Bishop: don’t be fixated with single issues
By Ed West

20 November 2009

The faith cannot be reduced to single issues, argues Bishop Kieran Conry

Bishop Kieran Conry of Arundel and Brighton has told Catholics not to get “fixated” with issues such as the liturgy and contraception.

In a pastoral letter read out in churches in his diocese last weekend, he also revealed that he was reported to the Vatican for comments he made about Confession in a previous letter.

Bishop Conry wrote: “In May of this year I wrote a letter to you all and suggested that you might go along to the priest and talk about the one thing that was the biggest obstacle in your relationship with God. Someone was clearly unhappy with this and reported this advice to the Vatican. I had a very kind letter from the Holy See asking me to correct the impression I might have given, and I am very happy to do this.”

In his letter Bishop Conry had suggested that people go to the confessional to talk about how the spark had gone out of their relationship with God, and what was making them tired. “Go to the priest and talk about these things, the way in which your relationship with God might have grown stale,” he wrote.

But in his most recent pastoral letter he explained: “I was not suggesting that this is an alternative to the traditional practice of confession of sins, an integral part of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. I was hoping that it might be a way back to the Sacrament for many people, a ‘toe back into the water’. The Church’s traditional teaching is that serious sins (what used to be called ‘mortal sins’) should be confessed at least once a year before receiving Communion, and that even the less serious sins (so-called ‘venial sins’ or ‘everyday faults’ as the Catechism puts it) should also be confessed, in order to form our conscience and help us advance along our spiritual path. All this is explained very clearly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in Chapter 2, Article 4, ‘The Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation’.”

But Bishop Conry added: “It is all too easy to get caught up and even fixated with single issues, whether this is in religion or politics. So many people tend to focus on liturgy – even the language of the Mass – as if this somehow expresses the core of our beliefs.

“Others campaign on the moral issues of the day. Someone said recently that a person’s attitude to Humanae Vitae was a ‘litmus test’ of being a Catholic, whereas many might not know what Humanae Vitae is.

“These are all undoubtedly important issues, but they will never get anywhere near expressing our faith in its entirety, and we can ask if some of these questions are actually fundamental to faith at all.”

Critics have accused the bishop of being hostile to the introduction of the Extraordinary Form since the Pope’s Motu Proprio in 2007. But he has always maintained that he never attempted to restrict its use, only that some of the demands of traditionalist Catholics were “over the top”.