Many things have saddened me during my forty years as a priest, but the most common has been listening to people who have found themselves at odds with the official teaching of the Church on marriage and divorce. For many of a certain generation this is a cause of great anxiety, and as I have listened to their stories over the years I have felt, not only sad, but angry. Angry, not at the people involved, and not fundamentally at the Church either, but at the fact that so much of the suffering people experience is completely unnecessary, based, as it so often is, on a complete misunderstanding of what the Church’s position on these matters actually is, a misunderstanding which often arises – and it gives me no pleasure to say this – from the fact that many of my fellow priests have themselves not understood the Church’s position and so have placed on people burdens they did not need to carry. And so many good people have spent years feeling rejected by the Church, feeling they could not go to Mass and, worst of all, living with the often deeply buried fear that, if they were to die, they would be rejected by God too and go to hell. Many of you will know of such cases. You may even be one yourself. And so, having listened to Jesus’ own words, not easy ones for us to hear, I would like to try and clarify what exactly it is the Church is saying today. The key document here is one published by Pope John Paul in November 1981 on the subject of the family, and I could not even begin to count the number of times I have t read it to people over the years.
In it, the Pope, in a a section towards the end – numbers 80 to 84 if you want to Google it – speaks at length about the variety of situations people find themselves in in today’s society, including people who have been divorced but who have not remarried – with whom the Church has no problem whatsoever - and those who, having been divorced, have subsequently married again. I can’t quote it all to you today, but if you do read it for yourself you will see how the text simply oozes compassion, understanding and care for the individuals involved, qualities which, sadly, have not always been reflected in the attitude of the Christian community. But I do want to quote you the last part, words which I virtually know by heart now, and which sum up the official view of the Church, if not the view of many Catholics and not a few clergy. And this is what the Pope says: ‘I earnestly call upon pastors and the whole community of the faithful to help the divorced (and remarried), and with solicitous care to make sure that they do no consider themselves as separated from the Church, for as baptized persons they can, and indeed must, share in her life. Let the Church show herself a merciful mother and thus sustain them in faith and hope.’ a far cry, I am afraid, from the experience of many people in our parishes. As a Church, we should hang our heads in shame for what we have sometimes done to them and if any of you here have been the victims of such gross ignorance I can only say that I am sorry.
There is, however, a ‘but’ and it is a pretty big ‘but’ because, although you can sense in the text his sadness at having to say it, the Pope reaffirms in this document the practice of the Church, based, he says, on Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion, divorced persons who have remarried, his fundamental reason being what he sees as the Church’s need to do nothing which would undermine in any way the permanence and idissolubility of marriage. Human beings, in other words, are made for and ultimately capable of a love that is permanent and unchanging and, in a world which more and more rejects the mere possibility of this, the Church must stand up for it. So faced with this, what are individual divorced and remarried people in the Church to do?
Well, here we come to an area which traditional Catholicism has not prepared us for, the area of discernment based on an intimate personal relationship with God. And, as I prepare to leave for West Kilbride in two weeks times, one of my hopes would be that, in the twenty four years I have been here I would have helped some of you, at least, to enter this very challenging, sometimes lonely, often painful but profoundly rewarding world of personal choice. And by personal choice, I do not mean doing what we like or what suits us. It’s much more profound than that and can only be understood by individuals with a high level of moral and spiritual maturity. It has nothing to do the kind of attitude that says; ‘The church is wrong. Who cares what the Pope says? I’ll just do what I like.’ This is infantile or, at best, adolescent, and has nothing to do with discernment. Genuine discernment in this area begins with a real respect for and willingness to understand why the Church says what it does and to recognize the truth contained in it. But there’s another truth here, too, which has been the basis of Catholic morality since the early Middle Ages, which is that conscience is the ultimate norm of morality. And so the mature Catholic, while accepting the teaching of the Church for what it is, has, in the end to stand before God in prayer and, using all the tools of personal discernment, which includes respecting the rights and sensibilities of others, decide what is the right thing to do and, with God’s grace, have the courage to do it. And there is no point in expecting the Church to agree or tell you that it’s OK. It cannot do that. Only the mature individual can do it for his or herself, which is why, in forty years as a priest I have never told any divorced and remarried person either to go to Communion or not to go. Many times, I know, they would have liked me to. Sometimes I could see the look in their eyes, pleading with me to make their decision for them and let them off the hook. It would have made things so much easier. But to have done so would have been to rob them of a privilege and responsibility which goes with being human. In the end, you see, we all have to make our own moral decisions and have the courage to stand before God with them.
And its not always easy.
BIDDING PRAYERS
We begin today by praying for all those men and women who, as a result of painful and complicated relationships in the past, have found themselves at odds with the Church’s laws on marriage and as a result have felt rejected and abandoned by the Christian community. We ask God to reach deep into their hearts today and heal the hurt they feel and, if it is what they want, give them the courage they need to return to the Church into which they were born................Lord hear us
In the document w heard from today, Pope John Paul uses over and over again words like, ‘care,’ ‘compassion,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘tolerance’ and ‘love’ for people in all kinds of situations. He calls on us to understand the world we live in with all its pressures and never to indulge in judgement or condemnation. And so we pray that, both as a parish and as individuals we will become more like this ourselves and so show to the world the true and authentic face of the Church..................Lord hear us
When it comes to things like relationships, marriage and so on, the world we live in is in a constant state of turmoil. Old certainties have been lost or abandoned and the world is struggling to find alternatives to them. Caught up in this turmoil are the young. Born into a world almost lacking in moral landmarks or signposts, they are left to find their own way at an age when they are simply not ready to do so. And so we ask God to guide them when we do not............Lord hear us
Faced with the turmoil and confusion of our time, the Institutional Church feels a great need to defend the whole institution of marriage. For centuries marriage and the belief that human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, are capable of life-long, faithful unconditional love has been the foundation stone of our society. And so, at a time when many no longer believe in this vision, we pray for the insight to understand why the Church says what it does................Lord hear us
In the first reading today from the book of Genesis, we hear the most amazing affirmation of the fundamental equality of men and women – ‘This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh - an idea which, when Genesis was written, was light years ahead of its time. Even now the world is a long way from fully understanding this truth. And so we pray for a final end to all chauvinism on the part of men and of all discrimination against women in the world................Lord hear us
And we pray for married people in our parish and in the community around us. We ask God to give them the courage, generosity and selflessness they need to be what they are called to be and which, with God’s grace, they are capable of being. But we pray in a special way for couple who are struggling at this time to be faithful to the promises they made that, with God’s help, they will find a way forward together.............Lord hear us
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