Pro Vita Sua

Seán Fagan is in his eighties but he writes and thinks like a young man, a wise young man with buckets of experience behind him.

I have just finished reading his book What happened to sin? Originally written in 1977, he has since updated it in 2008.

I really don't know where to start. It is such a relevant and inspirational book that it is hard to see anyone of good faith taking issue with it.

One of his other books, Does Morality Change?, originally written in 1997, was condemned by the Vatican (CDF) on its republication in 2003, on the following grounds (as reported by the Irish bishops):

“the denial of the binding force of the Magisterium [Rome] on conscience”; “the uncritical acceptance of the tendency ‘to substitute a dynamic and more evolutionary concept of nature for a static one’,”; “the effective rejection of the church’s understanding of the natural law (illuminated by revelation)”; “the explicit denial of moral absolutes, specially those concrete acts which are intrinsically wrong”; and “the promotion of a false understanding of conscience”.

I would have thought that these sound more like grounds for praise than condemnation. Of course, they are a hostile presentation of Seán Fagan's ideas by a power-mad bureaucracy that feels threatened by him. They fail to present the inspirational context in which these ideas are put forward, and they fail completely to see that Seán Fagan's thinking could be the salvation of a church which is failing in its duty to its members and which even some of its own highest officials acknowledge is rotten at parts of its core.

I found What happened to sin? the most inspirational book I have read since John Robinson's Honest to God. It is a game changer. Don't be put off by the use of the word sin, and you could even dispense with the divine in its content, and you would still have a programme for good (Godly?) living to bring you in sight of the Promised Land.

I read it as an unbeliever, but with an eye to what its thinking might mean for the renewal of the Roman Catholic Church on the lines promised by Vatican II some half a century ago.

It is a plea/recipe for individual moral responsibility in a buck passing and uncaring world. It debunks the power-enhancing strategems of church administrations over the last decades, centuries even, in favour of person-based moral growth.

It is a disgrace that this man has been silenced, though not very effectively it would seem. It is a sad reflection on the moral pygmies who reported him, those who silenced him, and those, who by their own silence, consent to the outrageous treatment of this holy man.

The Registry Office

Up to now, people who got married in church didn't have to worry about the civil aspects of their marriage. The church supplied the required information to the civil Registrar and it got entered up in the civil records. Official marriage certificates, when required, were then drawn from the civil register.

Those who did not get married in church had to handle the civil aspects themselves. Althought lacking the pomp and ceremony of a church marriage, one in a registry office could be equally good fun. Certainly, in the old days when I was still not half the age I am now, the antiquated English delivered by the Registrar, would have you smile, or even laugh - and you could because you weren't in church.

There has long been an argument for taking the church out of the civil registration process, which should be separate.

In the days of few religions here, a church marriage certificate was itself acceptable in place of a civil one for all sorts of civil purposes. Not any more, as I found out a few years ago. And, on reflection, right order.

However, nothing was done about the current arrangements for marriage registration, and the church continued to act as an agent for the state in the matter.

Now the RC Bishops are threatening to "work to rule", sort of, and refuse to do the State's business if the State introduces gay marriage. Their rationale is that gay marriage is unilaterally changing the terms of the current contract between Church and State, and so all bets ar off. As it is most unlikely that gays will be allowed to be married in an RC church, this is really a threat to inconvenience the State and all those RCs opting to have a church marriage.

If arrangements had been properly reorganised way back, the RC Church would not have this lever to pull today.

I wonder, however, if they have thought it through. Might their stand not lead to a significant number of RCs opting for the civil ceremony, which can now take place in all sorts of romantic places and not just in the Registry Office? And if the same RCs felt the need for Divine inclusion, could they then not just get a priest to informally bless their union? How would this affect the RC Church's income stream, I wonder?

Something like this has been happening in cases, for example, where a couple were married in the church of one spouse's denomination, but, for whatever reason, felt the need for the union to be blessed by the denomination of the other spouse.

I am familiar with one such case (see civil registry entries below), but in this case, unfortunately, the RC priest involved in the second ceremony recorded it for civil purposes as an actual (civil) marriage between the already married couple, who were duly registered as entering this second process as spinster and bachelor.


Click for larger image
It is clearly time for all this confusion to cease. The couple marry each other. This is then registered and recognised by the State. As things stand, the RC priest is only a witness at a ceremony where the couple marry each other and the marriage is then recognised by that denomination. So there are no great thological/constitutional problems here. Merely the small matter of resources. No doubt the State could cover the financing of the new arrangement somewhere in the current package of savage stealth taxes in the pipeline.

Clearly time to call the Bishop's Bluff.

Spiritual Harassment

As Pope Benedict said "many people now think the Church is a collection of prohibitions, but it is not."

The above is from an interview with Bishop John Buckley of Cork and Ross and is quoted in an article reproduced on the website of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP).

When I read the sentence, I didn't know whether to fall off my chair laughing or just feel that these ACP guys must have needed a lot of paste to keep that one from falling off the wall.

How many priests have now been silenced for attempting to discuss forbidden topics? How many nuns are being investigated by bishops for unorthodoxy? Nuns, who have put their lives on the line in taking the social justice agenda of the Second Vatican Council to some of the poorest areas in the world, being investigated by bishops, whose own orthodoxy has been to shuttle paedophile priests around parishes under their control, and for which orthodoxy they have neither been investigated nor punished.

You can get details of the above in another article on the same site and also find a link to the full investigation by the National Catholic Reporter of the attempts by the CDF to bludgeon American nuns into submission.