocent life, therefore abortion. Slavery, for example, is intrinsically evil, etc. But the Pope's point, it seems to me, throughout this letter is, if we present the moral life simply in terms of rules and prohibitions, We're presenting a very impoverished account of the moral life.

He prefers, as I say, the Thomistic and Aristotelian virtue ethic approach. Now what does that mean? It means that moral formation is finally about the inculcation of virtue. What's a virtue? What's a virtue but an inner and consistent disposition toward the good.

An inner and consistent disposition toward the good. How do we get virtue in us? Again, go right through St. Thomas, back to Aristotle, through habit. Listen to the Pope's line here. Without the conscious, free, and valued repetition of certain patterns of good behavior, moral education does not take place.

How do we become better people? By having virtue in us. How do we get virtue?

Through repeated habit. So that's the tradition that he's standing in. And see, bottom line for Pope Francis, the family.

is the place par excellence of formation in virtue. And there's chapter 7 in a nutshell. Now, I mentioned this virtue ethics tradition. A couple names come right to mind. One is Alistair McIntyre.

A second one, there's McIntyre's one fan or family member over there. I'm glad you're here. Okay. let's see if Stanley Hauerwas has any family members here because he's the second name I want to mention. These are two great figures in the virtue ethics tradition today.

And I'll say a word about Hauerwas because Hauerwas is from Texas. Any Texans? All right.

Texas and his dad was a bricklayer and so as a kid Stanley Harawas learned the sort of art and technique of bricklaying and he compares learning the moral life to learning how to lay bricks. How did it happen? Well not just through a set of rules. But rather through a daily and steady practice, through trial and error, through watching the work of great bricklayers, through being corrected when he did something wrong.

In this long, steady process, he internalized the virtues of being a bricklayer. and thereby was able to do it well. So, Hauerwas says, and Pope Francis is right in that tradition, that's how we tend to learn the moral life. Listen now, again, here's a quote from Francis. How do we become virtuous?

Listen. Through ideas, incentives, practical applications, stimuli, rewards, examples, models, symbols, reflections, dialogue, and a constant rethinking of our way of doing things. Now see, what's cool about that, the reason I read it that way, is it's this compilation of different ideas and methods and practices that place the virtuous life in us.

It is not simply a matter of learning a few abstract rules. That's the point. It's a lived thing.

You know, now this won't make sense here in Ireland, but when I was a kid, my game was baseball. Yay, baseball players. Here I'm sure it'd be football or hurling or something right in Ireland. But how did I learn to be a baseball player? Oh good, you know the symbol for baseball.

Very good. I just saw that. She's good. She's good. You know, I started playing baseball when I was about seven, and nobody laid out for me when I was seven the rules of the game.

Rather, I remembered vividly, I had coaches who brought us out onto the field and had us smell the field. and get down on our hands and knees and kind of feel the field. And then through a series of practices, they put the moves of baseball in our bodies, right? So all the different rehearsals that you go through. Now, in the course of many years then of practice and play, I began to internalize the rules of baseball and I became a baseball player.

Now, Having played for a long time, I also learned the rules of baseball. They emerged rather naturally out of the playing of the game. But the heart of the matter was not the rules.

It was the habituation that led to virtue. Now, here's a very important connection, and Francis makes it clearly in chapter 7. It's virtue that makes us... free. It's virtue that makes us free. And I know that seems counterintuitive.

You think, no, no, I mean, virtue is, I do, or rather freedom is, I do what I want. Don't tell me what to do. I don't like laws. I don't like restrictions. No, but think about this.

When the virtues of a game, like baseball or football or hurling or something, when those virtues are placed in you, then you can play play the game freely. You can do what the game demands. You can respond to the ever-shifting demands of the game.

It's when you don't have the virtue of the game in you that you're stymied. You're stuck. You can't play.

You know, golf, of course. Everyone loves golf in Ireland. And I love golf.

I'm lousy at it, though. Now, why am I lousy at golf? Because despite, trust me, 30-some years of effort, effort. I have I've not inculcated the virtues of golf in my body, in my mind, in my hands, right? And so when I'm faced with a difficult shot, I don't have the virtue that enables me to respond freely.

but Rory McIlroy does do I get a cheer for Rory? I thought I'd get a bigger cheer in Ireland Graham McDonald does no, no Graham McDonald alright But see, the point is, when you're learning golf, talk about habituation and talk about rules and demands. But see, once they're internalized, now you can soar, now you can play.

Freedom is not opposed to virtue. Freedom is the result of virtue. Does that make sense?

Listen now to Pope Francis. The virtuous life thus... builds, strengthens, and shapes freedom, lest we become slaves of dehumanizing and antisocial inclinations.

Just that first part, though, listen again. The virtuous life builds, strengthens, and shapes freedom. Now, I know everybody. We're all, you know, Westerners. We're all moderns.

And that runs counter to our intuitions. No, no, freedom is let me be me. Let me do what I want.

I don't want laws, rules, and habituation, and virtue, and restriction. I live the way I want. See, but that makes you a slave. That's the biblical idea. Mind you, Saint Paul can say, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.

And I am a slave of Christ Jesus. See, on our terms, that doesn't make a lick of sense. If you're anybody's slave, you're not free.

But Paul knows, when you can say, it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Now you're free. Now you're free to be the person that you want to be, are meant to be. That's the Pope's point here, very much in chapter 7. Now, where does all this happen?

So, how are we supposed to know? learned bricklaying from bricklaying masters. McElroy learned golf from his teachers and so on.

I learned baseball from my coaches. Where does moral formation happen? The family. The family.

The family. That's the Pope's point. How do we know how to be courageous? How do we know how to be prudent?

How do we know how to be kind? How do we know how to be self-sacrificing? It won't come from a rule book primarily.

It'll come from a steady day-to-day habituation in virtue led by the parents in a family, fostered by siblings within a family. In this, and here's the language he uses, in this school of virtue, we find our moral and spiritual education. That's the point he's making.

Now, is all of this positive and happy? Absolutely not. Now why?

Because learning any craft or any sport or any excellence involves lot of correction doesn't it I mean the years I was learning baseball the number of times I was corrected by my coaches how to hold the bat how to swing how to feel how to position myself think of a golfer like Rory McIlroy how many times as a kid he was cautioned and changed and affected and corrected Any musicians in the crowd will appreciate this. The great conductor, Arturo Toscanini, I read an account by one of his orchestra members who was not playing according to the time that Toscanini was giving. So the maestro came down from the podium and with his little baton, and he tapped the time on his head.

One, two, three. And the player, this great, great classical musician said he always can feel the tap, tap, tap of Toscanini whenever he plays, you know. So, the Pope says, in the moral life, lots of correction is needed. I like this. Children who are lovingly corrected feel cared for.

They perceive that they are individuals whose potential is recognized. So, there's no room in Francis'vision for a kind of just nicey-nicey, everything's fine, don't worry about it. No, on the contrary. Parents that don't correct, that don't give direction, are not going to produce virtuous children.

I love this too. He doesn't like our society today in the measure, I'm quoting again, that it tends to indulge children too much so that everything revolves around the child's desires. Now think of this not as just like, hey, I'm going to be tough on the kids. It's...

If my desire becomes the criterion, I'm never going to achieve excellence in any area. I don't want to play baseball that way. Well, I don't care. That's the wrong way to play. Oh, no, but I'd like to do it this way.

Who cares? So if we simply indulge our natural desires, we're not going to come to any sort of moral excellence. And so the Pope wants us...

Correcting, when appropriate, in this school of virtues. How about this? Again, I'm quoting him. Whenever I'm doing this, by the way, because the light is hitting the page this way, I'm quoting from the Pope. Such children will grow up with a sense of their rights, but not their responsibilities.

And that's a good way to sum it up, right? We're very big on rights. But see everybody how typically modern that is, the focus on rights, and there's obviously great room for it, but when that becomes exclusive, then this inculcation in virtue becomes attenuated. Okay, here's something.

I love in this tradition I've been describing going back to Aristotle very important role is played by masters and heroes and models Aristotle famously says If you ask, what's the right thing to do? The answer is, find the good person and imitate him. It's a cool answer, isn't it? It's very simple, deceptively so. What's the right thing to do?

Well, it's not primarily a matter of consulting the rule book. Rather, find the good person and watch him and imitate him. How do you play baseball?

Find a great baseball player. player watch him how do you play golf and see we golfers do it all the time right we're always trying to find ben hogan or jack nicholas or one of the great masters and we spend all this time imitating them watching them studying them so francis says in this tradition the saints play a decisive role Not primarily the rule book, but looking at the saints. What do they do? What are they like?

Move like them, think like them, see the world as they do. But then he adds, and it's a typically sort of Franciscan twist, I like this. Adolescents should be helped to draw analogies, to appreciate that values, these virtues, are best embodied in a few exemplary persons.

So there's the saints, right? But here's the Franciscan twist. But also realized imperfectly and to different degrees in others. Now, what I like about that is, yes to the saints.

Of course, we hold the saints up. But. Sometimes the saints can be a little bit overbearing, or it's too much, or I mean, how could I live that way?

And so, how about other figures who might not be completely heroic, maybe flawed in some way, but they still embody something of the life of virtue. And I mean, when I read that, I couldn't help but think of Graham Greene. Think of the power and the glory. And the hero of that story is the famous whiskey priest, right, in Mexico, who's... a deeply flawed, compromised character, but yet who does show forth very powerfully a life of virtue.

Or even think of one of my favorite novels in the 20th century, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. Thank you. Waugh's one fan is here too. All right.

Think of Sebastian. in that story. Talk about a compromised figure, a deeply problematic figure, but yet, but yet, by the end of that book, deeply flawed Sebastian is also, in his own way, a model of the Christian life.

Good. The saints and even some of these more compromised figures can be exemplars in the life of virtue. Okay, let me just cut now to the last part of this first section of chapter seven.

Paragraph 274, we find this. The family is the first school of human values where we learn the way. Wise use of freedom. That's meant to be a one-line summary of everything I've said so far. Paragraph 274. The family is the first school of human values where we learn the wise use of freedom.

Do you see everybody, if the family breaks down, and it is in trouble certainly all over the western world, if the family breaks down, the prime school of virtue breaks down. And if that breaks down... then we're in trouble as a society. Do you see too now why Catholic social teaching has always said the family is the building block of the society? That's why.

It's a school of virtue and of the wise use of freedom. Super important point. Okay, the second major section in chapter 7, I'll spend a little time with, is about communication technology. Now I realize that people think of me sometimes as the tech bishop or I'm the...

new social media bishop and I've got my iPhone with me. We have cameras over here and so on. Is all this good? Of course it is. I mean, who of us would just throw these things away?

These things are marvelous. I think last night when our team got here, we went down to St. Stephen's Green and Grafton Street, and we just had to find our way. They gave us one of those maps at the hotel, but then one of my team members said, we can't go walk around with a map. We'll look like complete nerds. So as though it made us less nerdy, we all took out our machines, and I got my map out.

And we made it effortlessly from the hotel to St. Stephen's. St. Stephen's Green and over to the Grafton Street and all that. Great. And then the ways that we can communicate with all these media, it's a miracle. It's a miracle of grace.

St. Paul to Fulton Sheen, they would have given their right arms for this kind of technology, right? But the Pope is also, like a lot of thoughtful people today, critical of dimensions of it. And I'll just say a few words about it.

He does so, and I find this really interesting, under the rubric of the virtue of hope. You say, hope? What is he talking about?

The very best things in life, Francis says. come after a time of waiting. They're not usually just given to us. But we have to learn to accept a certain delayed gratification. We have to be patient.

Think of all of the exhortations in the scripture about patience, right? Waiting upon the Lord. Blessed are those who wait for the Lord, who are patient in their expectation.

Well, what do these things do to us? And it happened last night. Oh, St. Stephen's Green, where's that?

Hang on, I'll go. Oh, it's right over there. Let's go.

So, who started that movie from 1945? I'll find out. Ask Mr. Google. Okay.

Oh, I know. who it was, is these things, and look, we're all addicted to them. I'm guilty. I'm addicted to them.

They give us the illusion, don't they, of instant gratification, that we can get pretty much whatever we want. Isn't it, isn't it, everybody, kind of miraculous that we all carry around in our pockets almost all the knowledge that humanity has ever accumulated? I mean, it's staggering. When I was a kid, if you had told us that, we wouldn't have known. never believe it.

I can look up the whole Summa of St. Thomas on this thing. I can call up Dante's Divine Comedy. I could get the collective works of Aristotle right now, right now on this goofy machine. Especially if you grow up with these things.

They give you, he says, This illusion of instant gratification. From the standpoint of virtue, that's a problem. Because now in regard to the deepest and most important things, we become very, very impatient. I like this now from the Pope.

In our own day, dominated by stress and rapid technological advances, one of the most important tasks of families is to provide an education in holiness. hope. So one of the theological virtues is hope.

The family is a school of virtue. One of the most important ones is this virtue of hope. That's part of our job. How about this now? The new technology the Pope is afraid is undermining our capacity for real socialization.

Here I'm quoting. This capacity to relate to others, to listen. to share, to be patient, to show respect, to help each other live as one. I might draw your attention to the work of Gene Twenge.

Gene Twenge is a psychologist from San Diego, so out in my area. neck of the woods she wrote a great book I recommend it to you called I Jen so I with the small I and then GEN so it's the I generation the the youngest people today who were raised with with an iPhone in their hand right she certainly sees all the the values and virtues of it she does she appreciates everyone does at the same time her research shows and it's it's staggering really as you read it it shows how compromised a lot of young people are becoming precisely in this regard in their capacity to relate to pick up social cues to develop friendships because he and again everybody but a guilty is charged. I'm addicted to this thing like we all are. Look what it does to us.

And you see it whenever you see photographs of people with these things, how it focuses in sort of in our little tiny world. St. Augustine defines sin as incurvatus in se, meaning caved in around myself. Well, look what we look like, all of us, when we're looking at these things.

She points out that years ago, this is true like when I was a kid, if you were going to see your friend at his house, at the very least, you had to ring the doorbell. And when their parents came to the door, you say, hey, can Johnny come out? to play, you at least had to relate to them. Or you had to call and maybe the parent would answer the phone.

You had to be able to deal with the phone. Now, kid pulls up, I'm here. Okay, and out he comes. and and she shows and again this is a little anecdote but she shows with her research that the kids are having a much harder time with this socialization she also demonstrates and i found this very um intriguing and disturbing that kids are tending to grow up more slowly they tend to stay in a more adolescent world longer and part of that she she speculates is because of this you Uncomfortability with greater socialization.

Well, the Pope, it seems to me, is very concerned about this too. Here's another quote. granting all the values as the Pope does.

Still, it's clear that these media cannot replace the need for more personal and direct dialogue, which requires physical presence, or at least hearing the voice of the other person. I should say, right? I mean, if we lose that, we're losing an awful lot. And then he concludes with this image, which we've all seen. We've all seen it.

Is a family sitting around the table, like at a restaurant? but every family member on his or her own device, probably texting each other, you know, pass the salt. There's the problem. And I think families as schools of virtue have to be attuned to this.

You know, just one more quote, and it's from the very beginning of chapter seven, but it fits here. Listen, parents need to consider what they want their children to do. children to be exposed to.

And this means being concerned about who is providing their entertainment, who's entering their rooms through television and electronic devices, and with whom they're spending their free time. That's good old-fashioned parental advice, isn't it? You know, what's coming through people's minds and hearts through these devices?

Okay. So that's a little quick romp through, oh no, I'm sorry, one more little section in chapter 7. An important one. So the family is a school of virtue. We've now heard about the virtue of hope and how it is standing athwart some of this technology today.

The third major section, he talks about education in sexuality. Paragraph 280, he broaches this sensitive topic for the first time. He says that sex education was clearly called for by Vatican II, which is true, and that we should certainly use, the Pope says, all of the psychological and biological and didactic sciences to help us understand sexuality. Absolutely.

Grazia supponent naturam. Grace builds on nature. So we should use all of the natural sciences we have to understand the phenomenon of human sexuality. Great. But then he adds, but the proper moral...

Moral training in sexuality has to go beyond those and include primarily a training in love. Now I know there's that word love which is just problematic in English because it's kind of un-nuanced. What's love? I go back to St. Thomas Aquinas.

is my hero. To love is to will the good of the other. Nice, isn't it? Simple, clear bracing. To love is not a feeling, not a Is it loving myself through another?

Do you know what I mean? So I'll be nice to you that you might be nice to me. That's not love.

That's just sort of indirect selfishness. To love is to break out of the black hole of my self-regard that draws everything into itself and really to want, to want what's good for the other. That's everything, Christians. That's the whole spiritual life.

by this they will know that you are my disciples that you love one another love is the height of the mystical life and so like everything else in life sexuality needs to be brought under the aegis of love what's the purpose of human sexuality ultimately to will the good of the other now do we have a fight on our hands in regard to this absolutely because you Almost everything in the culture militates against it. Sex for pleasure, sex for me, sex as a contact sport, you know. No, sex is under the aegis of the willing of the good of the other.

It's meant to lead us to self-offering and self-gift. Where do we learn this? The Pope says in the family, in the family, the school of virtue. That's how we learn the meaning of sexuality.

The problem is kids, all of us, but especially our young kids, are learning from the culture the exact opposite all the time. And if the family is no longer a school of virtue, this indispensable lesson is not going to be learned. That's, I mean, point number one.

I love this, by the way. This is one of my favorite quotes from Amoris Aetitia. The Pope is talking about the virtue of modesty. And you say, oh, modesty.

How sweet. How prim. How Victorian.

Modesty. Who thinks modesty is a good thing today? But listen to the way the Pope characterizes it.

Modesty is the natural means whereby we defend our personal privacy and prevent ourselves from being turned into objects to be used. Isn't that good? It's not a prim little Victorian hang-up.

It's someone's way of seizing real power, self-control, because I'm not going to be turned into an object of your desire. The purpose of sexuality is not objectification and use of the other, but rather of self-gift. I love that, that we teach our kids modesty as a path of empowerment. If I can use our our jargon today. That's really good, I think.

And then this, the Pope bemoans the fact that so often today when we talk about sexuality, it's in terms of protection and safe sex. The first problem is it tends to see children as this threat from which we have to be protected. You know, keep me safe from the threat of children.

But then also, I mean, safe sex that I have to to be safe in my own space and that nothing untoward or unexpected will ever happen. And the Pope says, God, your life is not about you, but rather this surrender to God's providential purposes. And this has to do with sexuality as much as any other area of life. And if we see it under the rubric of protection and safety, then we're never going to enter into the adventure of the moral life. Does that make sense?

Yes. So much of our modern sensibility is predicated upon the protection of one's individuality. Ah, but the moral life, the life of real virtue is about adventure, the adventure of love, of moving outside of one's own ego. So the Pope bemoans that language of protection and safety above all.

Then this, it's so important, the Pope says, and I'm quoting, to learn the language of the body, which calls for a patient apprenticeship in learning, to interpret the, and to interpret the, Interpret and channel desire in view of authentic self-giving. I love the language of learning the language of the body. This means what the psychological sciences can teach us, etc.

But see, the deepest language of the body is meant to be a language of love, of self-gift, of self-offering. Do you want a one-line summary of John Paul's theology of the body? There it is. How to train our bodies in self-gift, the Pope once said. And it's in this context of sexuality that the Pope says some of his strongest things about what I would call a culture of self-invention, and he often calls a culture of neo-gnosticism.

now let me just unpack that a little bit it is a common place now in most western most of western culture that we are entitled to invent ourselves now Now, trace the roots all the way back to the Middle Ages in some cases, but coming up through people like Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century, someone like Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century, Michel Foucault in more recent years. But this view is now, I think, in the minds of almost every high school student in America. Namely, I define myself. Through my freedom, I determine the person I'm going to be. I even determine the values that will govern my life.

Who are you to tell me what to do? Who are you to tell me what to think? I decide that. Look, by the way, 1992, U.S. Supreme Court, decision called Casey v. Planned Parenthood.

And in that statement of the U.S. Supreme Court, we find this, I think, still breathtaking language. That it belongs to the essence of liberty to determine the meaning of one's own life, of the universe, and of existence. That's the language of the US Supreme Court.

My freedom determines everything, what everything means. Aye, aye, aye. That's the path, everybody. That's the path to deep unhappiness. Let me tell you, it's exactly like a kid being handed a golf club and told, swing any way you want, off you go.

How's that going to work out? No, no, no, the path to real freedom is not exercising my prerogatives. but internalizing these great virtues by which an authentic freedom emerges.

Well, the Pope is on to this problem. Does he get it? Listen to this.

Thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns often subtly into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Ah, that's it. That's exactly what I'm saying.

Oh, my freedom determines the meaning of existence. Oh, that's all. That's all I can do is determine the meaning of everything. Come on. Come on.

Listen to this now. If you think that was just a sort of one-off statement, these are from other parts of Amoris Laetitia. An appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves. The Pope rails against a gender ideology, common now in much of the West, that I can determine even my own gender.

We don't have that kind of freedom, the Pope says. Listen to this now, paragraph 56 of Amoris Laetitia. I'm outside of chapter 7, of course, but listen. Yet another challenge is posed by the various forms of an ideology of gender that denies the difference and reciprocity in the nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual difference. And this...

Let us not fall into the sin of trying to replace the Creator. We are creatures and not omnipotent. Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. Now see, everybody, all those passages from Pope Francis are meant to hold off this, what he calls neo-gnosticism, what I've been calling a culture of self-invention. And see, here's the thing.

The problem with the culture of self-invention is it is boring. It is. It's boring.

Because... It's my little projects, my little plans, my little ideas, what my freedom is capable of. Ho-hum.

What does Paul say in Ephesians? There's a power already at work in you that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine. See, surrender to that power. That's the Holy Spirit.

Your little projects and plans bore me to death with that. But there's a power already at work in you. See, over and against you, but at work in you.

that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine. See, that's the fun and the adventure. On behalf of Pope Francis, thank you for that applause. No, but that's the thing.

I don't think it's like, you know, freedom versus oppressive law. That's the wrong distinction. It's boring versus exciting, I think.

When you surrender to these great objective values and allow them to condition you, now you're really going, you know? Okay, you know what? As I'm running out of time a little bit, I'm going to, not out of cowardice, I'm going to skip chapter 8 altogether, I think, because... But yeah, oh no, give us chapter eight, please. How about I'll say a couple words about it?

Because they want me out of here by 11. So, um, um, no, no. See, I think now having looked at 7 in some detail, read chapter 8, please, as a continuation of that. In other words, it's about formation in the moral life.

Pope Francis is keenly aware, it seems to me, of the challenges and difficulties in attaining... the fullness of the church's teaching about sexuality. It does not mean, everybody, that he's dialing down or negating this great demand. Listen to this passage. Christian marriage is fully realized in the union between a man and a woman who give themselves to each other in a free, faithful, and exclusive love and belong to each other until death and are open to the transmission of life.

Well... I mean, could John Paul II have said that any more clearly, any more emphatically? There's the Pope's articulation of what we're about.

And see, the church is not interested in spiritual mediocrity. It's calling people to sainthood. To be a saint means to be heroically virtuous, right? The family is a school of virtue.

It's a school of sanctity. It's meant to make us saints. We're not interested in a dumbed-down or dialed-down ideal. Now, True. Clap for that.

That's true. Having said that, he knows, as anyone involved in the pastoral life knows, that people obviously struggle to attain this level. People struggle to live at that saintly level.

And now what do we do? Well, the Pope says, is there's two classical paths. One is the path of exclusion and using the law as a weapon.

The other is the path of, let me get that wording right, listen, there are two ways of thinking that recur throughout the church's history. Can casting off and reinstating. The church's way from the time of the council of Jerusalem on has been the way of Jesus, the way of mercy and reinstatement. See, I think that very generous comment gets to the heart of what he's driving at in chapter 8. It's not negating, dialing down, denying the ideal.

It is not relativism in regard to the church's sexual teaching. It's sensitivity to this. So, look, what do you do when someone is not living at the highest level of sanctity?

Cast you off! The law says this! Well, okay, there is that path, but the Pope says the Church's way has been the way of mercy and reinstatement. I think that's what he's interested in in chapter 8, is our pastoral sensitivity to those in these varying situations. So, that's my very quick word.

I have more I wanted to say about it. But I just frankly don't think the way this thing was characterized from the beginning has been helpful as a battle between, you know, an absolutism and a relativism. I just don't think that's right. You know, I'll say this from my own pastoral experience. I taught in seminary for many years.

I was rector of Mundelein Seminary near Chicago. And I love the John Paul II generation. A lot of the kids that I taught for many years were inspired by John Paul II.

They came to the seminary because of his heroic ideal. And he's my hero. I've got a picture of John Paul in my chapel.

California. But if I could say this, the shadow side of the John Paul II generation of seminarians was they often got deeply frustrated when they fell short of the ideal. You know, because he was such a heroic figure.

Indeed, he was and held out such a heroic ideal. Indeed, he did. And they properly were called to follow it. But then what do you do when you fail?

I think they struggled with that. And I read Francis as being sensitive to that fact, that part of our pastoral experience. What do we do when people fail?

And he prefers the path of mercy and reinstatement to the path of exclusion. I think that strikes me as right. Okay.

How about just, I'll do one quick thing on chapter 9, which I love. It's very brief, the final chapter of Amoris Laetitia, and it's on a spirituality of marriage and the family. He first comments how Vatican II called us to a lay spirituality. So prior to the council, we tended to associate spirituality with the clerical state.

And Vatican II, of course, universal call to holiness. Everyone's called to be holy, and so there should be a spirituality. that comes up out of the life of the laity. Good, and the Pope affirms that.

Especially a spirituality of married life and family life. So, quite right. Here's the line that I think is the interpretive key to chapter nine, listen.

Today we add that the Trinity is present in the temple of marital communion. Again, today we can add that the Trinity is present in the temple of marital communion. That idea of the temple, and I've developed it in a lot of my writing and speaking, is such a pregnant idea.

the temple, the temple in ancient Israel, was the place of right praise, right? There, all the tribes of the Lord go up. They go up to worship the Lord, to engage in adoration.

And that word, Pope Benedict taught us a long time ago, ad oratio in Latin. Ad ora means mouth to mouth, right? Ad ora, to the mouth of.

To adore is to be aligned. Unto God. All of our powers.

Aligned unto God. Working according to God's will. And purpose. Worship.

That's from an older English word. Worth ship. What's of highest worth to you? Paul Tillich. The Protestant theologian once said.

That all you need to know about someone. You can find out by asking one question. What do you worship? That's dead right, I think.

In other words, what's of highest value to you? Once you find that out, and everybody's got it, everyone worships something. Once you find that out, you're going to be a Christian.

you will know how that person's life is organized, right? So, the temple is the place where God is worshipped, where we are mouth-to-mouth with God, where all of our powers and all of our interests, our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls are aligned unto God. So what's a healthy marriage?

A healthy marriage is a marriage that's like a temple, that's like a place of right praise, where everybody in the family, now listen, this may me is the most important point in the whole letter. Everybody in the family is looking not to him or herself, even not to others in the family, but are together looking to God. Does that make sense?

Where everyone in the family is now a little community of worship, looking together to God. Now, some might be old enough to remember the work of Fulton Sheen, the great American preacher. Yay!

Do you remember, my parents had this book, I remember as a little kid looking at it, it was called Three to Get Married, remember? And the idea was you need the bride, you need the groom, and you need God. And Sheen was playing with a very old idea, also from Aristotle.

Smart guy, Aristotle. Called the transcendent third. So Aristotle said that a friendship will endure only in the measure that the two friends fall in love not just with each other, but together with a transcendent third. and send in third, right? When together they fall in love with truth, or with their country, or with God.

Only then will the friendship really endure. If we say, as we often do today, that, oh no, it's the two friends, or the husband and wife, or whatever, they fall in love with each other. That can devolve rather rapidly into a shared egotism.

No, no. When together they fall in love with God, now their family, now their relationship will be powerful. Here's the Pope's way of putting it. Listen to this now from paragraph 230. There comes a point where a couple's love attains the height of freedom and becomes the basis of a healthy autocracy. autonomy.

Now listen, this happens when each spouse realizes that the other is not his or her own, but has a much more important master, the one Lord. Man, is that good. Listen, let me read that second part again. This happens when each spouse realizes that the other is not his or her own.

So you're mine. I love you. You belong to me.

No, no. But has a much more important master, the one Lord. Together we are adoring the one Lord. Together we worship God.

In that our family and our relationship becomes like a temple and then it becomes really enduring. Then it's really powerful and strong. Do you remember, I'll close with this, do you remember the Bible?

Are there family values in the Bible? Well, yeah, but they're often surprising to us. because we tend to sentimentalize that language.

Story of Hannah, remember? Hannah can't have children. She begs the Lord at Shiloh.

She weeps and she begs. And finally she's given Samuel. What does she do? This child whom she loved, she longed for, she begged the Lord for.

Once she had weaned him, she brings him back to the temple and surrenders him to the Lord's service. Was it her relationship... to him undoubtedly of extraordinary sentimental value.

Was that the most important? It was his relationship to the Lord that mattered the most. What's the key to a healthy marriage? Together fall in love with God. What's the key to a healthy family?

That all of us together fall in love with God. See, then we're going to find, the Pope says, an authentic autonomy, an authentic freedom. Then that family will indeed become a school of virtue and indeed become the building block of the wider society. I think, friends, it's an extremely important letter.

Sad in a way that we got so focused on a little part of it. The inculcation of the virtues that makes the family a school of virtue. I can't think of anything more important in the life of our society and church today.

Listen, God bless you. Thanks for listening. God bless you all. Thanks.

Transcript for:Virtue and Family in Amoris Laetitia

Transcript for:
Virtue and Family in Amoris Laetitia