cormacburke.me.ke

            The Autumn 1995 issue of your Newsletter carried an article on my jurisprudence by Prof. Rik Torfs, a translation of a paper that he presented some four or five years ago at a Flemish Canon Law Workshop. The trouble in responding to this article is that it is somewhat dated - certainly as regards the present state of discussion between myself and my respected friend and sparring partner, Prof. Torfs.

Canon 1057 and the Object of Matrimonial Consent (Malta lecture, Feb. 1992)

"Giving oneself"

            The obvious answer to the question "what is the object of matrimonial consent?", is, "marriage itself". Just as obviously, however, this is not very enlightening from the juridic viewpoint which is interested in pinning down the specific, and above all the essential, rights and obligations that consent gives rise to.

      
             An article and Editorial of your issue of September 19th have just come to my notice.  Commenting on a recent High Court Judgment of Mr. Justice Rory O'Hanlon, you take me to task for a negative view of contraception given in my book "Covenanted Happiness" (which Justice O'Hanlon quotes in his judgment).  The implication, it would seem, is that I offer an outdated theological understanding of conjugal sexuality, unacceptable to modern concepts of human freedom and rights.

     Let us first recall a few elementary ideas about both conscience and law, and then consider some aspects of their inter-relationship.

           Conscience can be described as a personal interior faculty pointing to the right and wrong of one's actions. It is what the moral theologians call the proximate norm of morality.  Vatican II speaks of it as the interior voice "always summoning man to love good and avoid evil, speaking to his heart, saying: do this, avoid that" (GS 16).