How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part III: Exit

The priest and I sat for an hour in his well-appointed office of the Catholic Chaplain at Yale University.  It was the Spring of 1981.  I was an assistant professor of sociology at Yale, and I was preparing to get married in August of that year.  I had asked for our meeting to see whether it would be possible for him to be the co-celebrant at the wedding.

I went into the meeting visualizing any number of barriers to his participation.  But I was doing due diligence on the possibility because I knew it would please my mother, a devoted Catholic.

The problems were several.  My fiancée was Jewish, as would be our co-celebrant.  I told the priest that I was no longer a practicing Catholic, and that I could not commit to bringing up any future children in the Catholic faith.  I kept waiting for him to draw the line against his participation at any one of these conditions, but he did not.  To my surprise, he kept indicating that he could work with them.  I was pleased because I knew my mother would be.

As I stood up, something off-script entered my mind, and, thinking it really irrelevant, I nonetheless thought I should double check.  Just in case.  I said, “Oh, Father, there’s one more thing–it’s probably unrelated.  My fiancée was married earlier and is now divorced.”  He was halfway out of his chair when my comment caused him to slump back into it.  “That’s a problem.”

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How could that be a problem???  During college Kathy had married a Jewish man in a Jewish ceremony, and then they had ended the marriage a few years later in a civil divorce.  What interest could the Catholic Church have in that history?  She wasn’t the baptized person in our coming nuptials, I was.  And I had never been married.

To my shock, the priest explained that the Church could not sanction a marriage if either of the parties had been divorced, unless the divorced party had her or his earlier marriage annulled, by the Catholic Church.  Kathy would have to have her earlier marriage annulled by the Church if he were to officiate at our wedding.

I was all but speechless.  After a few more minutes of making sure that he and I were talking about the same background facts–that Kathy and her former husband were Jewish and were married by a rabbi in her family’s backyard, etc.–I thanked the priest for his time and left.

As I walked back to my office on campus, I couldn’t make any sense of this policy.  It seemed crazy and self-destructive.  If the Church wanted to reel back in lapsed Catholics such as myself, wouldn’t it want to make itself hospitable to those who still had at least a toe in its practices and belief system?  Why would it make us go through archaic procedures that were wholly irrelevant to faith?  More to the point, why would it make a divorced Jew go through them?

Before I had completed my 12-minute walk back to my faculty office, anger had overtaken my bewilderment.

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As soon as I could, I told Kathy what I had learned.  I assured her that I found the Church’s policy ridiculous and offensive, and that I did not want us to pursue that distorted path.  Surely we could find a co-celebrant of some Christian background to participate in our service.  To my surprise, she said that we should look into what the policy entailed before passing on the idea.  After all, she reminded me, we would be doing it for my mother.

She also told her parents about this problem.  And here the plot thickens.  Her father, a man of action if ever there was one, was a top corporate executive in a multinational manufacturing company, and in his early years he had managed its home plant in Brooklyn, New York.  He was also a well-networked individual, and he told her that he would look into this matter.  He said he knew people in the hierarchy of the Catholic Diocese in Brooklyn.

My Jewish father-in-law-to-be was soon back to us with a verdict.  It would be straightforward for Kathy to have her earlier marriage annulled there.

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That was because he had learned that the Brooklyn Diocese was known as the Las Vegas of the Catholic Church.  For a payment of $500 and simply participating in the formalities of the annulment process, including her live testimony before an annulment Tribunal, Kathy could have her marriage annulled.

This was less surprising to me than it was maddening.  This sounded much more like a cynical fund-raising exercise for the Church–at least in Brooklyn–than a  ritual of release from the sacred bonds of marriage.  But Kathy wanted to push on a bit further, and so we collected the documents that she would have to fill out and submit to begin the process.

I read them carefully.  The questions had to do with such matters as whether her earlier marriage had ever been truly meaningful in the sense that the relationship had been entered into with a knowing, willful and mature sense of the sacred bond to the other person.  The process also required her to get two people who were close to her during her marriage to submit written affidavits certifying that the marriage was not consummated in this truly meaningful, moral way.  That is, she was to get two lifelong friends of hers to lie for us.

That was all I needed to finally close the door to an annulment exercise.  We would marry without a priest.  The ceremony we had was a lovely one.  It was officiated by the chief Yale Chaplain–a Presbyterian minister–and a Cantor.

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My mother was delighted at the weekend celebrations of our wedding that Summer of 1981.  But I know that having had a priest officiate it would have warmed her heart by an extra special measure.  Perhaps that is why I managed myself and my family as I did at her funeral seventeen years later.

Though she had not lived in her hometown for more than 30 years when she died in 1998, she wished to have her funeral and burial there.  So two days after her death, my siblings and I found ourselves in the priests’ rectory at St. Benedict’s Church in Terre Haute.  She had grown up in that church and been educated in Catholicism in its elementary school.  Although none of her children were practicing the faith by then, I believe we all found this full circle moment to be very moving.

We were meeting with the priest there to plan her last religious rituals: the funeral mass  in the church, followed by her burial in Calvary Cemetery with other deceased members of the family in which she had been raised in the city.  Though the basic arrangements were simple to plan with the helpful priest, I felt an awkwardness in the meeting, and I suspect my siblings did as well.  Our mother had been the last real Catholic among us.

Finally I decided that I must raise the matter directly with the priest.  Since most of my mother’s friends had either died or left the city, the funeral mass would be very sparsely attended.  Only ten or so relatives and perhaps an old friend or two.  I told him that since none of her children were still in good standing with the Catholic Church, we knew that none of us were eligible to participate in the mass’s most sacred moment:  the taking of Holy Communion.  I thought the priest should be forewarned, because I suspected that none of us had seen a funeral mass in which only one or two people in attendance approached to receive the Communion wafer while the family simply sat through it.

He said that my reading of Catholic law on this matter was correct.  But he added something else, something that shed an entirely different light on the matter.  He said that Catholic priests were also taught that they could not deny the Communion wafer to anyone who approached to receive it in good conscience.

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There it was again: the default from strict rules to one’s own conscience.  I had first discovered this in action nine years earlier, when I interviewed priests for my newspaper report on whether they were strictly counseling parishioners against the use of artificial birth control methods, as the Pope had recently ruled.  (I describe this in Part II of this series.)  Some of the priests concluded then that Catholics’ consciences could be their guide on the use of birth control.  In good conscience about it, the use would not be a sin against God.

Out of great respect for the person whom our mother had always been, my decision was an easy one.  I would take Communion at her funeral mass.  It would be my first time doing so in decades, and my last time.  But I did it with a clear conscience.  It bonded me with my mother’s spirit.

Catholic strictures against divorce had contributed to her having been victimized by a bad marriage for far too long.  At least for once, and at last, restrictive Church rules would not freeze out a truly liberating and spiritual connection.

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Note to Readers:  If you would like to see the earlier essays in this series, you can find Part I here, and Part II here.  The final essay, Part IV, is forthcoming.