‘THIS is my body – that is for you’ – 1 Corinthians 11:23.
Nobody does performative indignation like a slighted leftist politician, especially when God is thrown into the mix. The Liberal Democrat MP and hour-a-week Catholic, Chris Coghlan, has been refused Communion by his parish priest over his support for the assisted dying bill. Mr Coghlan has declined to turn the other cheek, choosing instead to play the martyr on X and to notify the relevant bishop of this egregious persecution.
Coghlan described the decision of Father Ian Vane, pastor of St Joseph’s Church in Dorking, as ‘utterly disrespectful’ and insisted that ‘my private religion will continue to have zero direct relevance to my work as an MP’.
That this might be the problem seems to have escaped him. It’s all very well voting with your conscience, but if that means you find yourself walking through the division lobby in company with the weirdly bloodthirsty Kim Leadbeater, whatever your ‘private religion’ is, it’s probably not the Catholic one.
Coghlan cannot be so inadequately catechized that he doesn’t know the Church teaching on faith and morals in respect of assisted suicide. To help somebody take their own life isn’t to acknowledge their vulnerability, but to exploit it. You quite possibly facilitate the commission of a mortal sin. As the Catholic Herald put it, ‘the Church teaches that publicly legislating [for assisted suicide] prevents politicians from receiving Communion until they have repented’.
So, how is it that Coghlan believes that his private conscience allows him to pick-and-mix Church teachings? And why does he feel the need to compel Father Vane to set aside his priestly obligation to administer the Eucharistic sacrament according to his vows?
This public/private distinction is the political safe space originally marked out by Catholic Democrat politicians in the US, to excuse their legislative enthusiasm for abortion. Fact is, it’s an admixture of Jesuitical expediency and theological snake oil. This is not a delineation which survives the inquiring gaze of God. Anybody who met and followed the Jesus of the Gospels ended up being given something to go out and do. If that was a problem, other sects were available.
The Christian life is one of mission: to evangelize the ambient secular culture, by word or (perhaps more effectively) quiet example. We’re not talking squash club membership here. As my much-missed priest, Father Paul Gonsalves, used to say: you don’t go to church to attend Mass, you attend Mass so you can go out and be the Church.
None of this is to deny that Catholic MPs, like all parliamentarians, are entitled to exercise judgement in their approach to policy development. However, from the Church’s perspective there must be limiting cases, and assisted suicide is one of these – if not this, then what? Coghlan has strayed beyond the boundary of what is allowable for a communicant, and his priest is doing his pastoral duty by beckoning for him to come back. Reconciliation through Confession is the sacramental gift given to all the baptized, and Coghlan is being invited to enjoy it.
If he were looking at this in another way (a Catholic one perhaps), he would see that his priest’s actions are discomfiting in the way interventions are supposed to be, because they are an expression of agape – of genuine Christian love.
It’s important to emphasize what’s at stake here. Communion in the Catholic Church is not some symbolic thing. As Flannery O’Connor remarked to fellow writer Mary McCarthy, ‘if it’s a symbol, then to hell with it’. The Eucharistic celebration is a spiritual meal ordered to a sacramental rite and performed according to an evolved liturgical practice. Communion is a physical encounter with Jesus, who is considered to be really and literally present in the consecrated wafer and wine, in body and blood. It is not a representation, but a re-creationof the Last Supper; participation is a privilege, not an entitlement. It is where timelessness intersects with time, and where the celebrant, however briefly, is crafted onto the Lord of the Universe.
If this seems a bit weird, then good. Catholicism is a strange religion, that is its excellence. It is intolerant of inconsistency (because truth cannot contradict truth) but celebrates paradox and mystery. This is its humility: the admission that ultimate knowledge of Creation, and of God’s activity within it, is available to us only at several degrees of unbridgeable separation. It is a supernatural faith, or it is nothing, and those of us who practise it, however imperfectly, should not be troubled by the armies of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ who attack it with the inadequate tools of liberal political theory or secular materialism.
Communion, in short, is a spiritual nourishment, the highest point of the Mass which itself is the ‘source and summit of the Christian life’. To experience it joyfully, it is necessary to participate in it worthily.
I’m sure that Chris Coghlan is a nice man, but that’s irrelevant, a distraction at best. We are not called to be nice, but to be saints, and not many of the saints were particularly nice. You get to be a saint through the constant spiritual transformation, necessary to perfect a friendship with Christ, a process not easily accommodated by the dominant and unchallenging contemporary lanyard culture, and one likely to be very irritating to the merely ‘nice’. If done properly.
Father Vane is charged with saving Coghlan’s soul, not his face, and if (as he claims) the priest’s public intervention has embarrassed him, perhaps that’s because embarrassment is in this case the handiest pastoral tool.
It is curious that this distinction between the private and the public has come alive again in the mind of an MP whose party banned smoking in private clubs. If he’s not willing to carry his ‘private religion’ into his public life, he represents a political culture happy to invade and regulate the private space of the rest of us by shaming us into eating less meat or feigning an interest in women’s cricket, to give just two examples.
Mr Coghlan should repent, enjoy that repentance, and get back to Mass. I’m afraid he makes a very milquetoast martyr. As dull, in fact, as only a Lib Dem martyr could be.
