Divorce, annulment and GCSE

This week’s announcement by the Vatican about reforms to the legal structures which deal with questions of marital nullity may seem to the outsider to be quite obscure. But they represent another phase in the reforming zeal of the current Pope and have triggered a variety of responses and debates on social media.
http://www.news.va/en/news/press-conference-details-marriage-law-reforms

It is also another interesting case study of the point I made in a recent blog on the GCSE debate:

The real value in looking at religious perspectives on ethical issues is the contribution it makes to an in-depth study of the religion itself …. NOT the contribution it makes to understanding the ethical issue. But that is just the thing that too much GCSE teaching fails to achieve. Too many pupils cannot contextualise the religious teachings within the religion itself.

What is intriguing about this discussion within the Catholic Church is not so much the perspective it throws on the philosophical, ethical and social issues surrounding divorce but the fascinating insights it provides into the theological, legal and political life of Catholicism.

To quote one valued member of our community:

“I cannot stress how significant this is. It may seem obscure to the outside world but there is a whole cadre of Catholics who cannot receive communion because they have divorced and remarried without an annulment. This leaves them adrift from the Sacraments unless they live celibate lives. This has been a scar on the lives of very very many and it is by the far the most radical step this Pope has made so far. You need to change your textbooks. This is revolutionary and opens up the possibility that we have only just started to see the extent of the change possible under the papacy.”

It is not easy to summarise the current debate but here are some of the threads:

• the proposed reforms do not touch the nature and purpose either of marriage, or of the Church’s marriage law
• for Catholics, marriage is a sacrament and is by its nature indissoluble; there is no change to the teaching on divorce which remains a barrier to re-marriage and taking Eucharist
• headlines about the Pope making divorce ‘easier’ are very misleading and do not understand the complex nature of Catholic teaching
• when a marriage is accused of nullity, the Church investigates to see whether the parties presumed to be married ever actually executed a valid marriage contract in the eyes of the Church
• debates within the Church focus around this notion of an ‘invalid marriage’; the idea that a marriage can be ‘nulled’ if it was flawed from the outset
• the current reforms relate to speeding up the process of determining a ‘nullity’ in order to reduce the suffering caused to those involved and make it easier to re-marry
• the changes are seen by many Catholics to reflect the reforming zeal of the current Pope
• lying in the background are concerns about authority within the Church and whether the proposals will trigger a counter attack to try to undermine the Pope with open rebellion by some clergy

The debate around ‘nullity’ raises all kinds of fascinating questions. How does the Church go about changing its thinking? We have seen all kinds of comment and reflection. This, for example, offers an interesting female perspective.

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2015/09/09/as-a-catholic-i-welcome-the-changes-to-the-churchs-annulment-process/

But what is significant from the point of view of RE and GCSE is that the Church’s teaching is based on a set of beliefs, arguments and structures of authority which can seem at first sight to be quite alien to the outsider. It will be difficult for the non-Catholic to understand how the Catholic teaching can inform a wider philosophical or ethical debate about marriage and divorce. So, to paraphrase the quote above:

The value in looking at Catholic perspectives on marriage and divorce is the contribution it makes to an in-depth study of the Catholicism itself …. NOT the contribution it makes to understanding the ethical issue.

As Andy Lewis has usefully pointed out, “the unchanging Catholic Church may well be changing. However we need to be careful to cover the subtleties of these changes at GCSE level”.

The enquiries that are triggered by the debate seem to circle around these kinds of wider questions:

• How are decisions about theology, law and morality made within the Catholic Church?
• How is the Catholic Church responding to changes in modern society?
• What impact are those changes having on the theology, laws and institutional structures of the Church?
• How is the Church trying to interpret its teaching in the contemporary world?
• What do the issues tell us about the politics of the Catholic religion?

But frustratingly, these questions about the social reality of religion in the modern world are not embraced with sufficient seriousness by the revised GCSE courses. It will be for skilled teachers to develop opportunities for students, particularly those in non-Catholic schools, to engage with these kinds of question in ways that will bring authenticity and credibility to their learning.