Where Mercy and Faithfulness Meet

BY Fr Larry Kaufmann CSsR

Pope Francis’ Misericordiae Vultus, which proclaims the Jubilee Year of Mercy for 2016, is truly a word of hope. I was able to share some of its message of hope recently while preaching a mission in the Eastern Cape. I visited a woman, severely disabled, who was widowed after 49 years in a second marriage.

Her first “marriage” ended within one year, thanks to a philandering “husband” who today has several children by several women (the inverted commas obviously declare my belief that the first marriage was not a marriage). Yet this poor woman was told, after she married again, that she was “excommunicated”.

When I pressed her on this, since divorced and civilly remarried are not “excommunicated”, she was adamant that a certain priest had used exactly that word and nothing else, and that she would remain so as long as she “lived in sin”.

When she explored the possibility of an annulment, she was told that it would be a waste of time.

The second marriage by all accounts seems to have been marked by deep love and devotion. They had a child, whom she decided not to have baptised a Catholic as she did not want him to suffer the humiliation of his mother not receiving Communion when he did. In fact, she raised him to decide for himself what spiritual path he would like to follow. Today he is a Muslim.

In my pastoral encounter with this truly loving and open person, I begged of her forgiveness for the way she has been so alienated from the Church. Her response was to say that she had never for one moment lost her faith, continuing all the Catholic devotions she had learned as a child, even though the Church was punishing her for her “sin”.

I could not help feeling that the real object of God’s mercy in this entire narrative should be the institutional Church, not that faithful and misinformed woman, who was never far from the mercy of God.

It still pains me to recall the time when a certain bishop approached me while I was giving a mission, and asked me to provide a “pastoral solution” to a request he had received from a woman in a 30-year second marriage, but which he felt he could not give himself—”since I am a bishop”.

I did so, and the result was that in due course her husband, her four children, and five grandchildren were all baptised Catholic.

Some people are anxious that a more merciful pastoral approach to very human situations will lead to a compromise in or change of Church teaching. I do not believe that. Truth is indivisible. In God, “mercy and truth; justice and peace have embraced” (Psalm 85:10).

The genius and gift of St Alphonsus Liguori as a Doctor of the Church is that he was so able to harmonise compassionate pastoral ministry to doctrinal fidelity that over time his moral teaching, particularly on conscience, was to become part of the official teaching of the Church (see Gaudium et Spes 16).