In Mystery and Sacrament of Love, Cardinal Ouellet attempts to redefine the whole sacramental order so as to stop the deleterious advancement of liberation theology (2), postmodernism (2), the thought of Karl Rahner (9), and “the sexual revolution, feminism, and most recently, attempts to redefine the institution of marriage” (xii). Of all these though, the last is his main concern.
Ouellet combats these perceived threats to the Catholic tradition “by adopting the nuptial paradigm” of John Paul II (xiii) as the root metaphor for his “renewed understanding of the sacraments” (xiii). This nuptial paradigm has two primary aspects. First, it takes as its starting point the “man-woman polarity” (110), which “belongs to man's being in the image of God (122). Second, this “man-woman polarity” entails a complementary union between the two as the fundamental way of understanding God: the “man-woman relation provides the most adequate image for describing the unfathomable mystery of the Trinity” (280).
For Ouellet, then, the sexual act between a man and a woman is the fundamental reality upon which Christianity is built. Marriage becomes “the most ancient sacrament” and so “the paradigm of the sacramental order” (155). The “spousal mystery is the hermeneutical key” for correctly understanding the Eucharist (241), and “the conjugal union” is a participation “in the nuptial relationship between Christ and the Church” (43).
The result is that all aspects of Christian life are built upon this sexual bedrock. Christ's “spousal fecundity generates the Church” (125), and it is his “seed” that makes the Church fruitful (139). Mary “allows it [the Bridegroom's fruitfulness] to bear fruit in her, opening for him the space of her believing womb,” and Christ “deposited in the womb” to make it fruitful (205). The Holy Spirit is the “intra-trinitarian fruit of the mutual gift of the Father and the Son” (275). These are troubling metaphors, as they not only imply sex between mother and son and sex between father and son but also describe the genesis of the church as a kind of Christic onanism. If Ouellet was trying to stop homosexuality, these sexualized understandings of Christianity fail to do so. They evoke sexual acts that the Magisterium has found at least as problematic as homosexuality.
Beyond these troubling metaphors, though, there is a greater tension between Ouellet's project and the church. The most fundamental metaphor for Christianity is not sexual love, not eros, but self-sacrificing love, agape. The sacraments have not been understood as participating in sexual activity but rather cruciform living. In making the nuptial paradigm fundamental, Ouellet has made sex the framework for understanding the Incarnation and Crucifixion, the reverse of what most Christians believe. As a result, heterosexual activity becomes the primary way to follow Christ instead of something like the corporeal works of mercy noted in Matthew 25:31–46.
By making sex the fundamental metaphor for Christianity, Ouellet's project transforms the heart of Christianity into an antigay argument. Given this radical implication, Ouellet's book is not very useful for understanding marriage, sacraments, and Christianity in ways consonant with the tradition. Thus, the value of Ouellet's book is not in its content per se but rather as an example of the lengths some will go to oppose homosexuality.
