I was curious as to how he had come to make this commitment, and in the course of a conversation once he explained it to me. “I was in college, away from home for the first time. There were new courses, new people to meet, and the experience of freedom. And I enjoyed it very much, but I could see that it was very easy to make the wrong choices and slip into the wrong crowd.

“But there was one fellow in the year ahead of me who was different. He was quiet, peaceful, helpful — he was a centered person. At first he did not stand out at all, but, as time went on, I saw that he was the person people turned to for help. He lived down the hall from me, and I realized after a while that he was going to Mass every day. And, early one morning, as I was coming into the dorm from a party, he was going out, and later on I asked him why on earth he had been up at that hour. He said, simply, ‘The Catholic Worker.’ I didn’t even know what that was, but I liked this guy very much, and one thing led to another. Well, I went with him one Saturday morning, and here I am. I saw what it was all about.”

He saw what it was all about. That is a good example of the old bromide that Christianity is more caught than taught — example can often do what no amount of explanation could accomplish. As important as authentic teaching is, it will most often be impotent without good example — but the example of a disciple who is on fire with the Gospel can be life-changing! That is why I am very fond of the way this feast of our Lady, the Mother of God, follows Christmas.

Both Christmas and Easter are such great feasts, celebrating truths of such magnitude, that a single day in the Church’s calendar is not enough to do them justice. Instead they have octaves, a stretch of eight days during which we consider that we are still celebrating the feastday — readings, prayers and antiphons of the liturgy all reflect the fact that, on the fifth day of the Octave of Christmas we are still celebrating Christmas Day.

The eighth day is the Octave Day, and the liturgy does a lovely thing. The Octave which began with Christmas, the feast of the Nativity of the Lord, ends with the feast of Mary the Mother of God. I do not think this is an accident; I think that it has to do with the way the Church wants us to ponder the mystery of this season. God’s initiative calls forth our response; God can send his Son into the world, he can pour his grace upon us, but it is for us to welcome what he has done, to say, “Yes, Lord.”

There would be something missing, something very crucial, if our celebrating the birth of the Lord did not include remembering the role of our Lady. I know that there are many Christians of other churches who find our emphasis on her role to be exaggerated, but pondering the mystery of Christmas should show us just how crucial her role in the Gospel is.

The God whom the whole universe cannot contain, who created us out of love and, when we had parted from his friendship, longed to win us back again, had a Plan. And from all eternity, that Plan involved the moment when, in the fullness of time, God the Second Person of the Trinity should step into His own creation; should become Man. And in the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, we see that the fullness of time had come: judges and prophets had prepared the people, holy ones for generations had prayed for the coming of the one whom God would send as Messiah, never dreaming that in their time of need God would choose to come to them himself! And when that moment has come when he will step into the world, we look into the Gospels — and what do we see him doing?

We see him asking permission — asking the permission of one of his own creatures to step into his own creation. The angel stands before our Lady to ask her if she will be the Mother of the Messiah.

For centuries, this moment of the Annunciation has been portrayed by artists and poets. There is the angel, standing there anxiously, having delivered his message, awaiting the maiden’s response, all creation pausing, waiting to hear what her word will be. Now, I know that there are many people who think this kind of meditation excessively dramatic, who will point out, “But, look, God would have found some other way of doing it if she had said, ‘No.’” But I think that misses the point.

For God could have done whatever He chose; it is what God would not do which is the point. He would not force himself upon our Lady, nor would he force Himself upon our world. He will not force his gift of salvation upon us; Master of all things though he is, he will not compel us to give him the one thing which he really desires: our hearts.

So, here he was, awaiting the answer of the young Mary — would she trust him; would she consent to this strange vocation which was being proposed to her, a vocation the demands of which she could not foresee?

Isn’t this precisely the way in which he deals with each of us? I believe that is why the Annunciation is such a popular theme in religious art — most of the churches I have seen have some kind of depiction of that moment. His grace is offered to me — but it is for me to accept it. I have a genuine choice, and the genuine opportunity to turn from his grace if I choose to do so. There is a graciousness in the way our Lord respects our free will. And I have sometimes thought that among the joys of heaven, as our hearts are full to overflowing with gratitude to him for all that he has done for us, we will be thankful, too, that he has graciously allowed us the opportunity to give something to him — that, because he respected our free will and gave us the opportunity to choose him, we will be able to find joy in our having been able to give to our beloved Lord the gift of the hearts he so wanted.

All of this because of the gift of free will; because we have been given the capacity to say, “Yes.” This feast of Mary the Mother of God, this celebration of her response to the divine invitation, is indeed a crucial part of our celebration of the Christmas mystery. It is because of her free and live-giving “Yes” that God was able to enter His creation in the fullness of time; it is because of the free yes of so many disciples over the generations since that Christianity is caught more often than taught. It was the freely chosen example of that older student which transformed the young man of whom I spoke earlier; it is my own freely chosen “Yes,” spoken in imitation of Mary, which God may use to transform other hearts.

The greatest Gift that God gave us, the Gift of the Messiah, was his greatest surprise as well. It had been anticipated — by the time of the birth of Jesus, the expectation of the coming Messiah was widespread among the Jews. There was a great deal of speculation among them as to what sort of Messiah would be coming — some expected a mighty warrior who would expel the Romans and restore the kingdom of the House of David; some a great Rabbi who would reconcile the divided factions of the Jews. But it was widely expected that God would be sending somebody.

And that was the great surprise — for in the truest sense, he did not send anybody at all. He himself came. When the package was opened, mankind has received a far greater Gift than we could have anticipated.

Part of that surprise is the feast we celebrate today — the “Epiphany of the Lord,” the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles.

It is a mysterious feast. Out of the reaches of the east, the wise men appear, searching. They have seen a new star rising in the east, and they believe that this foretells the birth of a great King, and they have come to do him homage — not the kind of behavior most of us can imagine ourselves engaging in! When was the last time you were tempted to drop everything and follow a star?

We are used to thinking of Christmas and Easter as the two greatest feasts of the church year, but, believe it or not, the Epiphany was celebrated in the Church earlier than Christmas. Indeed, there are still countries where it is on the Epiphany that one gives gifts to loved ones, in imitation of the magi bearing their gifts to the infant Lord.

The Church began to celebrate this feast early on because it embodied another surprising and wonderful aspect of the Gospel: salvation was for the whole world! Where before, God’s saving plan had been confined largely to the Chosen People of Israel, and salvation history was to be followed through the events of Israelite history, now the gates were to be opened, and the whole world was to be invited to the Banquet.

It took the Church a few years to realize this. The earliest Christians were Hebrews and continued their Jewish observance after coming to believe in Christ — they would go to the synagogue or Temple on the Sabbath, to Eucharist early on Sunday morning, and keep all of the ritual prescriptions of Judaism. The first great crisis of the Church came when it became clear that the Holy Spirit was falling upon gentiles, not just Jews, and that these gentiles were coming to believe in the Lord Jesus — and the question had to be faced whether gentiles coming into the Church had to become Jews first. Was the Church a congregation of believing, practicing Jews who kept the Jewish Law but believed in Jesus as Lord? It was a bitter debate among the early Christians, for there were many of them who loved their Jewish heritage and saw it as absolutely necessary for the living of a Christian life.

In the end, led by the Spirit, the Church decided that the time of the observance of the Law had passed — we are living in the Law’s fulfillment. And the Messiah who brought the salvation which was the hope of Israel had actually sent forth his Church to the ends of the earth to proclaim the message. And that is the reason that the Epiphany is such a great feast. God had prepared his Chosen People by careful revelation through a long line of sages and prophets, but his grace could not be contained even by the old covenant; it was working as well among the gentiles, and, guided by their own lights, the magi were brought to the cribside of the Messiah.

Epiphany is a feast of mystery and surprise, and the God who works in surprising ways has not ceased to work to this day. One of the things the Epiphany should teach us is to be open to surprises, just as the eyes of Mary and Joseph must have widened with amazement at the entrance of their exotic visitors from the East.

What form might such surprises take?

Well, perhaps his grace will stir me to become more deeply involved in evangelization, bringing the Good News to others. Many people can easily assume that this is a task which they are not gifted for and which they can leave to church professionals, but the Holy Father has reminded us again and again in this Jubilee year that we are ALL called to bear the Gospel to others, each in his or her own way.

And it is something we have to think about, because becoming a bearer of the Good News means growing in God’s grace, being open to others, allowing my life to be penetrated ever more deeply by the Word of God so that I can bring it to those around me. I might volunteer to be trained as a catechist or a teacher’s aide, for example, in my parish religious education program, or as a religion teacher of children with special needs. I might investigate being part of the RCIA team, helping in the process which brings converts into the Church. Maybe my parish or diocese has a vocation team, working to promote the idea of a religious vocation to others.

Or perhaps the call of grace will be less oriented to Church structures and more intensely personal — I might be moved to enroll in a few courses on the Faith, to deepen my knowledge; or to commit myself more deeply to prayer. I might hear the call in my heart to reach out for reconciliation with someone from whom I have been estranged, or to try to bring together others who are torn by anger at each other.

The call of God can take many forms, which is why I need to be open to surprises.

Herod and the magi are interesting contrasts. Herod is a believer, of sorts. Hearing the magi, he has enough faith to summon the chief priests and scribes to inquire of them what the Scriptures might say about the coming of the Messiah. He believes, on some level, in the revelation; but he has not allowed it to penetrate him. He knows that God has spoken through His Scriptures, but he has never realized that God has spoken to him, to Herod, and that he needs to respond to the revelation. He believes in the revelation just enough to want to thwart it, to use it to kill the Child.

The magi are quite different. They use the knowledge given to them by their culture to discern the birth of a great king, and they undertake the costly, dangerous journey through the desert to find him. As they were seeking a great king, they must surely not have expected to come to the end of their journey only to find the child of a rather ordinary peasant couple — whatever the outcome of their journey as they had imagined it, surely it was something more dramatic than this! Yet St. Matthew tells us of the joy with which they saw the star proceed to the place where he was, and how they did him homage when they found him.

St. John says explicitly that in this way Jesus “revealed his glory,” which is a striking thing to say of an incident wrapped up so simply in our human lives and needs. I have to believe that he did so to emphasize to us that no care of ours is too trivial to bring to him. We need this assurance in every state of life, for surely we are all dependent upon the care of God — and surely this is true of the married state.

About ten years ago I received a phone call from a young man whose wedding was about four months away. He told me that he and his fiancée urgently needed to come and see me. We promptly set a time; they came in, and we sat down to discuss what proved to be a very serious obstacle for them.

The groom was quite frank in observing that he and his family were very different from the family of the bride; as he put it, “We’re much more simple,” by which he meant that their tastes were plainer. And, summing it all up in a nutshell, he said, “I just think it’s crazy to spend twenty-five thousand dollars on a wedding day when we’re beginning a whole new life and have so many other expenses.”

And that was the situation. I looked at the bride, and she had her jaw set in the most determined way imaginable. “I have dreamed about this day ever since I was a little girl. It has to be just right. I understand what he is saying, and that there will be expenses down the road, but this is not just another day. We are both in good health; we will go into some debt, but we can put off having children for a few years; we will work hard just as other people do, and we will pay this off.”

Every once in a while I have a conversation which sums up for me what’s wrong with the world today — and this was one of them.

It was hard to know where to begin with the discussion which followed. The situation embodied so many problems typical today. I began by pointing out that as Christians, we are not supposed to be materialists, and it seemed to me that this preoccupation with a thoroughly splendid wedding was dangerously materialistic. The bride stuck to her guns. I pointed out to them both that there would be other, undoubtedly serious matters which would face them down the road, and that they were going to have to learn to find a way to reach concord on decisions which affected them both; but, they were aware of this.

Then I said, “You’re putting a lot of energy and devoting a great deal of attention to the material preparations for your wedding. Are you doing the same for your spiritual preparation?” This drew two very blank looks, for even the groom was neglecting the sacraments, so I added, “Will you accept children lovingly from God, and bring them up according to the Law of Christ and His Church?” That is a promise you will make before the altar on your wedding day. But here you’re talking about putting off having children because you want a big party — as though children are something one produces by the clock. If that’s how you are treating a promise you’ll make to God, how much are your vows to each other going to be worth?”

Catholics are very familiar with the concept of a “vocation crisis.” We take the phrase to refer to a shortage of priests and nuns, but the vocation crisis is really much broader than that. It affects every state of life, including marriage. We actually have an across-the-board “baptismal crisis.”

Marriage is a state of life in the Church, just as truly as is the priesthood or the religious life. When we see a man and a woman standing before the altar ready to be joined in matrimony, we should realize that this is as sacred a moment as when a priest is ordained, or a sister is professed. And, in a real sense, all should understand that a life of service to the Church is beginning as well, for St. Paul teaches clearly that the faithful love between a husband and wife is a sign to the rest of us of Christ’s love for his Church. Marriage is not simply an arrangement benefiting husband and wife, or their children, or their families. It is a blessing for the whole Church.

And this is true in the most practical possible way, and I need to emphasize this carefully. The witness of committed laity has an importance which cannot be overestimated. The world is full of people who, frankly, will never listen to a blessed word I have to say, because I am a priest; they think, “He has to say those things.” It is the witness of committed laity, living the Gospel, creating Christian homes, raising Catholic families, which gets the attention of others. That is the seed cast into the ground of our society, and it does indeed bear fruit, more than we often know.

So, it is tragic when Christians enter into marriage with a secular mindset, and that happens so often today. A Catholic wedding ceremony does not make a Catholic marriage. Every married couple has genuine and important responsibilities, but when material concerns, thoughts about “getting ahead,” the status symbols of wealth become preoccupations, something has entered the home which can be very dangerous. Catholicism is more than just a list of obligatory do’s and don’ts; it is a deep and wide and fruitful way of looking at all reality, and if a family’s life is not grounded in regular prayer, celebration of the sacraments, attachment to the life of the Church, and reverence for God, then religion will be a mere formality, useful for celebrations but otherwise more a burden than anything else. And if that is how one approaches the most sacred thing in life, then the way one approaches other important things will suffer as well.

Marriage is a sacrament, a graced encounter with Christ. Immersed as we are in a secular, materialistic world which daily tells us that physical beauty, possessions and power are the most important considerations, our society urgently needs the witness of couples who live their marriage vows, committed for life, in Christ. If there were ever any doubt in my mind about that, experiences such as the conversation I described with that couple soon to be married before the altar would have wiped that doubt from my mind long ago. Each was approaching matrimony in a secular way — from different perspectives, but essentially secular. And each was floundering about, frustrated, in a situation where there was something missing — but they did not even know what. A Christian marriage was soon to begin, ideally a sign to all of the Kingdom of God — but it was beginning with carefully laid plans for a party so lavish that they were going to break their vows to God to pay for it!

Here we see clearly the importance of living the faith, not just as a Sunday exercise, but daily. Marriage is a vocation, a state of life; the seminary for that state of life is growing up in a Christian home. It is so difficult for couples who have not grown up in a fervently Catholic home to approach the sacrament with their priorities set correctly; where their parents provided for every material need but neglected the spiritual, they will naturally look upon the material things as their priority as well.

And the kind of marriage they will likely have? Well, once, while in Texas, I visited a museum housed in an old mission complex. It was an odd experience, walking through a consecrated church building, seeing the empty tabernacle, the altar, the murals, even an old confessional, and knowing that, however well kept up it all was, the life of the church had departed long ago — no one prayed here now. It should have been dedicated to God, but the building served another function, and was cold, lifeless. I have that same odd feeling in the homes of Christians who have fallen away from the sacraments — there may be a framed picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall, but he is far from being the Master of the house.

And what unhappiness results! How cold and fruitless life becomes. When the Church decrees that marriage begins before the altar, she is teaching us also that it should never be lived far from the altar! Sometimes the mistakes we make are necessary, because otherwise we would never learn the most important lesson — never forget who is the Master of the house.

But there are even more important foundations which need to be laid foundations of a sound Christian relationship. Without that, the loveliest imaginable home can turn into the setting of a nightmare.

I think the first thing I would say about the laying of that foundation is that two Christians should not marry unless each is capable of, and willing to help the other grow in faith. Now, right here we are getting into deep waters, and there will be all sorts of people who will disagree with me, I know. They will come up with all kinds of anecdotes about happily successful mixed marriages and how grandpa never went to Church but was an intensely good man who made grandma very happy. All well and good — but I can come up with a good number of anecdotes of my own!

There will always be Christians who will marry people who do not believe, and these marriages can work out quite well. But ordinarily, a couple getting married should share their deepest values and aspirations, and I take it for granted that for a believer the Faith is at the core of these.

During courtship, a couple should be practicing the Faith together. They should be attending Mass together frequently, developing and keeping up solid friendships with other believers, sharing wholesome interests. I often hear young adults complaining that it is difficult to meet other young Catholics, but I suspect that it is much easier to do so if one is living an active, committed Catholic life oneself, volunteering in parish, keeping up ties with school friends if one went to a Catholic high school or college, checking out lay apostolic organizations.

As a relationship gets progressively more serious, and a couple more committed to each other, it is vital that each helps the other to realize as fully as possible the ideals they hold in common. Few things are more important than this. Over the years, I have become convinced that many couples, standing before the altar on their wedding day with all the good will in the world, only attend to part of what they should be doing. They are focused upon the vows they will be taking, which is fine as far as it goes — but I suspect that it is only sixty percent of the challenge of the moment. It is not enough for John to focus upon his vows, and resolve to be a good and faithful husband; he must also resolve to help Mary to be the best wife she can be; and Mary must, in turn, not merely focus on her vow, but on helping John to be the best possible husband.

And this mutual support begins during courtship. It begins as a couple instinctively helps each other to realize to the full the values they share. Does this sound idealistic? That’s because it IS idealistic. “Idealistic” is not a synonym for “unrealistic.” A relationship without ideals will eventually seem like the worst kind of burden. Years ago, there was a couple who came to see me in the rectory because of marriage problems. I did not realize it at the time, but they had already separated, after just one year of marriage. In the course of the conversation, it became apparent that they were living two separate lives under one roof — he was coming home after work tired, wanting nothing but to collapse on the sofa and watch a ball game on television with a beer in his hand. The wife was “cooped up in the house all day with the kid,” as she put it, and wanting a bit of companionship, but if she sat down with him and talked she was interrupting his ball game.

Back and forth they went, until I decided that it was time to bring a bit of closure to this verbal fencing. “Tell me,” I said, “what interests do you both have in common?” He looked baffled; she said, “Absolutely nothing. I don’t even like television any more!”

“But,” I said, “what did you do when you were courting?” And they both looked at their little daughter, cute as a button at fourteen months, and laughed. And they were right — that was what they had done during their courtship. That was why they had never gotten to know each other — the element of sex, entering into the relationship too early, proved to be a great distraction. And here they were, one year into marriage, with an infant daughter, just discovering how little they had in common.

Yes, one sounds hopelessly idealistic when one speaks of Christian ideals and matrimony. But one had better be idealistic when laying that foundation! No one complains when the contractor is too careful, too meticulous or too honest. Some things are well worth the trouble.

One should not marry with the goal of “changing” or reforming one’s spouse. Children are an important part of matrimony, but one’s spouse should not be one of the children! One’s spouse should be someone for whom one has deep respect, someone on whom one can rely, someone whose faults one can clearly see but whose virtues stand out clearly, too. If the person whom one is marrying is going to be a “project,” you will end up being a heavy burden on each other.

A couple should also not marry if their fundamental visions of what their life should be like differ radically. It happened a few years ago that a wife was in my office speaking of her longing for more children. “In my family, Father, children were a blessing, and there was always room for everyone! My husband and his family are just not like that. When I told my family that I was expecting my third child, my dad popped the champagne cork; when we told my in-laws, my mother-in-law burst into tears. They’re just negative people, Father, and my husband thinks that life is just working incredibly long hours and piling up lots of money, and I don’t know how much longer I can go on.”

Please note that both husband and wife were deeply good people; but there was no fundamental communion between them in the way they looked upon their life together. That kind of marriage can be truly unbearable.

In the second reading, Paul speaks of the Church as the Body of Christ. Each one of us is a part of that Body. This is why a Catholic marriage ceremony occurs before the altar, witness by a priest or deacon. From that day on, the couple makes their contribution to the life of the Church by the living out of their marriage vows. And make no mistake about it, that contribution is extremely important! The witness of a Catholic married couple whose commitment to the Lord is lived out in the daily life of the home is a powerful sign to everyone who knows them, both Catholics and non-Catholics.

Undertaking the vows of marriage, a couple enters a new state of life in the Church. They are assured by God of all of the graces necessary for their state of life; he will never be outdone in generosity. If they make him always welcome in their home, not as a guest but as a member of the family, and if they will remember not simply to keep their own vows, but to help each other keep them, then they will find their vowed life together uniquely rewarding. They will grow together to meet challenges, their love will deepen as they turn obstacles into stepping stones to a deeper love. And they will find that, as they were faithful to their promises to each other, God will have been faithful in his promises to them.

But the idea is not always realized, as we all know; and it is about that difficult reality that we must speak today.

In one important respect, matrimony is a more difficult vocation to live out than is my own vocation of priesthood. It is a bit more complicated if one goes off the rails, as it were — if I as a priest begin to have difficulty with my vocation, I will if I am wise consult a spiritual director, but basically I have to worry about myself, and my openness to the grace of God.

With marriage, one has always to worry about one other person — one’s spouse. And that can be very difficult indeed. Both spouses have to be willing to be open to the graces of Matrimony; and that is not always the case.

I find that one very common, and totally unexpected, problem can occur in marriages when two people who were not fervent Christians marry, but one or the other spouse experiences a conversion, a deepening of fervor, and the other does not. This can be a serious obstacle, and all the more frustrating because so unexpected! “The last thing we ever thought would be a problem, Father, was RELIGION. Neither of us had any use for it! In fact, when we walked down the church aisle in our wedding day, our parents thought the ROOF would cave in!”

The person who said that to me was in my office because she was finding herself taking her faith more seriously, and it was becoming an issue in her home as her husband grew increasingly resentful.

There are variations on that problem as well — for example, the husband is an alcoholic, the wife has faithfully stuck by him, has kept things going in the family, and then, suddenly, the husband sobers up, joins AA, becomes industrious, reliable, quick to help others to sobriety. You might think that this is the end of a big problem, and it is, but often it is the beginning of another. Now the wife has an enormous adjustment to make, from being the one keeping things going to make room for a suddenly recovered, suddenly responsible spouse.

In all of these cases, one spouse has changed, has grown, and the other finds it difficult to adjust to the change. The communion of spirit which should exist between spouses is frayed, or fractured. For one reason or another, people grow apart; perhaps one or the other withdraws, no longer is open about sharing what is going on inside. This can be deeply frustrating for both parties.

And with that frustration, there is inevitably guilt and the tendency to blame oneself. Here, we must be very careful to be clear about the teaching of the Church.

I cannot commit a sin by accident. I must clearly see that something is wrong, I must have thought about what I was doing and, despite knowing that it was wrong, gone ahead and done it anyway. If one of those conditions is not present, then I cannot be guilty of sin.

And relationships can be an extraordinarily complicated part of life. I can find out that even within someone whom I thought I knew extraordinarily well, there are things going on which I had not suspected; indeed, which the other person might not have known about himself. I can be doing the best I possibly can, yet not realizing the full limitations of the situation.

This was the case with a couple I knew in my first parish. They had been childhood sweethearts, married years before, but over the first few years of their married life the wife had begun to exhibit signs of serious psychological illness, both instability and severe paranoia. Eventually it became impossible, to the husband’s great distress, for them to live together, for her paranoia came to be directed at him.

They had been separated and divorced for years when he and a woman from the parish came to see me. They wanted to know about annulments.

The teaching of the Church on matrimony is quite clear. Once the marriage vows are validly exchanged, and the marriage is consummated, it is a bond which endures until the death of one of the spouses. In order for the vows to be validly made, a Catholic must marry before a Catholic Priest or Deacon (or some other representative of the Church licensed by the Bishop) and two witnesses, and must be free to make the vows, able to make the vows, and intending to live them for life. If one of these conditions is lacking, the marriage is not valid.

In the case of this man, it was clear that the psychological distress his wife had shown later on had been present from very early in her life - the testimony of family had shown that. She was therefore not capable of making the marriage vows. An annulment was obtained without difficulty, and the man was free to marry in the Church.

It is important to note here that an annulment does not dissolve a marriage — it declares that the marriage bond never existed because there was something missing at the time of the exchanging of vows which was necessary for a valid marriage. People today seem to feel quite free to criticize the Church’s teaching on annulments, but it is a matter of common sense that there are certain elements necessary for a marriage, and that if one of them is not present, the marriage cannot be valid. Because there is so much false information about the subject of annulments, it is very important that a Catholic who needs to know about them go to his or her pastor for accurate information.

The most important thing in a situation such as that is to remember the mercy and the understanding of the Lord. Caught in a situation to which there may seem no solution, mindful perhaps of one’s failings in the past, one must bear in mind that the grace of Christ is always there for us.

So, what is involved in the annulment process? That will differ with the situation, but the one thing which is always supposed to be the case is that the Marriage Tribunal’s work is part of the pastoral ministry of the Church. People come to the annulment process with a regrettable experience in their lives — the breaking up of a marriage into which they had entered with great hope. The annulment process should be a time of healing: looking at those memories, describing them in written testimony, and then resolving one’s feelings about them. The staff of the Tribunal should be deeply sensitive to this central aspect of their work.

And with the help of the grace of Christ, the baggage of the past is put away, and one steps forward to begin a new phase of one’s life. There is nothing which can happen to us which cannot be turned to the good, with the help of grace and our own humble willingness to learn.