The sacrament of marriage and Church teaching

[Gorgias]

When I go to Mass and hear the homilies talk about …

or how I hear homilies gloss over the very real problems Catholics and Catholicism is facing…

I do interpret it as liberalized.

Whether or not you realize it, you’ve just identified why homilies aren’t the best places to teach all manner of things: we tend to hear what we want to hear (and ignore what we want to ignore), and interpret things according to our pre-conceived notions. So, when a homilist tackles a complex subject in a 6-7 minute homily, and directs it toward a congregation of mixed maturity and with a variety of intellectual/spiritual/emotional formation… he very seriously risks being ‘interpreted’ rather than ‘heard.’

In this case, then, the suggestion that this sort of subject matter is handled best in another context is a very reasonable suggestion. (That doesn’t mean that it should be ignored in all other contexts – certainly, canon law places the responsibility for teaching about marriage at the feet of the pastor, and that responsibility is not to be fulfilled only at the time of marriage preparation! However, it does mean that an ounce of discretion goes a long way…)