Bishop Jean Laffitte, a specialist in conjugal ethics and also Secretary
of the Pontifical Council for Life, delivered the keynote address, at a major family conference promoted by the Australian Bishops, on
the meaning and mystery of love.
The culture of marriage, the culture of love and the ‘culture of the family,’ a term used by Blessed Pope John Paul II, “go together,” the Secretary to the Pontifical Council for the Family Bishop Jean Laffitte said in the closing address at the Third National Family Gathering in Melbourne on 17 April.
The French-born prelate – who holds a Doctorate in Moral Theology and who served as the undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family (PCF) and as the Vice-President of the Pontifical Academy for Life before being appointed Secretary of the PCF in 2009 – spoke on the philosophical and theological aspects of the nature of love, human and divine.
From personal experience, he mentioned as a point of “justice” his own experience of family and gave testimony to his own parents, because love for families is something he said he had received from them.
His parents had 12 children and, although now in heaven, he said, they have 36 grandchildren and 52 or 53 great-grandchildren.
Bishop Laffitte reflected on whether human love was genuinely a “good piece of news”.
The presence of so many families at the gathering was “proof” that human love was a “piece of good news”.
But the two requirements for this philosophical test concern the “discovery” at the natural level a person makes by means of his fundamental experience, ie that man discovers himself loved and a “revelation of a supernatural order”.
“Man discovers himself loved; it is the original experience of a child … but it is also revealed through this unconditional love of his parents,” the Bishop said.
The divine revelation comes when the Pharisees and the Disciples ask Jesus about the Law of Moses and obligation to the law in scripture, Mark 19: 3-13.
“In this sense, it is a very superficial question and demonstrates well that they have no idea at all that love might have a meaning; that there exists a beauty of love,” Bishop Laffitte said.
He said, Christ’s response reflects “a divine deliberation of the Creator that created the world and formed man as man and woman, an original plan of God”.
It is Christ who “unveils” God’s plan in Scripture, which, the Bishop said, is an “invitation to contemplate the beauty present within the same nature of love”.
“The response of Jesus, if you remember, is such: ‘At the beginning it was not so. Have you not read that from the beginning that the Creator made them male and female? For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. And the two shall become one flesh’,” he said, paraphrasing.
The two mysteries of love – the beauty of love that is “inscribed truly in creation” and “another love: a steadfast love that unites Christ to His Church” – interpenetrate one another, he said.
Bl Pope John Paul II, in a Wednesday catechesis in 1979 on human love, wrote, “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion. Right “from the beginning,” he is not only an image in which the solitude of a person who rules the world is reflected, but also, and essentially, an image of an inscrutable divine communion of persons”.
In this “extraordinary sentence,” Bishop Laffitte said, “we can relate our love, family love, marriage to this love, which exists in God in a divine communion of the divine persons in the Trinity.”
A relativistic vision of love does not permit one to perceive the natural beauty of love, he said.
But the Church sees herself obligated, in light of Revelation, to deepen more the implication of the truth of marriage and the family; the divine design for this community of life, the Bishop said.
What demands does the Church make on a man and woman who want to marry?
“The first is about mutual consent: the freedom of the person. And the reciprocity of the gift is an objective verification of love and certainly the condition for the happiness of the spouses,” he said.
The second demand is about the irrevocable character of the conjugal covenant, he said.
That marriage is indissoluble is not particular only to the Catholic Church, but rather it “belongs to the intrinsic nature, to the very essence of human love,” because love is a gift.
“It is true that the sacrament reinforces and consolidates indissolubility but it does not bring it into existence. It’s not an exterior addition but rather a permanent quality proper to a marriage validly contracted,” he said.
A third demand that the Church makes upon the spouses is that they are “open to life”, as within the Creator’s design this union is “oriented not only towards the personal good, the union of the love of the spouses but also to the service of life.”
After all, the transmission of life does not all depend always on the will of the spouses, he said but, borrowing terms used in the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, Bishop Laffitte said it is about the loving availability to present acts from which the possible consequence is the coming into existence of a new human being.
He clarified that the call to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ in the Biblical sense is not “a categorical imperative” but “primarily a benediction, a blessing, that when it is welcomed, opens the heart of the spouses to the joy of the gift of life and to the joy of participating in the act of the creation”.
“That’s why the spouses are called ‘pro-creators’ because only God creates,” he said. Bishop Laffitte then turned his attention to forgiveness and its place in the nature of love.
What can forgiveness – pardon – add to the beauty of human love?
However beautiful the love of the spouses might be in our eyes, it “is always something a little altered,” the Bishop said, “damaged by the infirmity of sin,” a condition belonging to everyone.
“Sin is an objective disaffection from the original light of God; it does not only refer to an action that contradicts the will of the Creator, but also to the objective state we are in of the human condition that has lost the splendour of its beauty,” he said.
Because of this, all human love finds itself in need of constant purification, so that something of its first beauty might be restored in it, he said.
The mystery of this purification is found within forgiveness, he said.
Forgiveness is not only an act by which a grave offence is remitted but is also, he said, a “disposition of love that embraces weakness, the sins and the infirmities, the insufficiencies of the conjugal spouse”.
The word “pardon” comes from the Latin, per dono, where per describes something of perfection, of achievement, and dono means gift. “Per dono is dono which is, a perfect gift,” he said.
“Love’s capacity to offer eventual forgiveness attests to its authenticity and in so doing verifies its origin,” he said.
“A love that excludes pardon is by definition destined to end and die.” Christian marriage has – as its particular vocation – to express a little of the mystery of the eternal union between Christ, the spouse, to His Church, he said.
“The capacity to signify and actualise the union of Christ and the Church belongs in nature to this community of life and of love between man and woman that is marriage,” he said.
“The relationship between the gift of Christ and the gift that spouses make of their life is not symbolic. The one and the other are two mysteries of love and of the transmission of life. The sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist comes from a definitive victory over death.
“The irrevocable, indissoluble and indestructible covenant of Calvary has rendered human nature capable of such an irrevocable, indissoluble and indestructible union,” he said.
The love of Christ for His Church is by nature a love that pardons, he said. “The Eucharistic sacrifice is the place where this union between Christ and the Church is re-actualised,” he said.
Because of this, the love of the spouses must be “sacramentally invigorated” by this divine source in order to become a love that always is more capable of pardoning, of forgiving, he said.
When forgiveness takes place in marriage, it is an “expression of conjugal fidelity,” and “it actualises the initial alliance of the spouses,” Bishop Laffitte said.
“And when you say ‘I forgive you,’ it is exactly the same as saying ‘I make a covenant again with you’. It is an actualisation of the covenant. For this reason, pardon is inscribed within the logic of love because it is a gift,” he said.
Forgiveness, pardon, is rendered a perfect expression of love to the measure in which it expands the limits of it, he said.
The fact that we can say that God loved us means and includes the fact that we have been forgiven – this divine love is a forgiving love, he said.
God constantly remakes His covenant with us as couples, as a family and as a person, he said, primarily with His people and then with each one of His sons.
“When the spouses are brought to pardon each other, they bring about the sublime testimony that love is stronger than death and they carry within the assurance of eternal life,” he said.
Therein lies “our true hope for the future,” he said.