Madam, - The Catholic Church lays great stress on authority - the authority of God, the bible, the church, the pope, the bishop, the priest. But it has a long history of ignoring the most basic authority of all: the authority of the facts - the facts of history, science, and human experience, especially the experience of God's holy people, through whose intelligence, faith and daily lives the Holy Spirit is present in the Church.
It was a real breath of fresh air to read Garret FitzGerald setting the record straight about his efforts with the bishops to work out the problems caused by the Church's bigamous remarrying of certain people in some way that would absolve it from the crime of bigamy (Opinion & Analysis, October 8th). Not only was Dr FitzGerald an outstanding statesman with a solid and very Christian understanding of the common good of the State, but he was, and is, more theologically literate than many clergy.
The late Fr Fergal O'Connor, OP, one of the saintliest and most prophetic of Irish priests of the past 40 years, caused a sensation when, in an RTÉ television programme on marriage, he declared that he would like to see the church get out of the whole legal side of marriage. It is almost a scandal, given the current shortage of priests, to see so many thousands of ordained ministers spending their lives in the paperwork of helping people to prove that their marriage was never a marriage in the first place so that they can marry again. This annulment procedure can help only a tiny fraction of broken marriages, but nothing can be done for the vast majority whose marriages break down beyond repair, and are now in "second unions" where they find a real presence of God and his love.
Official teaching at present is that they have all the obligations of being Catholic, but it is God's will that they have to remain celibate for the rest of their lives if they wish to receive Communion. Surely this is a bleeding wound in the body of Christ crying out for some Samaritan to respond in the manner of Jesus.
Church leaders brave enough to respond to Fergal O'Connor's challenge can take courage from the historical development of the Church's efforts to care for marriage. The over-50 generation will recall being taught in school that Jesus instituted the sacrament of matrimony at the wedding feast of Cana. The thousands of lay women and men studying theology around the country now know that before the 11th century there was no such thing as a Christian wedding ceremony, nor was marriage considered a sacrament in our modern sense. For hundreds of years it was the civil government which regulated marriage and divorce among Christians. With the disintegration of civil society Christian leaders gradually took control of marriage legislation, leading to our present situation.
This was a healthy development - an example of the church responding to the needs of the surrounding culture. Responding to cases arising from the missionary success of the church in pagan lands, the church further adapted its laws to incorporate the Pauline privilege, and the so-called Petrine privilege "in favour of the faith". Present teaching and canon law is that the Pope has no power to dissolve a marriage which is valid, sacramental (between Christians) and consummated (even if only through one drunken act of forced sex). But, for the spiritual benefit of the Christian in break-up situations, the Pope has the power to dissolve (divorce) so-called "natural marriages", which means the majority of marriages throughout the world. Pope John Paul II constantly preached that "divorce is contrary to natural law, contrary to justice, and contrary to the commandment of Christ", but during his pontificate there were thousands of dissolutions of these marriages, processed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The canon law on these cases is not secret and the statistics are publicly available.
In the course of its history (glorious and also sinful) the Catholic Church has tried to balance ideal and reality, sometimes but not always successfully. We need a courageous, fresh study of the problem, going beyond tidy housekeeping and the fear of scandal to a renewal of our theology, keeping in mind that so many faithful, committed Catholics are saddened that our official church shows little sign of the humility that is a core value of our Christian faith. - Yours, etc,
Fr SEAN FAGAN SM, Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2.