AND WHAT OTHER STUFF there is. Why is the Church so wealthy, wasn’t there a woman Pope, what is an annulment, what on earth are indulgences and does that mean you can buy them and buy your way into heaven? Is the Da Vinci Code true, are Catholics concerned about the rights of animals, why do we suffer, and did Jesus even exist in the first place? And on and on and on. There isn’t room to repeat, let alone answer, every question, but I can address some of the more common ones.
It’s appropriate to begin with a few basic facts about Jesus Christ and whether He existed or not. Almost every discovery in the last hundred and fifty years in the field of Biblical archaeology appears to prove the Bible right, even to the point of surprising serious and orthodox Christian and Jewish scholars. It’s been oddly pathetic observing liberal panic as another dig in the Middle East puts flesh to the bones of scripture. As for Jesus Himself, there are some absolute truths here. Jewish records refer to Jesus of Nazareth and did so even before Christ’s own followers had written about Him. Obviously these Jewish sages did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, but they refer to him quite clearly as the son of Mary, the alleged father being a man we know little about. Then we have Josephus, a Jewish general who betrayed his people and became a friend of the Romans and, indeed, a Roman himself. His writings are vital for any understanding of the Jews in the first century but must be placed in context. Josephus mentions Jesus, the Jesus, in his writings. It is almost certain that later writers, Christian enthusiasts, revised his words to make them seem more pro-Christian. Hence in some obviously edited versions of his work, Josephus, a Jewish man, suddenly sounds like a Christian. He was not, and these expansions of his references to Jesus are to be dismissed.1
The point, however, is that it is the revisions and not the original statements that should be expunged from the debate. Josephus knew of Jesus because no observer of the time could not know of Him. He refers to Jesus’ ministry and to Jesus’ followers. Some people have tried to throw out the baby with the bathwater, resulting in their entire argument becoming rather wet. Next is the Roman historian Tacitus. He discusses the great fire in Rome, how Nero was thought responsible and how the emperor blamed the Christians, named after Christus, who was crucified by “one of our governors, Pontius Pilate.” The Roman biographer Seutonius also refers to Jesus and a riot across the Tiber by supporters and foes of Christianity. Pliny the younger, governor of Asia Minor, also speaks of Christ and Christians. Then there is the Gospel evidence for Jesus. The Gospels were written by supporters, of course, but the more we learn about them the earlier we can place them and the more authentic they are shown to be. New research and the latest discoveries tell us so very much. The remarkable Ryland Papyrus on the Nile includes parts of John’s Gospel. Serious scholars now agree that the Gospels were completed well before AD 100 – that is, while some who were present during Christ’s life still lived. Further, these were produced for communities composed of people who knew Jesus or whose parents told them stories of personal witness and intimate experience of Jesus.2
In fact no Biblical expert – nor historian – worth the name doubts that Jesus lived, that He claimed to be the Messiah, and that many who knew Him believed that claim. The idea that He was just a great moral teacher or that we can believe some but not all of what He taught is based not on consistent thought but on a desire to be a comfortable follower of a figure whose life and death has little do with our “comfort.” Think of the distressing impact of Jesus’ claim to be the Son of God. If He wasn’t, He was lying or insane. Liars are not to be believed and madmen are not to be followed even in part. But should we believe? Consider the first-generation martyrs. People die for the wrong reasons, but they assume them to be the right reasons. If their faith in any idea or any person can be broken, they are no longer willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Yet men and women who knew Jesus, lived with Him, saw Him die and rise again were willing to go to their deaths with a smile. This is important. The followers of Christ were in chaos when they saw their master crucified like a common criminal. It was the resurrection, an event He had promised, that thrust them into belief and, frequently, a martyr’s death. There is no explanation for the documented martyrdom of those who knew Jesus other than that they believed, without doubt, that He was the Messiah and that He had been raised from the dead because they were there. They were not few in number and they were not slow of wit. They were intelligent, street-wise people: dockworkers, fisherman, former terrorists and prostitutes, collaborating bureaucrats and brilliant teachers. They knew. They knew the sight and smell of death, knew when people were dead, and saw their friend and the man they loved dead. Then they saw Him alive again.
They knew He was God because He’s called that seven times in the New Testament and is referred to as being divine on dozens of occasions. He was crucified not for being a prophet or an ethicist, or for that matter a champion of social justice, but for claiming to be the Son of God. Numerous letters from pagan and presumably objective or even hostile writers from the first and second centuries, including one written to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died in AD 180, describe how Christians believe Jesus to be divine. And no, contrary to what Dan Brown’s risible novel The Da Vinci Code might tell us, the Gnostic Gospels did not frequently mention that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. In fact, those Gnostic Gospels, so often quoted in movies and by conspiracy theorists, were rejected by the Church for a variety of reasons, primarily because they were distorted reworkings of the four Gospels and not the least because they were often misogynistic, were frequently contradictory, and tended to be self-serving and excruciatingly dull.3
Anti-Catholics also tell us that the Emperor Constantine collated the Bible and pretty much got the Church started. This would be news to the Emperor Constantine. The Old Testament, of course, existed even before the birth of Jesus, and the collection of texts into the New Testament began at the end of the first century – with most of the books agreed on within the next fifty years. The compilation was not finalized until the end of the fourth century. Constantine, however, died in AD 337. In other words, there is no way that he could have compiled the Bible even if he wanted to or had the ability to do so. What he certainly did do was to commission Bishop Eusebius to make fifty copies of the Bible that already existed so that more people could read it.
Speaking of Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code – and speaking briefly because even though he’s influenced so many people he doesn’t really deserve the attention – his claim in his book that “the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ has been chronicled in exhaustive detail by scores of historians” is just silly. The historians he lists in his book are Margaret Starbird, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, Clive Prince, Lynn Picknett, and Michael Baigent. The problem is that just like Dan Brown, these aren’t really historians. Baigent has a basic degree in psychology and is working on an MA in mysticism, and Picknett and Prince are best known for their work on the occult and UFOS. Pretending to be a scholar of Hebrew, Brown also writes that YHWH, the Jewish sacred name for God, is based on the word Jehovah. And Jehovah, he says, is a combination of the masculine Jah and the feminine Havah, signifying Eve. Thus God gave us feminism, Jesus was a pioneer of progressive gender politics, and the Roman Catholic Church has hidden all this to preserve male power and exclude women, particularly Mary Magdalene, from their rightful place in society and culture. Fun for the credulous but not at all true. YHWH doesn’t come from Jehovah but Jehovah from YHWH. The word was used thousands of years before Jehovah came into existence, which was as late as the sixteenth century. Dan Brown also writes that the Priory of Sion was founded in early medieval Europe. Untrue again. It was registered with the French government in a dusty office in 1956. His central bad guy is an Opus Dei monk. Hardly. Opus Dei is an overwhelmingly lay organization and they have no monks. Let me repeat, there is no such thing as an Opus Dei monk. Brown states that five million women were killed by the Church as witches. In fact, modern research has shown that the witch hunts began in the sixteenth century in Europe and that between 30,000 and 50,000 men and women were burned to death for the crime of witchcraft. However, 90 per cent of those trials took place before secular tribunals in countries such as Germany and France where by the 1500s the Church had lost most of its influence in judicial matters. Indeed, it was precisely in countries like Spain and Italy where the Catholic Church still had influence that there were almost no witchcraft trials. He refers to the Pope in the Vatican long before the Pope lived in the Vatican. And the list goes on.4
On Opus Dei, Dan Brown is particularly awful, but then Opus Dei seems to be a favourite target for Catholic-bashers in general. If it didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it and then invent a movie about it. Literally “Work of God,” the institution was founded by a Spanish priest named Josemaría Escrivá in 1928 as a largely lay organization of Roman Catholics with the purpose of seeking holiness in one’s ordinary work and maintaining orthodoxy within their faith. Holiness is within the grasp of everyday people, doing everyday things, said the founder, but they need guidance. It is now an international prelature with houses and followers throughout the world. It has roughly 86,000 members, around 1,800 of them priests. It is a personal prelature that depends directly on the Vatican, which means that it has official backing from the highest quarters. To understand Opus Dei, one has to understand that Catholicism is not always the theologically homogenous organization some make it out to be. Certainly for the last hundred years, there has been a division between liberal and conservative, something of which Escrivá was keenly aware. His followers claim that Opus Dei is very much within the spirit of Vatican II, the Church council that, it was said, opened up the windows of the Church and let in the light of change. Opus Dei places enormous significance on the sacraments, the rosary, and strict moral discipline, which is unsettling for the secular world perhaps but at the heart, and of course the soul, of the Roman Catholic Church.
This kind of faithfulness is also uncomfortable for those liberals who find themselves increasingly detached from vibrant and living Catholicism. It’s ironic, but the so-called progressives are now seen as old-fashioned and out of date, preaching a religious relativism that has little relevance, particularly to the young. Opus Dei, on the other hand, establishes schools and programs in inner cities, performs charity work in the developing world, and certainly does a great deal of good. It and other orthodox groups are growing almost as fast as liberal Catholicism is declining.5 Critics, though, argue that it is cult-like. This isn’t fair.
Actual membership certainly is demanding and is only for those who are committed to taking their faith seriously. Some members (a small percentage of the total) commit themselves to celibacy and devote a certain part of their income to Opus Dei but doing so is entirely voluntary. There have been cases of vulnerable people embracing the movement and perhaps hurting their families, but this is not really the fault of Opus Dei. There have also been rumours of fascist sympathies within the organization. Again, just not true. Because of the Spanish origins of Opus Dei, it is strong in Latin America and, of course, in Spain itself. General Franco did use Opus Dei members in his cabinet, but long after he had largely abandoned the far right and was seeking to modernize his country. Opus Dei members have also faced deportation and worse because of their stand for social justice in Latin American dictatorships.6 But back to more sensible matters than Mr. Brown’s fantasies about albino monks and cultish Catholics.
The problem of suffering. The terrible problem of awful, painful, seemingly pointless suffering. Bad things often happen to good people and just as often good things happen to bad people. A true Catholic response would be to acknowledge that this circumstance is difficult and challenging but also to ask why it should be anything of a surprise. The Bible makes it quite clear that faith in Jesus Christ and in His Church does not guarantee a good life but a perfect eternity. In fact, there is more prediction in scripture of struggle on earth for the believer than there is of gain and success. There are Christian sects that promise material wealth and all sorts of triumph in exchange for faith, but this has never been something that Catholicism would affirm. Roman Catholics believe that this life on earth is only the land of shadows and that real life hasn’t begun yet. Suffering in this sinful world is surely more of a problem for the atheist, or the anti-Catholic, who thinks that this life is all that there is and all that matters and that at death we are mere dust, food for worms, nothing. This idea of an afterlife could, of course, just be a crutch on which Catholics lean so as to give their lives and their suffering some meaning. It’s an accusation frequently tossed at Catholics and Christians in general. But lack of faith could just as well be a crutch for non-believers, allowing them to live their lives without any concept of accountability and giving them some sort of false confidence. The difference is that while Catholicism has an abundance of intellectual underpinnings to support its arguments, anti-Catholicism and atheism have few if any. The idea that people of faith have never before encountered suffering and that when the “why do bad things happen to good people” argument is made we will all suddenly look stunned and abandon our faith is ridiculous. The book of Job is full of such cries to God and questions about pain and suffering, and Christ Himself on the cross asks, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” It is fully understandable to feel anguish at times of pain, but if we think further we surely have to ask whether suffering and death are the worst things in an existence that is eternal. Pain is an emotion, and emotions allow us all sorts of joy as well as lack of joy and the opposite of joy. Pain is also a warning sign and a way to protect us against danger. That something may hurt is undeniable, that we will all feel some sort of pain at some point is inevitable, but whether this pain is our doing or God’s is something entirely different. Why, we are asked, would an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God allow us to suffer? Easy. He allows us all sorts of things because we have the freedom to behave as we will, but He has also provided a place with the greatest contentment we can imagine if only we listen to Him, to His Son, and to His Church.
We have free will because God is love, and no lover would allow anything else. A man who locks his wife in a room is not a lover but an abuser. God wants us to return to Him but cannot force us to take this course, and if we choose an eternity without Him we have chosen hell. When we do, we then abuse the God in whom we do not believe for allowing us to choose to spend our future away from Him in a place we have chosen ourselves. “God, God, God, you are so awful and why have you created hell? Oh, and by the way I don’t believe in you.” Our pride and our rejection of God are ours alone. As a loving father, He gives us the freedom to choose. I sometimes recall the first time my wife and I allowed our eldest son to go to school alone on public transport. He was old enough and we had to let him go. I was waiting at the front door by the middle of the afternoon. He came in at the appropriate time, ignored his father in the way boys of that age are supposed to, and then went up to his room. We had to let him go on his own, but our relief when he returned is hard to describe. Imagine, then, how God must feel when we come back to Him.
We are people, made in His image, to love Him and to be loved by Him. Which brings us to the modern fashion of animal rights and the accusation that the Catholic Church cares more about men and women than it does about animals. Of course it does, just as it should do. This isn’t an accusation at all but a statement of rational and Catholic belief. The argument that care for animals and care for humans are part of some inevitable continuum simply isn’t true but it’s helped us to escalate our empathy for animals to a hysterical, pagan level at the direct expense of people. There is something fundamentally contrary to Christian virtue in all of this, because as creatures made in the image of God, we ought to feel a greater spark of love and understanding for our brothers and sisters than we do for animals. It has little to do with vulnerability because even the suffering of babies is frequently ignored or even justified by people who routinely weep for rabbits. If they are unborn babies, the comparison with cats doesn’t even register. Christ died to free us from our sins, not to assuage our sentimentality. We see this echoed in international policy as well as in daily reaction. To ignore the suffering of an animal is inhuman, but to obsess about the suffering of an animal is anti-human. Yet this is what we do, even to the point of creating an entire ideology around the hideous misnomer of animal rights. The notion of rights is a human construct and human rights can apply, obviously, only to humans. Because we are distinct and superior, we have to act in a compassionate way toward animals, but this demands use rather than abuse, not a fantasy inclusion of animals into human society. Babies matter more than kittens, children of the poor matter more than pets of the rich, humans are more deserving of life and liberty than sharks and ants. By the way, it’s deeply significant that cuddly critters induce more sympathy than ugly ones. Cuteness appears to be the measure of an animal’s right to life. Or on a good day the criteria might be based on how intelligent they are – dolphins and dogs being kings of the cause. Yet if this is the measure, humans being the most intelligent of creatures must then deserve the most respect.
As the most important and most inalienable right is that to life, we cannot avoid the jarring difference between our over-reaction to what is usually a civilized treatment of animals and our indifference to the killing of the unborn. Simply, abortion mills are worse than puppy mills. To expose this neurotic, perverse juxtaposition, however, is to invite mockery and anger. “Not that old issue again, nobody cares about abortion.” Then another radio phone-in show about how animals do less harm to the planet than men and women. We are a product of God’s plan, as are animals. To reverse the order of His intentions and His creation is not only a denial of Him but another example of selfish, pampered, Western foolishness, Disney instead of decency. Christ fed the multitude; it was they who had rights and who were hungry, the fish didn’t really matter that much. It’s straightforward, it’s humane, it’s sensible, it’s Catholic.
If the Catholic Church’s apparent inability to grapple with animal liberation doesn’t send us running out of the pews – and if it does, we didn’t know why we were there in the first place – we’re hit with the old regular that the Church is dripping with money while the rest of the world starves. The Church is committed to the needy and the poor, and the apparent wealth of the Catholic Church is not only irrelevant to this but also inaccurate. Most priests, nuns, monks, and others who work in the service of the Catholic Church do so for a very low wage. They often work extraordinarily long hours and spend their retirement years in modest care homes. There is obviously a great deal of wealth in Rome at the Vatican, open for everybody to see in the museums – most of which operate at a deficit – and exhibitions of paintings, sculptures, and beautiful works of art. Much of this work is the creation of Catholic artists who wanted their achievements to be in the Vatican and on display to the rest of the world. The Church has preserved this art for centuries as the patrimony of humanity; if it hadn’t done so, much of it would have been destroyed, stolen, or bought by private collectors and never seen by the majority of people. It does not belong only to the Church today but to the Church of all time and for all time to come. To sell it for cash and have it hidden away for a selection of the elite seems a bizarre idea. These works of art simply aren’t in the gift of the Catholic Church to sell. If they were and if they were sold, the money raised could be given to good causes but it would soon be spent and forgotten, whereas the art collections in the Vatican are there forever.
The Catholic Church is one of the most generous organizations in the world, giving an enormously high percentage of what it raises to charities. The collections raised every Sunday at Masses throughout the world go to maintaining often leaky churches but also to running soup kitchens and aid centres and to help and support the needy and desperate. The Catholic Church built and ran hospitals, schools, and centres for the poor and unemployed generations before the secular state became involved, and even today a visit to almost any main street in the Western world or to a village or town in the developing world will show Catholic charities and outreach organizations operating in what are often the most challenging of conditions. It is estimated, for example, that most of the help given to people with AIDS in Africa comes from Catholics and the Catholic Church. We also have to realize that while Jesus reached out to the poor, He was not some economic revolutionary whose role was to remove poverty and create an alternative economic structure. This is chauvinism and arrogance on our part – to believe that if Christ wanted to eliminate poverty He could have done so in a moment. He was a Messiah and not a Marxist. In the book of Matthew, when a woman approaches Jesus with a jar full of costly ointment to be poured on His head, there was anger from some of those around Him. This is a waste, they said, and the money could be spent on other, better, more worthwhile things such as helping the poor. “Why do you trouble the woman?” asks Jesus. “For she has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.”
The Catholic Church is well aware of the attempt to politicize Christ: Jesus the neo-conservative who is used by people to support their interests in the free market and Anglo-American superiority; Jesus the rebel whose name is exploited by those working tirelessly against climate change or for international socialism; Jesus the me, Jesus the mine, Jesus the mere tool to be used to oil the mechanism of my particular political obsession. For the fanatical Israel-basher, He is Christ the Palestinian militant, for the Christian Zionist He is Jesus the Israeli warrior. And so on and so on until we leave the real meaning of our Lord far, far behind. He was and is God. This is the whole point and explains why He was here. He told this to His followers time and time again and some of them just wouldn’t listen! Once we try to belittle him and to transform God into some political icon or cause figurehead, we are committing the most vile and vulgar of sins: pride and the absolute certainty that our passing beliefs are more significant than the life, death, and essential meaning of Christ Jesus.
Christ was crucified for one reason and one reason alone, and to misunderstand this is to misunderstand Christianity. His death was part of God’s plan to give His Son to die for our sins so as to make us clean and to enable us to find salvation and our way back to our creator. He was crucified because He claimed to be the Messiah. The Romans would rather have let Him go. There were myriad political prisoners and activists in the region at the time, some of whom were outraged that the Son of God said that the poor would always be with us, that His kingdom was not of this earth, and that while social justice was important, spiritual completion was paramount. From the mid-1960s until perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, so-called liberal ideas dominated Roman Catholic thinking and enabled this confusion and misunderstanding to take hold. White, privileged people were telling the rest of the world what Christianity meant and simultaneously failing to see the irony of their arrogance. Just as the Church of England was once described as the Tory party at prayer, this was socialism liturgically dancing around the altar. It was very much the other side of the same coin that in the 1930s insisted that Catholicism meant support for General Franco, for anti-Semitism, and for perennial counter-revolution.
That nonsense was no more Catholic than are amateur theologians dressing their politics in the seamless cloak of Christ. By all means be left or right but do not try to use or abuse Jesus Christ by giving Him honorary political party status. The result of all this was the mass, and Mass, defection of good people who wanted the Gospel from the Catholic Church but instead received the manifesto. Those ideas are now passé, and the ideologues behind them – usually good and well-meaning people but so naïve and destructive – tend to be older and on the point of retirement. The damage done is being repaired but some of the exiles may never return. This was self-indulgence rather than true indulgence and a huge loss to the Church.
The word indulgence, of course, tends to conjure up images of brave Protestant reformers arguing that the evil Catholic Church is so greedy and so in need of money that it is willing to sell indulgences to people to ease them into heaven. As is so often the case, this is hardly an accurate picture of what happened. The Church defines an indulgence as “a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain defined conditions through the Church’s help when, as a minister of redemption, she dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions won by Christ and the saints.” It’s theological nonsense that someone can buy their way out of God’s judgment and escape hell. An indulgence can be earned on Earth to compensate for the punishment due for sins that would otherwise need to be atoned for in purgatory, and they were conceived as a way of dealing with this exact issue, to replace some of the more severe penances that were common in the early Church.7
There had certainly been abuses of indulgences, and that is why the Council of Trent in 1567 brought forth reforms to make it clear that any indulgences that had been the result of money being exchanged were invalid. To gain an indulgence you must be a Catholic in a state of grace and have the full intention of performing the act for which the indulgence is given. A partial indulgence must be carried out with what is known as “a contrite heart”; a plenary indulgence requires the same contrite heart but also requires the person receiving it to go to confession, receive Holy Communion, and pray for the Pope, usually with an Our Father and Hail Mary. The Catechism of the Church says this: “The Christian who seeks to purify himself of his sin and to become holy with the help of God’s grace is not alone. ‘The life of each of God’s children is joined in Christ and through Christ in a wonderful way to the life of all the other Christian brethren in the supernatural unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, as in a single mystical person.’ ”
A far more distressing issue for people today is the perceived stand of the Church on divorce and annulment, a particularly pressing issue given the alarming rates of divorce in the Western world and the common desire to remarry. The latter, the desire to remarry, is usually where Catholic teaching is most misunderstood and unfairly criticized. Many people who regard themselves as being Catholic assume that the Catholic Church is there to marry them, baptize their children, and be nicely decorated for Christmas and Easter but they also presume that this same Church has no right to refuse their requests and wishes even if those requests and wishes directly contradict the teachings and requirements of the Roman Catholic Church. As has been said before, nobody is forced to be a Catholic, but if you want to be a Catholic you have to live as a Catholic. And the institution of marriage has particular significance in the life of Catholics because it is a sacrament of the Catholic Church. A sacrament, according to the catechism, is an “efficacious [sign] of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us. The visible rites by which the sacraments are celebrated signify and make present the graces proper to each sacrament. They bear fruit in those who receive them with the required dispositions.” In other words, marriage is a holy encounter with Christ that makes people holy. Holiness is about God – and being about God is serious – indeed ultimately serious business. God is faithful – we are to be faithful. That is the stuff of holiness. Thus, of the sacrament of marriage Jesus said, “Every one who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery,” and Paul stated, “Thus a married woman is bound by law to her husband as long as he live” and “Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive.”
The early Church was equally strong in its language. Clement of Alexandria in AD 208: “That Scripture counsels marriage, however, and never allows any release from the union, is expressly contained in the law: ‘You shall not divorce a wife, except for reason of immorality.’ And it regards as adultery the marriage of a spouse, while the one from whom a separation was made is still alive. ‘Whoever takes a divorced woman as wife commits adultery,’ it says; for ‘if anyone divorce his wife, he debauches her’; that is, he compels her to commit adultery. And not only does he that divorces her become the cause of this, but also he that takes the woman and gives her the opportunity of sinning; for if he did not take her, she would return to her husband.” Clement is just continuing the teaching of Justin Martyr more than fifty years earlier: “In regard to chastity, [Jesus] has this to say: ‘If anyone look with lust at a woman, he has already before God committed adultery in his heart.’ And, ‘Whoever marries a woman who has been divorced from another husband, commits adultery.’ According to our Teacher, just as they are sinners who contract a second marriage, even though it be in accord with human law, so also are they sinners who look with lustful desire at a woman. He repudiates not only one who actually commits adultery, but even one who wishes to do so; for not only our actions are manifest to God, but even our thoughts.”8
The Roman Catholic Church believes that marriage is for life. It is the coming together of two people as one flesh, the popular and intimate manifestation of God’s plan for creation. It’s not to be taken lightly, in spite of what modern fashions tell us and in spite of the pressures that are applied to today’s marriages. Nor does it have anything to do with property rights, male dominance, or any other tendentious and misleading political and sociological propaganda that has been fed to us in recent years. Marriage as we know it today existed and was taught by the Church long before feminist theory became such fun. Thus the termination of a marriage matters a great deal, even if some of those experiencing the understandable pain of a separation wished otherwise. An annulment is the conclusion by a Church tribunal that what was assumed to be a valid marriage in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church was not. Because marriage seems so disposable today, we find it hard to understand why the Church is so adamant about it, but this says far more about modern values than about the timeless, grace-filled view of marriage. Some marriages obviously cannot remain together – where, for example, abuse occurs. But we know that children suffer when marriages break up and that they are torn between two parents who are living apart and sometimes fighting for the love or custody of their children. The immediate and long-term psychological consequences of such experiences are becoming increasingly evident. The Church puts children at the centre of marriage and family but also puts great importance on marriage itself. It cannot, though, have any influence over whether someone gets divorced or not and, contrary to what some people think or try to convince others is true, this area really has nothing to do with Catholicism in the strictest sense – apart from the Church’s concern for the state of society and the well-being of members of that society. It becomes a Catholic issue when people who are divorced want to remarry in the Catholic Church.
An annulment does not prove that the two people who were married did not love each other, it does not involve the Church choosing or taking sides, it does not lead the Church to hold one party guilty and one innocent, and the Church does not judge husband or wife as being better or worse Catholics. None of this is relevant. Annulment is the finding that when the marriage occurred, one or both of the people involved did not have the full capacity for a Catholic marriage, that they did not give their consent, or in some way did not fulfil the Church’s requirements for a valid marriage. This is where a great deal of misunderstanding tends to arise. An annulment doesn’t mean that a meaningful relationship never existed and certainly doesn’t imply that if there are children from that relationship they are illegitimate. The following is extremely important. A divorce is a device of the secular state authority and ends something that existed and states that a marriage is over. An annulment is a statement by the Church that the marriage that has broken down in fact never existed as a sacramental reality in the first place. The reason may be that someone was pressured into marriage, was drunk or on drugs, was lied to, was too immature to make such a decision, may have married to escape a home atmosphere that was threatening or abusive, may have married under any sort of false pretence, that the marriage took place even though one of the partners had no intention of being faithful or was using their partner for financial gain or to earn a passport or citizenship, or if either husband or wife had no intention of having any children – an openness to children being a prerequisite for a valid Catholic marriage. An inability to have children, however, is not the same thing and in no way makes a marriage invalid. None of this presents the Church as being draconian or lacking in sensitivity but nor can or would the Church accept some excuses such as “We’ve grown apart,” “I love someone else,” or “The sex just isn’t as good anymore.” It can’t because it’s Catholic and Catholicism teaches that marriage is given to us by God and should not be taken lightly by His creatures.
No person has to apply for an annulment and not everyone who does will be granted one. There is a lot of mythology around the subject, usually based on the rumour that wealthy people can buy annulments and those with friends in high places in the Catholic Church can get them too easily. Other people, runs the argument, who lack money or powerful friends can wait decades and their lives can be ruined. Or, we’re told, annulments are meaningless and are just a facade the Church uses to make it look as though it cares about marriage and divorce. Actually the system is efficient and fairly speedy, and those involved in the tribunals take their jobs very seriously. The process is non-adversarial and entails a great deal of compassionate counselling of people going through this oh-so-painful rupture. Because of this, the process can take a little time but this is, after all, a highly important decision. No matter how rich or important a Catholic may be, they have to go through the same hearing as the poorest and most anonymous fellow member of the Church. If the Catholic Church maintained the whole annulment approach only for the sake of appearance, it would be an elaborate and costly waste of time. Remember, any number of people tragically leave the Church every year because they are told that their marriage was valid and that, while they should but do not have to stay together, they cannot obtain a state divorce and then hope to be remarried in a Catholic Church. This tends to lead to Catholics becoming Anglican or other types of Protestant, where marriage is respected but is not truly sacramental.
This is all very sad, but the Church cannot become less Catholic for the sake of expediency. A divorced person who is not remarried can still receive the Catholic sacraments and even a Catholic who has been divorced and remarried without an annulment can still live a Catholic life, attend Mass, read scripture, and lead a moral life. They cannot, however, receive the sacraments – they come, as it were, as a package and we can’t pick and choose which ones we’ll observe and which ones we won’t. If this sounds exclusive or elitist, it is, but the exclusivity comes from the individual and not the Church. The Roman Catholic Church allows people to exclude themselves if they want to do so. It’s hardly fair, though, to ask the Church to lessen, weaken, and adapt its beliefs simply because they don’t fit in with a person’s circumstances, however difficult they may be. The same applies to who can and cannot receive the Eucharist, which causes many non-Catholics, even those who are fine and observant Christians, a great deal of discomfort. Catholics take the Eucharist extremely seriously because it is extremely serious. If it’s not the body and blood of Jesus Christ, it doesn’t really matter, and if it doesn’t really matter, why bother to receive it and worry about not being able to receive it? If, however, it is the body and blood of Christ – as was demonstrated in an earlier chapter – the Church has to be extremely careful about it and particularly protective of it. Communion is the most personal encounter with God that we have, the taking into our bodies of our Messiah. It’s not just those outside of the Church who are not supposed to receive Catholic communion but those inside the Church who are not prepared, not ready, or not in a correct state. That is, if you are not in communion with the body of Christ – His Church – then you should not receive communion with Him in the Eucharistic. Catholics must, first of all, be in communion with the Church’s belief in the truth of the Eucharist. This might sound obvious but think again. There are those who self-identify as Catholics who do not genuinely believe in transubstantiation but as matter of convenience or to satisfy their friends and family or to fit in and not stand out go forward to receive the sacrament. This is wrong. And to participate without belief is a very serious matter indeed.
Sin breaks communion with God, and so Catholics must also be in a state of grace and must have been to confession if they have committed a mortal sin. There are almost always priests available to hear a confession, and even if it takes a little effort to find a priest it is hardly a major sacrifice compared with the sacrifice made by Christ and the gift He gives us in communion. Catholics must also abstain from food and drink other than water or medicine for at least an hour before receiving the sacrament. They should, of course, also pray before and afterwards and participate fully in the Mass and in the meaning of what is happening – which is a miracle available to all of us every day and almost everywhere. Do many Catholics take the Eucharist for granted? Of course. That is a human failing and a human reality, and human failings and human realities are why we need the Roman Catholic Church.
If Catholics disqualify themselves, it’s their own fault and they should know better, but for faithful Christians who are not Catholic, the situation is more complex. Other denominations see their version of communion as a form of hospitality and friendship or as a type of communal meal and worship service where everyone is welcome. Everyone is also most welcome to attend Mass but not to receive communion. This is seen by some as being non-Christian and even anti-Christian – how dare one believer prevent another believer from being a full member of any gathering? Catholics, however, don’t view this as a hospitality issue but as one of communion with the Catholic Church, and we cannot be in communion with the Catholic Church unless we are a member of it. It’s rather like a marriage. The Eucharist is intimate and real and uniting and is part of a wedding to the Church. Those participating in it are participating in a form of marriage with the bishops and the Pope on earth and with the angels and saints in heaven. It would be rude to invite non-Catholics to take part. If people want to become Catholic, no one is more happy than a sincere and serious member of the Church so it’s not about exclusion but about what it means to be Catholic. Anglicans, for example, do not enjoy the apostolic succession and cannot trace their origins and their priesthood back to Christ. While some of them, and in particular High Anglicans, may find their communion service deeply moving and may be committed Christians, it is not the Catholic sacrament, and they have specifically rejected that sacrament by not being Catholic. Other Protestants often do not regard communion as anything more than a symbol and it would be nothing short of offensive – both to them and to Catholics – if they were offered it or accepted it. In a perfect world, some argue, everybody would be entitled to the Catholic Eucharist. In a way I suppose that is true, because in a perfect world everybody would be Roman Catholic.
Any other strange accusations that Catholics confront? How about the flogging by some pseudo-historians of the conspiracy to bury the story of Pope Joan? If they were real historians, they would have understood Catholic history, and they would know that the scurrilous and silly accusation that there was a female Pope is merely urban myth. That, of course, hasn’t stopped stage plays and movies being made and the odd, very odd, book being written about the so-called Pope Joan. This one is as much Monty Python as is nobody expecting the Spanish Inquisition but, believe it or not, far less plausible and convincing. Unless, of course, nobody in the ninth century could tell the difference between a man and a woman. Something of a transgendered fantasy, it’s French farce disguised as Greek tragedy used as anti-Catholic drama. The story probably had its origins in the thirteenth century and was used before the Reformation by Catholics critical of the Church. Protestants after the Reformation were obviously even more critical of Catholicism, and they and assorted secularists and atheists have kept the tale alive. It is supposed to have begun in Mainz, Germany, with a clever, gifted girl who convinced everyone in a monastery that she was a he. She was a brilliant student, travelled to Athens, found a lover – who presumably discovered that she was a woman or was simply terribly confused – and then made it to Rome, still disguised and apparently convincing everyone around that she was a man. She became a secretary in the papal curia or civil service and then, as happened to all good cross-dressers in those days, was elected Pope in AD 855. Alas, the Church was not to be reformed and brought kicking and screaming into the modern tenth century because poor Pope Joan was kicking and screaming as she felt her baby move in her womb. Not enjoying the contemporary gifts of cheap contraceptives or publicly funded abortion, the good lady was found out at long last and was killed by stoning or being dragged by a horse through the streets. Nobody is quite sure. This led to the awful Catholic Church insisting that all priests from then on had to be celibate and also to a persecution of women in the Church who in any way were too spiritual or who showed signs of achieving greatness in the Church. Simple really.
Except that there is no truth to it at all and, like so many children’s stories, depends on a credulity and a suspension of disbelief and an absence of intelligent inquiry that is beyond even most Catholic-bashers. As we have already seen, priestly celibacy existed from the days of the early Church, and women were given power and influence in the Church that they would not have in the non-Catholic world for hundreds of years. The Catholic Encyclopaedia states, “Not one contemporaneous historical source among the papal histories knows anything about her; also, no mention is made of her until the middle of the thirteenth century. Now it is incredible that the appearance of a ‘popess,’ if it was an historical fact, would be noticed by none of the numerous historians from the tenth to the thirteenth century.” Incredible it is.
There are similar legends in Roman mythology, and the stuff of women dressing as men is a common theme in Renaissance drama. The story would probably have been forgotten if it hadn’t been used by anti-papal writers and then some of the reformers in the sixteenth century who were willing to use almost any ammunition to fire at the Church. Ironically enough, it was a vehement critic of Catholicism who confirmed that Pope Joan and her early feminist struggle against the patriarchy was an insult to intelligence. David Blondel lived through the Thirty Years War and saw the worst aspects of religious conflict. He was a Protestant clergyman, living in Protestant Holland and surrounded by Protestant ideas and Protestant friends. He was also a gifted historian who refused to allow propaganda to interfere with truth and by unpacking the Pope Joan myth concluded that it was a much later invention concocted by people with a vested interest in damaging the reputation of the papacy. There is no gap, he said, that Pope Joan could have filled because although she is said to have reigned between AD 855 and AD 877, Pope Leo IV died in June AD 855 and was immediately succeeded by Pope Benedict III. Quite a lot is known about this early election because the Byzantine Emperor tried to influence the outcome. The more we have learned about history and the more we learned how to use and apply history, the more we have realized that this story was a product of a drunken imagination. It’s amazing, though, how many allegedly sober journalists and filmmakers choose lies over truth.
Lastly to hypocrites. It seems a sad way to conclude a book but perhaps it is fitting that this subject should be at the rear of such a work. To give hypocrites their most descriptive titles: politicians, powerful people, and even ordinary men and women who claim to be Roman Catholic but behave as if they weren’t. Being Catholic does have a cultural context, and while many people struggle and evolve in their Catholic faith, the mere fact of being born to Catholic parents or in a Catholic country is not enough. Being Catholic is not the same as being Jewish, for example, in that Judaism has a secular aspect and there are Jewish people who describe themselves as atheists who are still to a large degree accepted within the Jewish community. Both the friends and, sadly, the enemies of Judaism have guaranteed that Jewish identity is not as straightforward as religious belief. Catholicism is different. But anyone who listens to public discourse will hear people criticizing or mocking Catholic teaching while defending or justifying their comments with the explanation that they are Catholic too so it’s okay, often followed by some joke about Catholic school, a joke about a priest, or some nonsense about the size of a Catholic next-door-neighbour’s family. This is irritating but relatively unimportant. More problematic are politicians who campaign against and vote against Catholic teaching but insist on announcing, particularly at election time, that they are faithful Catholics and that being Catholic sometimes means taking issue with the Church. In fact, they are usually not Catholic, not faithful, and not taking issue. They are exploiting their nominal Catholicism for their own ends. As politicians they can say and do whatever they want, but as Catholics they should speak and act as members of the Church.
When, however, bishops, cardinals, or parish priests rebuke them, the response of the politician and their friends in the media is generally to tell the Church to keep out of politics. Good Lord, reality cries out to be heard. It’s not the Church interfering in politics but politicians interfering in the Church. If a politician claims to be a Catholic, a priest has an obligation to guide that person to God and heaven, and the regular and repeated political support for propositions that contradict Church teaching and Christian belief will take the politician in the opposite direction. It’s an act of kindness and not aggression for a clergyman to try to help a politician save his soul, even at the expense of losing his political career. These men and women ought to learn from the lesson of St. Thomas More and his martyrdom due to his refusal to dent Church teaching, his refusal to agree to an end to papal supremacy, and his support for genuine marriage. One can stand in the man’s last dwelling-space – the cell in the Tower of London – and appreciate in the harsh, compellingly beautiful but coldly unforgiving room the contemporary resonance of More’s heroism when we compare him as a statesman to those men and women in international politics who claim to be Catholic but work and vote against fundamental Catholic doctrine. They do so with the usual chant that we must separate church and state and that their personal views must not influence their public policies, one of the most disingenuous utterances ever to bruise the body politic.
Truth is not geographical. If it’s true in a church or a home, it’s true in a parliament or a courtroom. If it’s true, it’s true. If unborn life is sacred, if marriage can only be between a man and a woman, if unjust war is wrong, if exploitation of the poor and weak is immoral, it’s always the case. We would think little of a man who loved his wife when in his home country but was unfaithful to her when on vacation. Or someone who told the truth to one person but an untruth to another. The first is an adulterer, the second a liar. On the abortion and marriage issues in particular, it is not that ostensibly Catholic politicians have found the matters complex but that they have found them inconvenient. But if it’s a life or a sacrament, it’s not trivial, it’s not a fashion statement, it’s not something mutable and passing like a party platform position. If they’re genuinely Catholic, they should be ashamed; if they’re just cultural Catholics, they should have the courage to admit the truth. What so much of it all comes down to, of course, are men and women not living out their Catholic faith. They also failed during Thomas More’s era, when legions of politicians, priests, prelates, and people gave in and gave up. That was for the sake of their lives. Today politicians do the same for the sake of their limousines. It would be easier to take if they just told us that their careers were in danger if they voted for the Catholic rather than the party line. Instead they obfuscate with arguments about church and state separation and representing all and not just some of their constituents, supporters, and voters. Nonsense! It’s long been established that an elected politician is not a mere delegate and is elected to guide as well as represent. On the subject of the death penalty, for example, it may well be that the majority of the elected official’s voters support capital punishment but few of them would then feel obliged to vote for hanging. This is about pleasing media rather than the masses.
When it comes to the separation of church and state, this is an American concept that doesn’t apply to every country and anyway concerns the protection of the freedom of individual Christians rather than the threat of the interference of Christian ethics into national politics. Anybody who does not understand that does not understand the history of Protestant ministers or Catholic priests and nuns building public hospitals and establishing free education. Thomas More loved life, was not physically brave, and had so much for which to live. But he had more for which to die: truth and the Church, two concepts that are as important now as they were in the sixteenth century. And Catholicism is as important now as it ever was and perhaps even more necessary in a world that appears to prefer confusion to clarity and to long for feelings instead of facts. All sorts of people have interesting and valuable ideas and deserve to be heard. Catholics particularly so. Because Catholics are right.