It has always seemed to me to be a sad thing, mystifying, that pilgrims on a journey in faith such as Hilary Langden and her husband (The Tablet, Letters, 25 October) should, sooner or later, find the possibility of being admitted to full Communion with the Catholic Church stymied by the revelation to them of an irregularity in Canon Law which now convicts them of a "sin" of which they were conscientiously ignorant over 30 years of marriage.
Forty years ago when I was a rookie representative on the National Conference of Priests, the admission to Holy Communion of divorced and remarried Catholics was a hot topic. I was kindly taken aside by Mgr Dan Shanahan, long deceased, but at that time vicar-general of Brentwood and himself a canon lawyer, who, with great clarity and assurance, instructed me in the protocol, in such cases, of reconciliation in the internal forum.
For a priest working at the coalface and struggling with established hardline and often unfair solutions to these pastoral dilemmas, the advice Dan offered me was a liberating experience.
I have striven to put it into practice ever since, and still firmly believe that I have brought hope, and immense peace of conscience, to hundreds of couples and individuals. I include in this a large number of newly received converts, applying the now well established protocol on their first individual experience, as new Catholics, of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
It distresses me to read that, three generations on, the majority (it would seem) of divorced and remarried Catholics, including those aspiring to be Catholics, find themselves in, or potentially facing, the Limbo of Excommunication.
Edward Butler, County Donegal, Ireland
In the early summer of 1944 an archbishop wrote to answer a query sent to him by a priest of his church. The priest wanted to know whether or not he should admit to the sacrament a remarried divorcee with a young son. The archbishop was clearly reluctant to allow such admission in general but, following the advice once given by a sometime colleague, he allowed that the woman might be admitted to the sacrament for the sake of the boy as he was approaching the age of confirmation. The archbishop stipulated that the child should be told at the right moment "that there has been this irregularity and that consequently the question had to be referred for decision by authority". The mother (so he added) should be told "that her position is contrary to the requirement of the Church but that we wish this not to stand in the way of her religious life and the religious progress of her son".
The author of the letter was not a Catholic but an Anglican – none other the great William Temple of Canterbury; the deceased bishop whose advice he chose to follow was Walter Frere of Truro, an Anglo-Catholic. Temple is now often regarded as a liberal but his counsel in this case was hardly lax. Few Catholics know (so one suspects) how rigorous many Anglicans once were in their moral theology: figures such as Gore and Kirk were hardly less orthodox on divorce, abortion and even birth control than their Catholic contemporaries. Do Catholics (and I write as a recent convert) really want to exchange their moral teaching for Anglican uncertainty and anarchy?
Yours sincerely, CDC Armstrong, Belfast
Loading ...
