Boris, marriage, divorce and the Catholic Church

So twice divorced Boris re-married, in no less than the Catholic Westminster Cathedral, triggering a media manufactured storm of “controversy” over the legality, propriety and morality of the Catholic church allowing such a twice divorced man to re-marry in their principal English cathedral.   In fact, the rules of the church, in allowing such marriages  were well known and easily found for those who cared to look. for them, and the proposed marriage was entirely within the very long standing and very well understood cannon law of the church.

But the controversy reminded me of my own travails, as a divorced man, with the Catholic church.   It’s an odd story but worth, I think, the re-telling.

I was brought up as a Catholic.  Sort of.   My father was not at all interested in the church and I can never recall him attending mass.  But my mother was fairly devout and would take us, religiously, to mass each Sunday, wherever we might be in the world, for we were a military family following our father to postings around the globe.  

 I went to Catholic school in Gibraltar where it was discovered that my mother had forgotten to have me baptised.    I was eight  years old.  It was probably because we lived and moved so often to such strange places that it had just not been organised.   So at eight I was, in St. Joseph’s church, Gibraltar, baptised.  And about a week later took my first communion and a few weeks later my confirmation. 

I think I sensed from the very start that something about the church was  not quite right.   Gibraltarians  took communion and confirmation very very seriously.   The girls were adorned in wedding dresses, with veils and bouquets, white shoes, white lace gloves and even confetti.   The boys were dressed up in white admirals suits, or captains suits for Gibraltar has very strong naval traditions.     Their parents, who wee not particularly well off, spent small fortunes on communion suits, whereas I, from a family of five children of a British Army sergeant, with little money, attended communion in my school white shorts and plimsolls, wearing  my brother’s long sleeved white shirt.   Still, I was now a member of the faith.   From then on I attended mass regularly and continued to do so until about 1964.

By then I was a soldier.  I had joined up at age 15.   There were a couple of advantages in being a Catholic soldier.    Yes, we had to attend church parades and march down to the garrison churches, but Catholics would then fall out of the parade and were supposed to go to the Catholic church.  Invariably, we went to a greasy spoon café to play the pin ball machines while the poor protestants were supervised into the church whether they wanted to or not.

But it was not to be the pin ball machines that pulled me away from the faith.

Armed to the teeth, facing the Indonesian military, your best friend was your rifle and bayonet and your second best friend was your mosquito net.

 It was my first posting:   To a war zone, dramatic, exciting. To the steamy jungles of Borneo.  I have written of that war before and you can revisit it here. (Borneo – A Clean War?) Hot humid temperatures, drenching monsoon rains.

We lived in the primary jungle, in bashas made of local trees with palm leaf roofs.  We kept our kit in old packing cases that had brought up the ammunition and stores.  Just a few personal things, maybe some family photographs, letters from home, a few paperbacks, maybe a small transistor radio, some magazines.  Our rations and water came in by RAF helicopter.  It was a soldiers soldering.

One thing the army never neglects, no matter how harsh or dangerous may be the conditions, is the spiritual needs of its soldiers.     There is a distinguished record of service by the Army Chaplin corps who send priests of all persuasions, mostly church of England and Catholic, into the most deadly of situations.  And so it was in the jungle.   Each Sunday an RAF helicopter would visit the jungle forts dotted along the Indonesian border, carrying two priests from the Army Chaplin’s Corp.    They would leap from the chopper, dressed in full jungle green, jungle boots, ’58 pattern webbing, a machete strapped t, o their legs and a jungle bush hat, faces smeared with camouflage cream, looking like SAS storm troopers except that they wore white clerical dog collars.

 Whilst our  belt pouches contained jungle essentials – ammunition, mosquito repellent, water purification tablets, spare socks, a torch and a military knife with an attachment for getting stones out of horses hooves, the padre’s pouches contained a chalice, small flasks of wine and water, tins of  sacred wafers, a surplice and a stole and a knife with a thing for taking stones out of horses hooves, together with a collection of hymn books and a bible.

The Catholic priest looked rather uncomfortable with it all.  He was older than the C of E chap and he had a look of panic or perhaps surprise, that he was here, in uniform, dropping out of the skies to hear the confessions of rough jungle soldiers.

There would be  a church parade come mass for the C of E’s and we few Catholics would have a separate small service.    Confession was taken whilst walking the perimeter of the jungle fort, me lightly armed with a sterling sub machine gun, both of us watched by the troops manning the sandbagged machine gun and motor trenches which covered the perimeter

I had changed whilst in that jungle fort.   I was no longer secure in my faith. 

I had been passed, by a fellow jungle soldier, a copy of a paperback,  “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller.   It was life changing. An author who truly understood the futility of war and the ridiculousness of the military machine.    Therein there is a priest, Chaplin Tappman,  friend of the surreal and sceptical bomber pilot, Yossarin.   The Chaplin is required to bless the bombs carried by the bombers and say a prayer that they might effectively kill ever more of the enemy.    It is magnificent, horrible, prophetic and it caused me to give up religion for ever.

“I’m leaving the church father” I said as we walked the perimeter.

“oh dear”

“I don’t want to take confession ever again”

“oh dear”

“I’m afraid I shall not see you again”

“oh dear”

There was an extended silence as we warily walked the perimeter.

“Is the war corporal?  I know war can be terrible”

“This is not such a bad war father, the Indonesians are not up to much and I haven’t fired a shot yet, not like those poor sods up in Vietnam, you’d be more use up there father”

“Well I shall miss your confessions corporal, I quite enjoyed them”

“If’s a book father, Catch 22, have you read it?”

“No, I’ve heard of it but not read it yet”

“You should father, might make you give up the army, maybe even the church”

“Oh dear, I don’t think so, I’m commissioned by God you know”

I watched him lift off in the helicopter,  and rise above the jungle canopy, and with him went my faith.  From now on I was an atheist. I was never a militant or a proselytzsing atheist, in fact I continued to admire those who held onto their faith and would never belittle them for it or mock the faith they believed in.

I got married a few years later, no longer a soldier.  I insisted it should be in a registry office rather than a church because I thought I was a man of principle, and should not retract on my long ago jungle conversion.

It never worked, that marriage.   Lots of them don’t, and we ended up incompatible and the inevitable divorce followed.

Life goes on, with all its twists and turns and in due time I met a beautiful Irish doctor, Patricia, and bang!, it was head over heels time.   We met at time when I was running as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour party, under the leadership of my great hero Michael Foot, and a manifesto described at the time, as the longest suicide  note in the history of politics, although for me it was a touch right wing!

Patricia by contrast was a committed Catholic.  Not pious or dogmatic but firm in her faith.   She wanted to marry in Ireland, in her local parish church in a full Catholic wedding.   She was prepared, should that not be allowed by the church, to marry in a registry office, but I knew her heart was set on a wedding in her local church and that it would break her heart not to do so.  And break the heart of her family if she was not to marry in her local church.    So we agreed to explore the possibilities of a church wedding, despite me being divorced.

We discovered, as did Boris, that for the Catholic church, any marriage that was not celebrated in the Catholic church, in a registry office for example, was simply not recognised by the church as being a valid marriage.    As far as the church was concerned such couples wee not married at all and were merely living in sin!

It is a horrendous policy,.    It is astonishingly arrogant and contemptuous for it implies, in fact it is explicit, in condemning all marriages outside the Catholic church as invalid and the participants therein as sinners.     It should have made me roaring angry and indeed, if I had been Prime Minister I would have immediately introduced a law forbidding the non recognition by any church, of any marriage conducted within the civil law and registered accordingly.    

Alas I was not the Prime Minister.   It occurred to me that Henry the VIII would have sorted it out pretty quickly.

There is, as Boris and I discovered, a condition to allowing the wedding of a divorced person in the church.   You must attend a course of “instruction” by a Catholic priest into the ups and downs, the ins and outs, the duties and responsibilities of marriage. 

It is a condition, no doubt devised by a committee of celibate old men wearing funny hats, in Rome, designed for very young “virgin” couplies entering into their first romance and relationship.  But it is an iron rule and is applied equally to those divorced Catholics, veteran’s of marriage, as well as the young 18, 19 and 20 year olds.

It is an embarrassing and humiliating condition, for it becomes compulsory that you must listen to a celebrate priest, a man who leads a lonely celebrate life, advising you on what is going to happen in your marriage.   But it is a hoop you must jump through if you wish to marry the woman you love in a Catholic church.   You must attend the nominated priest for “instruction”

Boris, it seems, got a Bishop in a cathedral.   I got an elderly priest in a neglected desolate church on the edge of a notorious Nottingham city centre housing estate.    The church was in poor condition with the long stained glass windows covered in mesh screens to protect them from local stone throwing youths, although in fairness the graffiti was more vibrant and colourful than the stained glass of the windows.

In a high ceilinged, bare whitewashed room, with little in it but a table and two chairs, I met my instructor.   I resented the process and did not look him in the eye, but listened to him describing the need to “stocktake” your relationship, take down each element of the marriage from the shelves and check whether it needed refreshing or renewing, the family box, the financial box, the sex box .   He mimed the process of taking down each of the boxes in his holy stocktake, and I bit my lip.

He asked me when was the last time I had taken confession and I told him the story of the Jungle encounter, all those years ago and the influence upon me of Catch 22.

“NO!”   he shouted, banging the palm of his hand on the table.     Startled I looked up.

“NO!” he again shouted and again banged the palm of his hand “on the table.

“I was that priest!”   he exclaimed, “It was me!   You were a corporal, I remember you now”  and he banged the table again “I knew you would come back to the church, I just knew!”  and again he banged the table.

We wee looking at each other in total astonishment.   It seemed to last for ages.   I recognised in him the slight look of panic and surprise that I had seen in the priest leaping from the RAF helicopter in that jungle fort., now laced with a touch of triumph.

“Well fuck me”   I said, very slowly.

For all  his  command of the Despatch box and the English language that Boris displays, his lucid writings, his slippery advocacy and speech making, I very much doubt, that given the particular circumstances, he would have, or could have, made a response more eloquent  that that.

It was a wonderful wedding in Ireland although I may well have been the first divorced person to ever marry in a Catholic church in rural County Cork.  I am sure there must have been mutterings.  On top of which I was an ex British Army soldier in an area of Cork where the fight against the Brits was intense and ferocious.

And now,  37 years later, I am still married to and still in love with the beautiful doctor from Ireland.   Patricia, if anything is even more  firm in her faith, not pious, not dogmatic, not uncritical, but firm in her faith, whilst I, I am afraid rarely attend church, and still treasure my copy of Catch 22.

It would be churlish not to wish Boris and his wife Carrie an equally long and happy marriage.

And I do.