When someone leaves the Church, how do we pastors respond?
Catholic Herald, 19 March 2020
The pastor goes after the lost and beseeches those who would depart. But what if the lost are determined not to come back?
Mary McAleese is still leaving the Catholic Church. Or considering it at least. Or threatening it.
The former president of Ireland (1997-2011) wrote to Pope Francis after the Jean Vanier revelations saying that she would leave the Catholic Church “if it transpires that the Holy See failed to act to protect members of the L’Arche community”.
Back in 2015, when McAleese was campaigning for same-sex marriage, she allowed that she was so ashamed of the Catholic Church that she had considered leaving but couldn’t find anywhere to go.
In 2018 she had been invited to speak at a Roman conference on International Women’s Day. The Vatican declined to approve her invitation, so the conference moved from Vatican offices to the more congenial quarters of the Jesuit generalate. The Jesuits were pleased to host McAleese, who took the occasion to denounce the Church as “a primary global carrier of the toxic virus of misogyny”.
It’s a bit puzzling as to why the Vanier revelations should have moved McAleese so. She was president of Ireland when the national commission into sexual abuse released its devastating report on 50 years of abuse and cover up by Church and state. If sin in the Church was reason to leave, surely there was sufficient evidence in its pages?
Since her presidency ended in 2011, McAleese has spent a good deal of time at the Jesuits’ Gregorian University in Rome, completing first her licentiate in canon law and then her doctorate in 2018. The study of law is, to a great degree, a study of bad behaviour, both sinful and criminal. That’s why laws are needed. So a canon lawyer more than most ought to know that the Church has been dealing with the phenomenon of wicked shepherds and wicked sheep for a long time.
It could be that her studies at the Gregorian weakened her faith, and that the celebrated alumna’s faith has been rendered too frail to endure the scandal of a Church that is both holy in her Head and sinful in her members. A “casta meretrix” – a chaste prostitute – to employ the vivid phrase of St Ambrose.
Whatever the vagaries of McAleese’s ecclesiology, her latest eruption invites the question of what the pastoral response ought to be for someone who wishes to leave the Church. Most don’t write a letter to the Pope about it, but just leave.
Ask 10 pastors about what to do in such cases and all 10 will say to go after the would-be lost sheep. They would appeal to the authority of the Lord Jesus Himself, who spoke of the good shepherd who leaves the 99 to go in search of the lost. Of the physician who comes for the sick, not the healthy. Of the tax collectors and prostitutes that will enter the kingdom before the self-righteous. Ten out of 10 – including me – would point to the conversion of the Samaritan woman at the well, Zacchaeus in the tree, Matthew at the toll booth and the Good Thief on the cross.
The pastor goes after the lost and beseeches those who would depart. But what if the lost are determined not to come back? The Gospels then give different advice.
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