“You dodged it,” I smiled at my priest as the congregation was filing past him after Mass, and he grinned, knowing what I meant. The theme of the readings and sermon had been divorce and Our Lord’s uncompromising views upon the matter. And Fr Costello had looked at every aspect except the one that a lot of those in church would have been mentally focusing on: the exclusion of divorced and remarried Catholics from the sacrament of Communion.
I can murder somebody in the morning and receive the bread and wine in the evening provided I repent in between. But were I married to a drunken philanderer with thousands of child abuse images on his computer, divorced him and married a quiet, devout soul, I would be barred from the Lord’s table for ever in the Catholic Church. If I observe that in such circumstances the Church would be more understanding if I murdered rather than divorced him, that is not dark humour but a cry of incomprehension, for it is true.
Oh, the theology is easy enough to understand. Any one-off act, even if likely to be repeated, is over and done with and cannot be undone, but someone living in a marriage which the Church does not recognise as sacramentally valid is in an ongoing state of sin, because theoretically he or she can leave said state and return to the old one, or at least to the single life. But in practice that is a nonsense and simply means breaking two sets of vows instead of one.
It is possible to repent of anger and still be angry, of jealousy and still be jealous or of gluttony while thinking about the huge meal on the evening’s menu. In my book Sackcloth and Ashes, which is about penance, I examine the proposition that one can repent and sin simultaneously.
Of course it is unlikely that many divorced and remarried Catholics are sorry for what they did – only for the need to do it. So the necessary condition of absolution – repentance – is missing in any meaningful sense of the word.
One solves most such conundrums by asking a simple question: what would Christ have done? It becomes even easier if we can ask what He did do. He said to the woman taken in adultery “… neither do I condemn thee”, but added “go and sin no more”.
Unfortunately for those going home to a second spouse, they are not able to observe that exhortation, which leaves those arguing for a gentler approach than the current one waffling about Jamesian exceptions and infinite mercy.
I am among those wafflers, but what I argue for is discretion on either the part of the bishops, who can already annul a marriage, or of parish priests, who know their faithful and their circumstances well enough to judge whether a marriage has been cast aside lightly or whether it had become intolerable for all but saints, and maybe even for them too.
The teaching is clear enough but the practice is a fudge. A priest once told me that he did practise discretion, relying on the absolute indissolubility of marriage where he felt the case was not worthy and quietly giving the sacraments when he thought it was. I understand that only too well as a resolution of a dilemma but it hardly makes for cohesion or obedience.
In other cases people have told me that in such a situation they simply turn up for Communion in other parishes where the priest doesn’t know them. I understand that too, but it is still a long way from satisfactory, for if we are not to go down the same route as the Anglicans – and let everybody believe whatever they like and accommodate all of it as though it were Gospel – then the situation needs formalising and resolving. The Church’s teaching is either revealed truth or it is not; or as Cardinal Hume once memorably put it, it is not presented on an à la carte menu.
The problem extends well beyond divorce. It is generally acknowledged, for example, that a large number of otherwise devoutly practising Catholics use artificial contraception. They claim “conscientious dissent” and carry on, many probably not even bothering to confess it. Far better, surely, to allow it as long as it is not abortive, no matter at how early a stage. After all, what is the difference in intent between natural and artificial means? The desired result is exactly the same.
However, the purpose of this article is not to select particular acts of defiance but to look at the bigger picture: the balance between what the Church teaches and what it enforces, and just how wide a gap it can afford to let develop between the two without losing credibility and cohesion.
Ann Widdecombe is a novelist, broadcaster and former prisons minister
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