May 14, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – An Australian archbishop recently appointed to the Vatican’s chief doctrinal office has said that the most important task facing this year’s upcoming Synod on the Family is how to teach people to embrace true, heroic, self-sacrificial love.
“This is a real crisis, a crisis of what it means to love, and how to love, and how we support people in loving well,” Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Syndey, Australia told Vatican Radio.
Archbishop Fisher said it’s very easy to get distracted by the controversies surrounding the synod. Though he acknowledged that people living in irregular unions are facing very real questions that need answers, he said the fundamental issue facing the synod is how to love.
“Deep down I think many people know they’re not actually very good at loving,” said Archbishop Fisher. “They’re not very good at the self-sacrifice it takes, they’re afraid of the commitment that it might take, the vulnerability that comes with loving, the consequences of it failing.”
Pope Francis made two new appointments Wednesday to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican’s chief doctrinal body: Archbishop Fisher and Archbishop Roland Minnerath of Dijon, France.
Archbishop Fisher has a doctorate from Oxford University in Bioethics, and has done work for the CDF in the past. While the archbishop has not been told specifics of what he will do in his new post, he said he does expect to continue to give opinions on doctrinal matters that come before the CDF from across the world.
In the interview with Vatican Radio, Archbishop Fisher responded to questions about love, bioethics, marriage and family and personhood.
He pointed out that many people nowadays don’t bother to get married, and lamented the failure of the marriages of many who do.
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“I think modernity has often reduced love through romanticizing it, sentimentalizing it, exploiting it in various ways commercially,” the archbishop said, “and so people have a certain view of love which is largely about feelings, about a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, being warm and fuzzy about the world, and thinking obsessively about one other particular person and getting certain satisfactions from that relationship.”
This is a Valentine’s picture of romantic the world has been sold that is very different from the love Christ exhibited for us on the cross, he said.
“Christianity has proposed a very different view of love,” Archbishop Fisher said. “That is the cross-shaped, Easter-kind of loving. It’s a loving that loves even when it’s hard, that loves even when you don’t get the warm fuzzy feelings.”
Even as the synod fathers prepare take up issues such as the definition of marriage, children in the family, same-sex attraction and reception of Communion for the divorced and remarried, the archbishop reminded listeners that while synods are pastoral, ultimately they will end up touching on doctrine.
“The synod of last year and the synod forthcoming are not expected, haven’t been, not expected to be doctrinal synods, they’re very much pastoral synods,” he said, “but we know that the issues they consider also have their doctrinal implications.”
Australians can have a straightforward approach to resolving issues, he said, something he will likely bring to his CDF role. And while moral issues often don’t lend themselves to quick resolution, the archbishop said being focused on results that bring what’s best for people is something that is compatible with Catholic Tradition.
“People don’t just want endlessly to debate a thing,” Archbishop Fisher said, “they want at the end of good honest dialogue to have a way forward to have some wisdom on what to do next.”
The Catholic approach to human dignity is something he will take with him when he debates controversial philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer in Sydney August 13 on end-of-life issues.
“We believe human beings are made for immortality and greatness in this life and the next,” the archbishop said. “And that’s very different to an approach that says human beings are basically consumers of resources, receptacles for pleasure and pain, or perhaps one replaceable with another. We take a view that they are of immeasurable value and made for greatness.”
This means the whole way a Catholic approaches these issues is very different from that of a utilitarian philosopher, making common ground and even common language difficult in the euthanasia debate, because these are almost incomprehensible to modern philosophers.
Catholics have a view about the importance of commitment, self-sacrifice, love, redeeming love and redeeming suffering, he said.
“We are hoping for, wanting for greatness in each other, and heroism in each other, and happiness in each other,” Archbishop Fisher said. “It’s not enough to have in some way contributed to some balancing act of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ in the world, and have been minimizing the amount of discomfort in yourself or in others. We want really great things from people.”
He offered the example of a mother’s love as she gets up in the middle of the night when the baby is crying, and she does it, even though it’s difficult, because she has a job to do.
“But it really is love,” the archbishop said, “that means she perseveres in that kind of self-sacrifice.”
He thinks the synods can help Catholics and the world learn and appreciate this again.
“That self-sacrificial love, personified by Jesus Christ, by his Holy Week, and his Easter for us, that’s the kind of loving that we need to learn again and to teach the world.”
