Within Fabrice Hadjadj's busy agenda during his recent visit to Spain, there was time for a lively discussion with the priest José Fernández Castiella. The topics they discussed included marriage, freedom, vocation and celibacy, in connection with the book "The Marriage of the Priest".Marriage, the great divine invention".
The meeting took place at Modesta Bookstore, something particularly timely, because as Hadjadj pointed out "there is a very strong link between marriage and reading, reading beautiful stories. Because being able to venture into a marriage is also about having listened to good and beautiful stories, because you keep believing in this wonderful adventure. I think there is a very strong link between bookstore, reading and marriage, and today we are seeing a loss of the sense of the storytelling of marriage because we have also lost the sense of reading. That's why it's great that we are in this 'modest' bookstore, a modest bookstore but with a very strong concentration of intelligence and words."
The marriage narrative
Fabrice Hadjadj approached the nature of marriage from the perspective of "the narrative of a drama", in which the weight of unsolvable problems and situations manifests itself in many dimensions, including the lack of fullness in the exercise of sexuality. This same dramatic narrative can be seen as a reflection of the "drama" of the History of God's Salvation of the people of Israel. For his part, Fernandez Castiella took the argument to the anthropological terrain, attributing to the supernatural end of human desire the cause of marriage, which "is always pending a fullness to be attained and therefore maintains its projective character".
Personal freedom plays a decisive role in the configuration of the marriage vocation, since the promise, the unconditional and total relationship that it originates and the commitment to the future, means that marriage must be considered, according to José Fernández, as "the paradigmatic vocation that concentrates the essential elements of the human and from which all vocations must be understood", including his own vocation as a priest.
For this reason, he underlined the confluence between vocation and freedom with a phrase from Hadjadj's book "The Depth of the Sexes": "God's will is desires for men".
Celibacy
The French philosopher dealt with the question of priestly celibacy by making an analogy with circumcision as a mutilation and divine seal in the people of Israel, while the Spanish author defended the idea that the Eucharist is the company that takes the celibate out of solitude. Both agreed that marriage and celibacy mutually claiming and enriching each other.
The moderator of the meeting, Paula Hermida, described chastity based on the drive for immediacy that characterizes our society. While the Catholic tradition - St. Thomas Aquinas in particular - has treated chastity as part of the virtue of temperance, Hadjadj thinks that it is a part of justice, since it refers to relationships with others and the chaste person is the one who is able "to give to each his own".
In this sense, the French author explained that chastity intensifies femininity or masculinity, to which the priest focused his discourse on the lack of chastity as fragmentation that reduces the person to his genitality.
Chastity
"Education in chastity does not consist so much in repressing a drive as in broadening the gaze to see the other with his being and complete biography. This is where respect is born. That is why an education through beauty that educates the gaze and recovers the contemplative sense that integrates all dimensions is necessary," said Castiella.
In relation to the possibility of being happy in this dramatic narrative of marriage and the fears that impede the audacity to embark on adventures, Hadjadj resorted to examples from literature to claim exemplarity. Hadjadj resorted to examples from literature to vindicate exemplarity, to which Castiella supported the urgency "to freely assume the leading role in one's own biographical drama and considered that the problem of the lack of audacity is not fears but the lack of greatness of soul".
