On divorce and remarriage, Church should meet people where they are

Reading recent correspondence in The Tablet about the predicament of remarried divorcees, I have been struck again by the way the Church has stymied itself by insisting on trying to squeeze people in to the straitjacket of doctrinal rules rather than working to accommodate the rules to people's real lives (the so-called 'pastoral' approach).

As the not entirely comfortable beneficiary of an annulment, I feel that I should make one crucial point: if a marriage has died, it cannot be pretended into life - least of all if one partner has entered a new life with another person. Equally, a second marriage that persists purposefully and joyfully for many years is very much alive - and cannot be denatured by either damning with faint praise (good for them but it's not really a marriage) or condemning it as unrepented serious sin.

There are countless faithful Catholics all over this world who know that their second marriage is given by God and blessed by Him. This is the lived and loved truth - a truth unaffected by the fulminations of those who cannot understand that theology is always incomplete.

Sin? We all sin but not necessarily in eventually finding faithul love with a second spouse: the real sin would be in abandoning one's spouse and all those who depend on the second marriage in order to provide some fictional evidence of repentance for a dead personal history.

Christopher Smith, by email