Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat and a lot of Catholics are arguing after the release of Fiducia Supplicans. Welcome to the contentious end of 2023!
Back in 2018 I was at a Catholic event and ran into Austen Ivereigh, the Catholic journalist, author and biographer of Pope Francis. I explained to him that I had just been granted an annulment after four long years of waiting. He was prompted to apologise to me for the length of time it had taken and the hardship I must have endured. I was surprised by this. I had been happy to wait and had endured no real hardship, but I understood that he was being nice.
Many people around me were also surprised that I was not protesting at the level of interrogation into my private life; at waiting to find out whether I was considered free to marry. “Who does the Church think it is?” some people asked during my time of waiting. “It’s not a very nice way to behave.”
On a merely human level where Nice trumps Truth, they might have been right. One might well wonder how anyone, let alone a number of celibate clergy, could possibly make such a significant judgement about my life with the potential for such far reaching consequences.
But if the Church really was who I believed Her to be, then I had to push my ego aside, trust in Her and know that whatever the outcome it will be right by God. Of this, I could be sure and in this I found comfort.
As we argue about the contents of Fiducia Supplicans, with Catholics threatening to walk away from the Church, Anglicans crowing that converts to Catholicism have gone from the frying pan into the fire, and couples in a homosexual relationship looking to plan a spontaneous, non-affirming, casually dressed blessing from Fr James Martin or any other obliging priest, it seems we have allowed despair to cloud hope as clarity gives way to ambiguity.
None of this is to say that the document is a good one or that those behind it aren’t guilty of causing confusion, even division (whatever the unknown intentions). But to be a Catholic is to believe that the Church is more than human; that She is graced with Christ’s real presence and promise of guidance into all Truth, irrespective of what we think we can see now – as C.S. Lewis noted: You have never seen more than an appearance of anything”.
If that is correct then no Catholic should be running anywhere, Anglicans have no need to crow, and people who experience same sex attraction need to understand Fiducia Supplicans in light of the traditional teaching of the Church. If the latter fail to do so, or are not directed to, then there is little point turning to the Church only to be given what the world already offers.
And if, on deeper analysis, the document appears to contradict traditional Church teaching, or to give the impression that the Church can turn an acorn into a Lamborghini, then we can still be confident that any such error will be corrected (even if we like driving the Lamborghini).
It would not be the first time. In the 7th Century the statements by Pope Honorius to Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, gave ammunition to the Monothelites who denied the hypostatic union of Christ’s humanity and divinity in one individual personhood. The then Bishop of Rome might be defended by the argument that he was speaking as a private theologian. But he was not. He was responding to someone seeking the authoritative advice of the Bishop of Rome and he responded in that capacity.
“We shouldn’t have an idealised view of the papacy,” says Catholic convert and theologian Scott Hahn. “Some Popes are good, some are bad, some are fair, others are great, and some are saints, but most are not. This is the living reality of the papacy.”
Whatever confusion exists in the Church right now, we must have faith that clarity will follow, just as it did in the 7th Century.
How it will happen and where it will come from, we cannot know. But when a body is threatened with disease it produces antibodies to fight the disease. Like soldiers, those antibodies give themselves up for the survival of the body.
“The body of Christ is a real body, and therefore it too produces antibodies called Saints,” says Catholic theologian Peter Kreeft. “Antibodies are tailored to the disease. If threatened with the disease of indifference to human life, it produces missionaries of charity like Mother Teresa.”
We do not know whom the Great Physician, in his strange divine wisdom, will choose to use to save the world we live in. It could be you! Saints are the secret weapon that will win the war, not complainers or conformers.
The darkest hour always comes before the dawn, and we must have hope in that which is beyond man. This is a truth recognised in C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew when the young boy reprimands his uncle for sending a friend to an unknown world from which she cannot return:
“You are a beast. I suppose you planned the whole thing so that she’d go without knowing it and then I’d have to go after her.”
“Of course,” said Uncle Andrew, with his hateful smile.
“Very well I’ll go – but there’s one thing I jolly well mean to say first. I didn’t believe in magic until today. I see now it’s real. If it is, I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true and you’re simply a wicked cruel magician like the ones in the stories, well I’ve never read a story in which people of that sort weren’t paid out in the end and I bet you will be.”
We cannot take on more than man is capable of. We need help. A lot of it. Jesus teaches us to call God by the endearing name Abba, given His paternal love for us.
Once we know the one to whom we are speaking; once we trust God as a Good Father, we see everything differently and learn to trust in a whole new way – no matter what is happening in the Vatican.