Quote:
Originally Posted by Not Bob
I acknowledge your experience and simply note that mine have been different.
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No, my
experience has been the same as yours. I have been blessed to interact mostly with Catholic authorities whose primary interest keeping Catholics like me coming to church, and often that means pretending that church teaching is more practical and humanistic than it really is. I had one priest send me off to college with the valediction (hi, Greedy!), “If you can’t be good, be safe.” And a few years after that, my parish priest tried to assure my Episcopalian wife that the pledge we signed to get a permission to marry to the effect that we “will” raise any children born of our marriage in the Catholic Church actually meant that we would “try.” He said this because he knew if he said anything different, the form would go unsigned, and we would be married without the Church’s permission and never darken his door again. I don’t blame him, but I also do not pretend that what Father Dave says to a liberally-minded parishioner is church teaching. There are thousands of Father Daves, but they belong to a church that actually has a formal way of making rules, and a certain pride in offering redemption to those who stray. The result is a lot of rationalization. Which is fine. We are talking about religion, after all.
If your Father Dave and my Father Dave both allow folks to get married in the church without an annulment just because Groom’s first marriage was a civil ceremony, that’s fine by me. It’s contrary to church doctrine, but also the right thing to do, ultimately. And what are we to make of that?
