The Portal March 2017 | Page 7

THE P RTAL
March 2017 Page 7

They don ’ t like it up them Sir

Some thoughts on Amoris Laetitia and a pledged troth from Fr Nicholas Leviseur

Two men presently occupy the Chair of St Peter . One , somewhat oddly , does so in the relative humidity of downtown Houston : the other , late of the Argentine , now does so in Rome . Francis , by divine permission Lord Bishop of Rome has given to all the faithful a thoughtful and beautifully written presentation of God ’ s plan for marriage helpfully entitled Amoris Laetitia . Steven , presumably also by divine permission , Bishop of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter , has penned what ought properly to be called an epistle which he has called “ A pledged troth ; a pastoral letter on Amoris Laetitia ”.

Whilst I quite understand that much of what flows out of Rome is written in a most peculiar way and appears to have been rendered into English by Albanian émigrés , it really is quite something that a bishop should have felt it necessary to explain in such an engaging way what the Pope was driving at when he penned his reflective thoughts on marriage .
He does so because his flock contains many who , as former Anglicans , have been nurtured by an Episcopal church in which divorce is an ever present reality and the teaching on the sacraments has been less faithful to the generally understood thoughts of the church on the subject than it should have been .
Bishop Lopes too writes beautifully , although his prose style is blighted by the hypnotically dull footnotes which are required of all who do Roman theology . This is the essence of what he says . Marriage is lifelong : that is what the words “ till death do us part ” mean .
One cannot marry unless one is free to do so and understands what marriage entails . Marriage is a sacrament . Christ told us what he thought marriage entailed and since he remains God we really have no power to change His views on it which , one way or another , ought to be ours .
I may have missed some of the theological nuances , but that really is the gist of it . You will all be relieved to hear that Bishop Steven is quite sure that this is what Pope Francis was driving at in Amoris Laetitia . The two of them also agree that marriages break down rather a lot and that society as a whole has a rather different view on the consequences of that than does the church . Where they apparently part company is on quite what we need to do about this .
The former Bishop of Bevendon , Dr Spacely Trellis ,
Bishop Steven Lopes
would not entirely have approved of the unhelpful stance taken by the Ordinary ; rooted as it is in the teaching of the church founded upon the most ancient of theological reflection and buttressed by both doctrine and dogma . Fortunately , the Pope can boldly go where no one else dares to tread .
Having noticed that Catholics have a thing about Holy Communion and that an unfortunate consequence of divorce is that people quite wrongly think they can remarry and have sexual intercourse without committing adultery ( so that they take communion to the great peril of their souls ) the Pope thinks we really ought to do something about this most unsatisfactory state of affairs .
Quite a lot of really enlightened Churchmen have come to the conclusion that in a world in which Christians are being driven out of the Middle East and in which the population of Rome is not really Christian and is distinctly anti-clerical , it would be a good idea to stop erecting barriers to the faith and to allow people to keep doing this .
I may have got some of this wrong , because there is a very large extract of mercy to be added to the mix , but that is the general drift of the argument . The Pope ,