Letter to Prairie Messenger

The Editors,

The Prairie Messenger &
Catholic New Times

As a Catholic and Anglican interchurch couple, my wife and I worship together on alternate Sundays in the two churches which gave us spiritual birth and nurtured us in our faith journies. In the last couple of weeks at St. Thomas’s Anglican, and again at St. John’s Catholic, we have been struck by the Gospel reading (Mk 10:2-16).

Christ clearly states something that we have both experienced: namely, that two individuals come together in marriage and, by the grace of God, are made one. He goes on to state that what God has thus joined together, no one is to put asunder.

Then, elsewhere in the Gospels, Christ also tells us that unless one eats of the flesh and drinks of the blood of the Son of Man, one cannot have life within.

This ‘one’ that God has created then wonders: where is this ‘one’ to worship; to take and eat the body of Christ; to take and drink His blood? In the Anglican church? In the Catholic church? Where is the justification for implying and at times clearly stating that the non-Catholic member of that ‘one’ cannot be invited to receive at the Lord’s table in the Catholic community? How many more Sundays must that one whom God has joined together be put asunder - and how can such sundering continue to be justified in the name of a lack of unity, a unity which the Church proclaims (and we believe) that God has already effected in the sacrament of marriage?



Sincerely,

Ray & Fenella Temmerman