An Exhortation Best Ignored

More than once in my ministry, I have taken communion in churches where, by virtue of my not being a member, I was not supposed to. I knew what I was doing, experienced no remorse over doing it, and whenever another occasion presented itself, I went and did it again. And now that my "sin" is out in the open, in order not to get barred from the chancel rail by the Reverends who may come across its exposure, the next time I may even show up in disguise.

What this dare-ya-to-knock-the-chip-off-my-shoulder rhetoric is all about is a recently released "Exhortation" of Pope Benedict XVI laying down, yet again, "non-negotiable" positions on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and divorce that reasonable people have been negotiating for quite some time now and that American Catholics have been ignoring for just as long. In the midst of all the other prescriptions, a requirement of celibacy for priests was re-imposed by fiat, in spite of the fact that hardly anybody worth reading even tries to make a case for priests being single anymore, and the fact that there are married priests all over the place now. (You just have to make sure that you get married before you make public your sense of being called to the priesthood.)

Especially grating to First Amendment types like me is the Holy Father's reference to the "grave" responsibility of Catholic politicians and legislators to bind themselves to "a properly formed conscience" in getting the kind of laws passed and enforced over which Vatican officials can salivate. To my chagrin, a lot of non-Catholic Christian conservatives have been lining up with this Medieval view of church and state for sometime. Their only substantive disagreement with Rome is over who decides whose conscience is "properly formed" and whose is not.

What especially jerked my chain about this latest broadside from the Vatican are the crocodile tears wetting its pages about "the painful situation" of remarried Catholics. His Holiness solemnly declares that these unfortunates suffer only because of the sinful state in which they are living. For the remarried Catholics I have counseled over the years, the source of their pain is decidedly not their sinning; they do not in fact seriously believe that they are living in sin, nor do I. The real source of their pain is the demeaning words of their leader, barring them even from receiving Communion, the central sacrament of the Christian tradition. And now we get to the point of my earlier confession.

His Eminence appears to have forgotten somewhere along his path of elevation just whose table it is that we are talking about here, and whose church it is that embraces all of us in love, no matter how many in it jockey for the right to determine all on their own who will and will not be permitted to partake of its sacred substances. None of us --- single, married, divorced, celebate, straight, gay, remarried, shacking up, giving up --- is "worthy" to come to Communion. But God continues to honor his promise to be with us whenever and wherever his table is set, and nothing can be a more egregious perversion of his good news than allowing someone no less sinful than we are to block anyone else's access to him there.

Benedict XVI's exhortation is just the kind of weighty tome that has been sinking the credibility of his church's hierarchy for decades now, and that will continue to foster mischief, meanness, and malignity in peoples' lives for even more decades to come. All three are involved in the one approved way for remarried Catholics to extricate themselves from their "painful situation," basically by coming up with enough money to buy themselves annulments. I see little difference in this way of getting right with God and the church from the way of indulgences, which latter disgraces both.

For Catholics without the resources to buy an annulment of a first marriage, and without the dishonesty it takes to declare many a first marriage a nullity, I recommend a time-honored way of vetoing unjustifiable prohibitions, with one's feet. This is a seditious recommendation, of course, but sedition is not always a bad thing. (Remember the Boston Tea Party?) The next time you think about it, just slip into the pew of a parish the next neighborhood north or south, and receive quietly and gratefully at the hands of an unknown priest the body and blood of the One whose knowledge of you and your situation is the only kind that finally counts.