Farewell to marriage priest

I  was sad to receive word that Fr Chuck Gallagher SJ had died on July 21 at the age of 85, because he had as a person and with his work in Marriage Encounter and beyond made such a great impression on my late husband Chris and me.

Fr Chuck Gallagher SJ

Soon after our Marriage Encounter experience in 1979 we came across the many programmes and books he had written or co-authored with others.

Sex is Holy, Evenings for Couples, Evenings for Parents, and more of the same were  products of Marriage Encounter and its vision and outreach for a renewal of the Church through a renewal of the sacraments of matrimony and holy orders at the time.

Evenings for the Engaged is still being used in parts of South Africa 30 years later. “We the Parish” was a small programme of parish renewal that I believe had an influence on how MARFAM started and the parish family ministry developed.

We met Fr Chuck in New York in 1993 and shared a common dream and some of his resources. Although he was by then no longer in Marriage Encounter, he had started the Pastoral and Matrimonial Renewal Centre which produced many booklets and programmes.

His gift to the Church was his deep insight into the spirituality of marriage and the holiness of sex and sexuality that was at the heart of some of the marriage renewal programmes that were developing soon after the Second Vatican Council.

Many will remember his message: “Pray for passion in your marriage!”

It must be one of the great disappointments in the Church that this particular direction in the marriage ministry’s work of marriage renewal was never fully adopted and promoted.

Was it because it was largely a lay initiative, or, like so many things in the Church, was there some conflict at institutional levels? Was the theology and spirituality too deep and too challenging for many couples themselves?

The August family life theme does not focus on women, but on “Gender Matters”, recognising, as Fr Chuck did, that women’s empowerment or promotion of men’s and fatherhood programmes should not be done in isolation.

A recent experience brought that element of complementarity or collaboration that he stressed to the fore for me again.

On a visit to Bethulie, a small town  in the eastern Free State, our group was shown the concentration camp memorial which commemorates the death of many women and young children towards the end of the Boer War in the early 1900s.

The Boers, who were fighting for what they considered the survival of their people, were reduced to committing acts of harassment towards the vastly superior British army.  In retaliation the British employed a scorched earth policy, destroyed farms and deposited women and children in concentration camps.

It is said that at times the men would have surrendered but were encouraged by their women to continue the struggle.

Similarly in 1955 there was the famous women’s march to Pretoria, but the women marched not for themselves alone but for the sake of the people, the families.

Family life and marital love are at the heart of society and of the Church. But contextualising the message in a programme where couples intimately encounter not only one another but God too works a miraculous kind of magic.

How many couples across the world will have reflected at one time or another on the inspiring words taken from Fr Gallagher in his famous prayer “Our Father’s Call to a Couple”?

“Your being in love is my way to invite you to love. Your closeness, your oneness is the human experience nearest to how I live and love. I desire for you to spend yourselves on each other without reserve, the way My Son spent Himself on you.

“You in your unique union, in your everyday life together are a sacred sign of his caring, healing and life-giving presence. Whatever you do in loving union brings Jesus in His Body alive to all whom you touch. I call you to love each other in his name.”

May this call continue for years to come.

Rest well, Fr Chuck, and as you loved to say: “Enjoy!”