Bishop Philippe spoke to US newspaper

Sunday, February 16, 2025

It seems that bishop Philippe Jourdan spoke unusually clear words about the law that finally regulated same-sex marriage in Estonia. The article From 6 to 6,000 - Meet the bishop of the growing diocese of Estonia) was published in October 2024 but I read it only now.

Here is my excerpt of what Philippe answered to their questions: “It’s difficult to talk with the government (…) because sometimes the government is not very much in favor of our way of seeing things. (…) We work a lot together on relations with the state, especially when there are laws on marriage or on life that are not very good. There we go, Lutherans, Catholics, Orthodox, Baptists and other denominations, visiting politicians giving a common witness of faith. (…) With regards to the government, God works miracles, but we do not (laughs). Last year there were elections and now we have the most progressive government in this country, and they wanted to pass a gay marriage law almost immediately. (…) [I]n the end the parliament passed this law, but it was clear that the Christian churches are very united on this issue, that we are all in favor of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Certainly, we did not achieve what we wanted, which was not allowing this law to pass, but we clearly made known the position of the Church and that the Church defends this not because we are conservative and old, but because we have a clear and rational position on these points. I believe that in the long run this will bear fruit.”

I said “it seems” in my first sentence because I suspect newspapers in general and this one in particular of sometimes reflecting other people’s words in a biased way. This one is called The Pillar, and nomen est omen. Another reason for my “it seems” is my hope that Philippe is actually more open-minded than this. It’s a common issue with faith questions that the answer is right before you but you don’t see it, and that people get you wrong when you talk about it. Otherwise the article gives an easy-to-read introduction to the Church in Estonia.

Yes, the topic of same-sax marriage is a frightening one because it requires subtle but deep changes in the teachings of the Church. Such changes cause a lot of work and require much time and energy, and it’s easy to burn one’s fingers. Software developers say here be dragons when they need to change something in a piece of complex old source code.

But there are more important topics. Rather than trying to explain why we shouldn’t call it a “marriage” when a same-sex couple lives together, you’d better explain to our government “the need to accelerate decarbonisation and fight climate change, the need of highly indebted countries to retain fiscal space to invest in poverty eradication, social services and global public goods, and the need to get back on track towards reaching crucial Sustainable Development Goals” (as the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences wrote last Friday in their opening of a workshop on Tax Justice and Solidarity). And the Vatican’s Secretary of State, in his speech at that opening, is even clearer: “The current global tax system is no longer fit for purpose. It favours multinational corporations, deepens social inequalities and makes it easier for the wealthiest to consolidate their power.” (Source: Vatikan ruft zu globaler Steuerreform auf)

Dear Philippe, it is true that people get afraid when they hear that things need to change, that we need to repent. But isn’t this the key point of the Gospel? Stop being afraid. Francis gives clear signals. Your job as the bishop is to lead your flock, not to follow a small subset of it. The Church is growing in Estonia despite your mistakes, which consist in cultivating a clerical and introvert church that is obsolete by at least 50 years. Your flock is growing because Francis does not make these mistakes, because God wants the Gospel to get announced to everybody. Do not fear. Trust in the Pope and help your flock to do so as well.

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Our contemporary hope for marriage

A friend reacted as follows:

The predominant image of marriage in the new testament is of Christ and his bride the Church. This image depends on a cultural concept of marriage that has disappeared in the west - of a passive and dependent bride passed from her parental family to her husband who will take on the responsibility of caring for her and that the bride will obey her husband.

Our contemporary hope for marriage however, is that romantic love will play a far greater rôle than it did hitherto, and that the partners will share domestic responsibilities and work for equal pay, with a safety net provided by the state for women who have maternal responsibilities for children both within the marriage and, if the marriage fails, outside it. I think that the ‘bride of Christ’ image has very little light to shed on such a view of marriage. A marriage of equals requires a different image - like the image of the ‘body of Christ’ in which the cells of the body play individual and complementary parts.

It’s interesting that when the Church defines ‘traditional’ marriage today, it speaks about ‘the union of one man with one woman’, but omits the traditional words ‘for life’. Yet the ‘for life’ part is founded on the clear words of Jesus recorded in the gospels. It seems to me that this suggests that the Church has already accomodated itself to divorce and remarriage despite our Lord’s teaching. In contrast to their clear teaching about marriage, the gospels have nothing to say about same sex attraction.

Above all, the Church should encourage personal truthfulness as the seedbed for discipleship. It is very wrong to encourage people to deceive themselves about their own nature or to act out a rôle in order to fit in with an acceptable template of what a holy lifestyle should look like. What’s needed is a sensitivity to the many different ways in which God has created human beings and loving support for them as they discover how to follow Christ within their God-given nature.