When my wife, Elizabeth, and I were married a quarter century or so ago, she was a practicing Christian in a mainline Protestant denomination, and her pastor married us. (N.B.: Neither of our true names, nor anyone else’s, appears in this piece.) I was decidedly non-practicing, a self-described agnostic whose Catholic upbringing was, I thought, behind me for keeps. But when Elizabeth said to me more than a decade later that she was thinking about becoming a Catholic and wanted to know if I would return to the faith with her, I answered immediately, “Yes, I would.” My prompt response—no struggle, no fuss—surprised her, and I suppose it surprised me, too. Something was definitely at work in both of us—the Holy Spirit, perhaps—and her question and my answer were timed perfectly for one another.

Off we went to our local parish priest. We made sure to tell him that Elizabeth had been married twice before. Each marriage had ended badly, crashing on the rocks of the husband’s infidelity; both ex-husbands still lived, but no children had issued from either marriage. Fr. Colin listened to our story in a warm, welcoming way. For me he prescribed the sacrament of confession; I jokingly suggested that I book one of his free afternoons. For Elizabeth, it was off to RCIA, which, though already underway that autumn, would prepare her to be received with other new Catholics at the Easter vigil in the spring.

That was it. Nothing was said by Fr. Colin about annulment of those prior unions or any obstacle to reception of the sacraments by either of us. We joyfully plunged into the life of our small-town parish. Fr. Colin was a young “JP2” priest, devoted to the faith, orthodox in outlook, clear and bright on church teaching in his homilies. One reason I am not employing his name—or either of ours—is that we still have a great fondness for this priest. We still scratch our heads today, however, over his failure to alert us to church teaching on divorce, ­remarriage, and the sacraments, when so much else in his pastoral character was fine and admirable.

You've reached the end of your free articles for the month.
Subscribe now to read the rest of this article.
Purchase this article for
only $1.99
Purchase
Already a subscriber?
Click here to log in.