Communion or suspicion: which way for woman and man?

• Author: Alvare, Helen M.

INTRODUCTION

In recent decades, the Roman Catholic Church has contributed considerable intellectual resources to the subject of intimate, heterosexual relationships. These resources also feature historically unprecedented attention to the question of the identity, roles, and situations of women. Citing only the most significant documents, these resources include the 130 Wednesday audiences of Pope John Paul II on the Theology of the Body between 1978 and 1982. (1) They also include his 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem. (2) In 1995, in connection with the United Nation's Fourth World Conference on Women, Pope John Paul II addressed his Letter to Women. (3) Also in 1994, he issued the comprehensive Letter to Families. (4) In 2004, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), in his position as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote a letter to all the bishops of the world entitled On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World. (5) Finally, in 2005 Pope Benedict XVI issued his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, the first half of which treated at length the nature of love, beginning with the love between a man and a woman. (6)

Painting with a very broad brush, it can be said that these documents together propose a model for intimate heterosexual relationships between men and women. This model is grounded in an anthropology of woman and man based first and foremost upon the creation of each in God's image and likeness. Consequently, it understands man and woman as radically equal. It also understands their sexual difference to be oriented intrinsically to communion, in mutual service to one another. This is indicated, though not completely constituted, by their biophysical beings. Marriage is the way most human beings will live out this call to communion and service. The man and the woman, and the pair together, also are always subject to Christ. Their relationship is essentially good, but at the same time it suffers a brokenness as a result of original sin. Each sex manifests this brokenness somewhat differently, as well as in relation to the other. Christ's life, death, and Resurrection show humanity the way of love, including the way of triumph over broken love. For each person, and in particular for intimate heterosexual pairs, that way requires "finding oneself by losing oneself." (7)

For the sake of brevity, this Article will call the foregoing the "communion and mutual service model" of intimate, heterosexual relationships. In addition to Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, there are other religious and legal scholars who have endorsed one or more elements of this model--whether drawing upon religious sources or images, (8) or upon the discipline of ethics. (9) Their contributions will be discussed below in Part II.

The development of the communion and mutual service model coincided historically with unprecedented legal changes in laws and practices in the United States, which reduced barriers to cohabitation, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce, and same-sex marriage. Theoretical legal and cultural reflections upon these developments often concluded with calls for sweeping change, both in the private sphere of intimate heterosexual relationships and in the public laws and policies affecting them. Often reacting to past or ongoing situations of oppression, discrimination, or even violence against women, several of these proposals evidenced deep suspicion of men and their capacity for loving relationships. They neglected discussing men's equality or dignity and sometimes despaired of securing men's assistance as a spouse or a parent. Other proposals sought to secure a strict equality of functional outcomes both within and outside of heterosexual relationships. Together, this Article will call the proposals introduced in this paragraph the "suspicion model" of intimate heterosexual relations. This model includes varying proposals, but they all tend toward suspicion regarding males' capacity for good behavior in such relations.

Family law in the United States is currently grappling with questions that engage the anthropological issues raised by both the suspicion and the communion and mutual service models. These questions include, inter alia, whether to valorize and promote marriage as compared with other intimate unions such as same-sex unions or cohabitation, whether to continue to devote public funds to encouraging nonresidential fathers' involvement with their children, whether and how to devote public resources to stabilizing marriage, and whether to reform divorce laws in order to slow down or even discourage divorce. The appeal of one or the other of these models could play an important role in providing answers to all these questions.

More dramatically, John Paul II and Benedict XVI claim that in some sense, humanity's successful understanding of the meaning of human life is at stake in the contest between these two models. This is because both popes contend that love is the very meaning of life and that, for the vast majority of people, love is learned, understood, communicated, and spread--or not--within the context of an intimate heterosexual relationship. It is not at all difficult to conclude that society at large is affected in myriad practical ways by whether or not men and women successfully negotiate the terrain of intimate heterosexual relationships. At the very least, children's well-being is at stake.

While this paper concludes that the communion and mutual service model better accounts for and enables good heterosexual relationships, it will not overlook the salutary cautions, messages, or prescriptions offered by the suspicion model. Ultimately, however, this paper concludes that the communion and mutual service model can not only accommodate but can even illuminate the legitimate concerns of the suspicion model while holding onto a model of intimate heterosexual relationships that invites a more desirable, fruitful collaboration or communion between men and women.

This paper will therefore proceed as follows. Part I sets forth the elements of the communion and mutual service model as gathered from the leading, relevant documents of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. Part II describes and compares some of the existing models of intimate heterosexual relationships that share one or more elements of the communion and mutual service model, as proposed by scholars in law and religion. Part III sets forth the suspicion model. Part IV considers how the communion and mutual service model might correct and illuminate the suspicion model and offers general support for particular directions in the law affecting intimate heterosexual relationships.

1. MAN AND WOMAN IN COMMUNION AND MUTUAL SERVICE

   This section will describe an anthropology of human persons in the context of their inclinations to form intimate heterosexual relationships. John Paul II and Benedict XVI have developed this anthropology in large part from the Genesis accounts of the creation of the human person, the Fall, and its aftermath. This Article's description of this model is very brief compared to the primary sources from which it draws, but it contains all of the elements necessary for a fruitful comparison with the suspicion model.

   According to Pope John Paul II, the "basis of Christian anthropology" is God's act of creating every human being in his image and likeness, an act that reveals man and woman to themselves. (10) John Paul II writes that "both man and woman are human beings to an equal degree" precisely because each is made in God's image. (11) Thus, the basis for equality of man and woman comes from an outside source. It is unchangeable. It is not about appearances, functions, strengths or weaknesses, but simply about our coequal humanity.

   Like God, man and woman are rational and free. (12) Also like God, we are made for relationship and communion. This is based upon God's existing as three persons in one God in an eternal communion of love. John Paul II writes that this "social" nature of the human person is, in fact, a "prelude to the definitive self-revelation of the Triune God: a living unity in the communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit." (13) It is also grounded in a reading of the Genesis creation account, in which God concludes after the creation of man that "[i]t is not good that the man should be alone." (14) Both creation accounts in Genesis understand the human being as a "unity o the two, as existing always in relation to another human person. (15)

   Within this model, what is the purpose of sexual differences? John Paul II and Benedict XVI conclude that they exist to enable communion. In the second creation account, immediately after creating Eve to be Adam's "helper," (16) God directs that a man shall "leave[] his father and his mother and cleave[] to his wife, and they [shall] become one flesh." (17) When Adam sees the woman, he recognizes her immediately as "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh," (18) a "somatic homogeneity." (19) In other words, talk of heterosexual union, including physical union, follows immediately upon the creation of Eve. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote previously in On the Collaboration of Men and Women, one should not be distracted from the reality of Eve's equality-with-differences by the language of "helper" used in Genesis to describe Eve. To modern ears, it may appear to connote someone lesser in rank. But Benedict XVI writes that "[t]he Hebrew word ezer which is translated as 'helpmate' indicates the assistance which only a person can render to another. It carries no implication of inferiority or exploitation if we remember that God too is at times called ezer with regard to human beings (cf. Ex. 18:4; Ps. 10:14)." (20)

   It is important to note the role played by the physical complementarity of Adam and Eve in the Genesis creation accounts. In his summary of this aspect in John...