Ministry aims to welcome divorced Catholics back to Church

The following article, by Joseph Kenny, appeared in the April 4 edition of the St. Louis Review:

Lee Schellert walked away from the Church for four and a half years.

“If it hadn’t been for Father (James) Benz,” he said, “I wouldn’t have come back to the Catholic Church. He had to do a lot of long, hard talking.”

Schellert had been active in a parish and had told his pastor at the time that he had no other alternative than to go through a divorce. The reply stunned him. What Schellert heard — perhaps not the exact words but the message he received — was: “You can come to church, but I want your resignation from the men’s group because you’re no longer part of the Catholic community.”

The Church’s teaching on divorce is clear, stating that all except those who have remarried without an annulment are encouraged to receive the sacraments, and everyone is welcome to attend Mass and be a part of parish life. Reaching out to people who are separated or divorced is exactly what the Church calls Catholics to do, with the Catechism of the Catholic Church imploring priests and the whole community to “manifest an attentive solicitude, so that they do not consider themselves separated from the Church in whose life they can and must participate as baptized persons.”

The U.S. bishops, in a 1993 pastoral letter on family life, called Church leaders “to include more deliberately within the scope of our pastoral care” an attentiveness to a number of groups, including single-parent families and people who are widowed or divorced.

Many Catholics who are divorced or separated mistakenly feel unwelcome. Schellert told of a man who was divorced but not remarried who had been away 11 years, believing he couldn’t receive the sacraments.

“I went through my divorce and left the Church for approximately five years,” said Steve Oberle, now vice president of a region of Catholic Divorce Ministry. “I came back because I realized something was missing in my life. And luckily some people in my parish were part of a group” ministering to divorced Catholics.

Continue reading about the Catholic Divorce Ministry »