VATICAN CITY
The Nation
John Lloyd
Reuters October 21, 2015
The Catholic Bishop of Accra, Ghana, Charles Palmer-Buckle, sometimes can’t sleep at night. He’s tormented by the distance between the Vatican’s teaching and his flock’s behaviour.
Unusually for an African bishop – the continent’s Catholic hierarchy is renowned for the strictness of its doctrinal observation – he sways towards accommodating the behaviour of the flock.
Describing, in an interview earlier this year, a parishioner married to the same man for 35 years, with children together, but sharing her husband with two other wives, he said: “If I want to apply the law as it is, I must tell her to quit the marriage. But if I do that, she and her children are going to say, ‘The Church destroyed my family.’ As a bishop, I tell you, I have sleepless nights… If a person is wounded in marriage and is having difficulty, what do you do? That’s what the Church is struggling with.”
Bishop Palmer-Buckle will struggle with this and more dilemmas with his brothers-in-Christ in the Vatican’s ongoing Synod on the Family. It’s been billed as the most serious internal debate on sexuality in its various forms that the Church has ever had. It may live up to that billing.
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