8 February 2019
Friday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
One of the reasons so many people today identify as “spiritual but not religious” is that religions have obligations and moral practices. Religions have commandments and precepts and customs and rubrics and indults and so on. Taking on these obligations need not be an experience of increased constraint. St. Ignatius, for example, insisted on the opposite opinion: that religious morality liberates more than it constrains. That is why, in his Spiritual Exercises, he instructs his exercitants to examine their consciences carefully in light of religious obligations. As he puts it “The subject matter for examination will be the Ten Commandments, the laws of the Church, the recommendations of superiors. All transgressions of obligations arising from any of these three groups are more or less grievous sins” (SpEx 42). This is an indispensable component of Ignatian Spirituality. The whole first week is built on it.
Every aspect of Christian morality is relevant to Ignatian Spirituality, including today’s scripture: “Let marriage be honored among all and the marriage bed be kept undefiled, for God will judge the immoral (Latin fornicatores;Greek πόρνους) and adulterers” (Heb 13:4). We must resist the temptation to see Hebrews 13 as a dark chapter in an otherwise enlightening spiritual book. A frank point is being made about the reality of the human person and the spiritual life. For some it is easy to follow this teaching, for others it is very hard. Sexual addiction and abuse pose problems which our Church still wrestles with.
It is not the purpose of this post to enumerate and explicate the specifics of Christian morality. The best reference for that is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This post’s purpose is merely to re-emphasize that for Ignatian Spirituality, Christian morality liberates more than it constrains. Do you want to be truly free?