It is the end of an era in an English corner of Rome: after almost two decades as Rector of the Beda College, Mgr Roderick Strange is leaving.Mgr Strange – or “Rod” to his friends – is widely considered to be one of the English Church’s most thoughtful figures. Trained at the Venerable English College, Rome, during the years of the Second Vatican Council, he has an Oxford doctorate and has written widely on theology. Alongside guiding the seminary for late vocations in those from the English-speaking world, he has been called upon regularly to speak and write about the figure of John Henry Newman, on whom he is an expert. In the autumn, Mgr Strange, 70, is due to publish a 750-page edition of Newman’s letters and he will also be taking up a visiting pro
13 August 2015, The Tablet
Father figure
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User Comments (1)
Mgr Strange’s contrast of sacramental with civil marriage overlooks the NATURE of marriage, which is both enhanced by being made a sacrament, and is also the underlying minimum common sense standard of moral validity of all civil marriages. It is this oversight, I think, that obstructs Mgr Strange ‘s appreciation of the significance of Jesus Christ’s own attestation, in St Matthew, that the human nature of marriage has been created from the beginning as being between ‘male’ and ‘female’ indissolubly. Instead, Mgr Strange regards indissolubility as a feature exclusively of sacramental marriage, and rather artificially stretches Jesus’ point about His teaching not being capable of acceptance by everyone, to make it refer to what He had said about marriage as naturally created,, when His immediately subsequent explanation clearly indicates that it was the foregoing of marriage, and not marriage as created by God, that not everyone could understand without a special gift from God Complexities, including those of marriage, make no sense without understanding the IDENTITY of what they complicate.