The London experience described in the last post of this series defeated my Faith in the Unity of the Church. She was allowing disunifying things to happen, of the sort I had seen, without even the suspicion of disapproval. I do not know whether anyone else had been as shocked as I was at the Kensington Mass. I was so upset that I wasn't aware whether anyone else left either before or after me. Apart from anything else, I could see that the new freedom of the Council was not doing a great deal of good. If those abuses were allowed, then so could many others, without correction. They were in fact licence. Rome did not see it.
My life was about to fall apart in every way. Shortly after my return to Devon it became apparent that my 'marriage' would not survive . My 'husband' made it clear that he had absolutely no intention of having children. I have already covered this in my earlier series of posts on Annulment.(See Archive) I will not therefore rehearse the whole sorry business here.
Suffice to say that these two matters, occurring one after the other, cast me utterly adrift. I left the marital home in September 1979.. Until the annulment case began in 1982 I acknowledged that there had been faults on my side as well, as indeed there were. I was not to understand until later, that though those faults existed on my side, they would not have been grounds for annulment. The faults on his side provided those grounds because, as became shockingly apparent to me during the gathering of evidence, he actually had lied at the wedding ceremony about his willingness to accept children 'lovingly from the Lord'..
Back in London I very nearly came off the rails. But Michael the Choir Master saved me again. He invited me back to the choir that I'd left in 1971. It was in trouble and about to die.
By now of course we are into the reign of John Paul II. I saw his enthronement whilst I was still in Devon.
His pontificate is what I mean by 'the long haul'.
To be continued.
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