by Susan Fox
"You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke10: 27)
Tora Hutchison had only a
high school education, but she could teach a course in the theology of
marriage.
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| Tora Hutchison, 1919 to 2001 |
Her life is a testimony to
the beauty of the sacrament, which she lived at great personal cost in complete
fidelity to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
Tora was baptized a Roman
Catholic as a young married woman in 1953 -- one week before me, her infant
daughter. Because of Tora’s fidelity in two Catholic marriages, and one choice
not to marry when the Church denied an annulment, I almost feel like I lived my
entire life under the shadow of one long Synod on the Family. The questions
that came up in the two-year Synod process ending Oct. 24, 2015, were questions
answered in suffering and love during my lifetime by my mother.
Tora, who died in 2001 at the
age of 82, would have
approved the post-synodal apostolic exhortation written by Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia. It is a
beautiful witness to the indissolubility and procreative nature of marriage
between one man and one woman, making marriage a reflection of the relationship
between Christ and His Church and the mirror of the interior life of the Holy
Trinity. It also opens a doorway for people living in a variety of irregular situations to live again according to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through a step-by-step process of accompaniment. See Love is Faithful; Marriage is Indissoluble until Death, Amoris Laetitia is a Hymn to Fidelity in Marriage, And How to Get There.
None of the 13 small working groups of the
Synod on the Family called categorically for allowing divorced and remarried
Catholics to receive Holy Communion. Unfortunately, despite the clear teaching of Amoris Laetitia against offering communion to divorced and remarried unless they are living as brother and sister and their situation is not publicly known, the issue is still an open question to some bishops.
“My
hope is the synod will leave us with open doors, not closed ones,” said German
Cardinal Reinhold Marx at the conclusion of the Synod. The Chairman of the
German Bishops’ Conference, Marx was among
those who supported communion for divorced remarried Catholics.
The Church has always taught
that after having investigated the roots of a marriage, if it cannot find
grounds to declare the marriage null, it remains valid. Under those conditions, anyone
entering into a second marriage is living in an objective state of adultery,
precluding reception of holy communion.
For as Jesus said, "And I say to you,
whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman
commits adultery." (Matthew
19:9)
St.
Augustine reminds us: “Who dismisses his adulterous wife and marries another
woman, whereas his first wife still lives, remains perpetually in the state of
adultery. Such a man does not any efficacious penance while he refuses to
abandon the new wife. If he is a catechumen, he cannot be admitted to baptism,
because his will remains rooted in the evil. If he is a (baptized) penitent, he
cannot receive the (ecclesiastical) reconciliation as long as he does not break
with his bad attitude.” St. Augustine is the saint who lived with a lot of
women in adulterous relationships before his conversion.
However, in the Synod, the German cardinals opined that
“in an ill-conceived attempt to respect the
doctrine of the Church, repeatedly we have had harsh and merciless pastoral
attitudes that created suffering,” especially for unwed mothers, children born
out of wedlock, cohabiting couples, homosexual persons and those who are
divorced and civilly remarried.
Tora would have agreed. She understood this suffering as she spent decades attempting to bring couples in irregular marriages back into the Church, using the same step-by-step process Pope Francis advocates. But she would have answered, “It is not the Church nor its
laws that created that suffering. Obedience to the Church is obedience to
Christ.”
My Catholic aunt, who regularly attended daily Mass, also found that truth through suffering. She said, “Susan I made a mess in my life. I couldn’t go to communion for two long years
(while I waited for the annulment process) because I ran off and married in Las
Vegas.” Marry in haste; repent at leisure -- that was her message.
But during the synod process and now in some dioceses, the wrong message has gone out. Some believe that a Catholic priest
should lead those trapped in the snare of a second civil union through an
examination of conscience, and let the couple decide what to do. Pope Francis did not endorse this approach. He asked priests to mercifully work with couples in a process of accompaniment and conversion, similar to what my mother did in the Legion of Mary. Bring their lives back in conformity with the Gospel in a step by step process that might take years. In the meantime, get them involved in parish activities that will not create a scandal because of their situation. Let them organise coffee and donuts, parish potlucks, be involved in Catholic discussion groups.
“A sincere reflection can reinforce trust in God’s mercy, which
is never denied to one who places his or her failures and needs before God,”
the German group said. This is true, but when some now say the
individual’s conscience should be respected and allowed to determine if access
to the sacraments is possible, they deny the Mercy of God. God is not allowed
to offer His Mercy when man takes the matter out of His Hands.
And they entirely forget the Catholic Church has its own
Conscience. The Church is not required to give communion to someone in an
objective state of serious sin, even if their subjective individual conscience
says, “It's okay!"
Cardinal Marx, who participated in the Synod’s German speaking group
discussion, made it clear in his press briefing, that they were using the
theology of St. Thomas Aquinas during their discussions. Aquinas defined the
human conscience as the “aboriginal Christ.” Out in the wild jungle of natural
revelation, St. Thomas argued that even if a person’s conscience is malformed,
they are obliged to obey it. But such discernment would not apply to a situation
in which the Church’s position is objectively known through an annulment
process.
The Conscience is the place of judgment where through reason –
not emotion -- a person chooses the good and rejects evil. For a person to
judge that my conscience is superior to the objective moral teaching of the
Church is foolish. The Person of Jesus Christ is the Conscience of the Catholic
Church. To hold your conscience superior to the teachings of the Church is to
say your puny individual conscience is greater than the Mind of Christ.
 |
| Cardinal Walter Brandmüller |
“Under no circumstances can pastoral work be in contradiction
with doctrine. Actions of the Church need to – if they want to be Catholic –
correspond to faith and dogma,” German Cardinal Walter Brandmüller said just
prior to the beginning of the Synod on the Family in October. He co-authored “Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage
and Communion in the Catholic Church.”
Tora was a widow -- my father, James Burkhardt, died when I was four. When I was
seven years old, my mother met Gilbert Koch in the Legion of Mary. They were in love with each other, and in love with learning more about their Catholic faith. I
remember going to Eucharistic Adoration with both of them on Friday nights.
Faith of Our Fathers, the Rosary, incense, and candles! I loved it.
Gilbert introduced Mom to deep sources of sanctity -- True Devotion
to Mary by St. Louis Marie de Montfort and the Introduction to the Devout Life
by St. Francis de Sales. In my living room today is a statue of St. Francis de
Sales that belonged to Gilbert Koch. Gilbert – also a convert to Catholicism –
asked Tora to marry him.
There was only one obstacle, which they both recognized. Gilbert
had been married before his conversion. Both he and his
ex-wife believed that she had never been baptized.
I was seven years old! It was firmly established in my mind at
that age that people married to an unbaptized person could remarry under the Pauline privilege. How funny now
to read Cardinal Marx question the very same thing on Oct. 21, 2015.
“There is a lack of synthesis in the (Church’s) theology of
marriage,” Cardinal Marx asserted, “If two persons left the
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| German Cardinal Reinhard Marx |
Protestant Church
and make their civil marriage, they receive the sacrament of marriage. You will
not believe it, but it’s true! Every contract between two baptized persons is a
marriage. Is that possible?”
Yes, it is. The Church defines marriage as a sacrament that two
baptized people bestow on each other while the Church blesses and witnesses
their choice. It makes perfect sense to me. Even in the case of a marriage
between unbaptized persons, they make a commitment to each other. They are
called to be faithful to that commitment.
So Tora and Gilbert dated for two years in expectation of
marrying once Gilbert received a declaration of nullity in his first marriage based on his wife’s unbaptized state.
Then tragedy struck. The mother of Gilbert’s first wife recalled she had baptized her daughter. The Church said in fact, Gilbert's first marriage between two baptised Protestants in a Protestant Church was valid. Gilbert had entered a sacramental marriage. Such is an unbreakable bond. To live with my mother would have been an act of adultery.
I’m
so glad Pope Francis is trying to shorten the annulment process because I’m
sure if any other couple had gone through the ordeal today that Tora and Gilbert faced, they would have been living together when the first marriage was recognised as an unbreakable bond. Both Tora and Gilbert had a
strong sense of right and wrong, so they did not live together. Added to that,
Tora was very conscious of maintaining a good example for her young daughter.
And consider this. Gilbert and Tora were Catholic converts from Protestantism. Once
permission to marry was denied, they didn’t think to themselves, "Oh, we'll just go back to being
 |
Gilbert Koch
Picture taken with the
Brownie camera Gilbert
gave me when I was 9 years old
|
Protestants and get married anyway.” Tora and Gilbert listened
to the Conscience of Christ. They made a heroic choice. They obeyed the Church.
Gilbert moved to Riverside, Calif. It was a good hour’s drive
from Anaheim where we lived. They ceased to see each other, but not to love
each other. Two years later he died from a heart attack. My mother was present
with him in the hospital when he died on Oct. 30. Later, she said to me because
she and Gilbert decided to separate when the annulment was denied, Gilbert now
had the hope of eternal life. Love denied opened the gates of heaven to Gilbert
Koch!
That is true love. Love seeks the good of the beloved even at
the expense of one’s own happiness.
Quoting Pope Francis, Cardinal Marx in an address before the Synod
on Oct. 14, said the Eucharist is not “a reward for perfection, but a generous
remedy and food for the weak.” Who apparently could be weaker than a couple
living in objective adultery (a second marriage not blessed by the Church)
trying to raise their children in the Catholic Faith? This can cause some
consternation.
During one Sunday Mass, the
young son of one of my friends discovered two consecrated hosts, apparently
received into someone’s mouth and then discarded and stuck wet underneath the
pew in front of him. They found it the Sunday after the parish
celebrated the children’s first Holy Communion. My friend -- without thinking -- pulled what she could off the pew and swallowed it, knowing it was the Body of
Christ. I was sitting in the pew directly behind her, and witnessed the whole
ordeal. We suspected two embarrassed parents left it there after they went to
communion lacking the courage to tell their child that they themselves were
barred from receiving communion.
Tora found similar
difficulties when she was doing door-to-door evangelization in Southern
California in the 1960s. She came home one night, and said repeatedly: “Susan,
thank God your father died, and we didn’t lose him through divorce.” What she
meant to say is that divorce is one of the greatest horrors that she – a widow
-- had ever encountered!
I experienced the same thing
in the 1990s doing door-to-door evangelization intensively for one week in
Iowa. A teenage girl answered the door. I told her I came from her local
Catholic parish to give her greetings from her pastor. She immediately had a change of heart. She
said she was baptized, had her first communion and confirmation, but her
parents divorced. The family never went to Church again! With her innocent little
brother standing by watching, she said to me in a very resolved tone, “I am
going to talk to my mother. I want to go back to Church.” She was a child, who
had to grow up when her parents would not.
Pope Francis understands the
horror of divorce, and its effect on families. That’s why he doesn’t want
divorced families to feel excommunicated. They aren’t, of course, and if they
remain faithful to the vows of their first marriage, they can receive all the
sacraments. That’s paragraph 83 in the Final Synod Document. But even if they
remarry civilly, they should still feel welcomed in the Catholic parish where
they can come, participate in parish activities, and bring their children to
Mass.
Tora had another opportunity
to prove her faithfulness in marriage. In 1971, she married Byron Hutchison. I
was her 18-year-old bridesmaid. Hutch suffered from post-traumatic syndrome,
paranoia and bi-polar disorder, but we had no idea of this when she married
him. I came back from college to visit six
years later, and my mother wept in my arms. This had never happened before.
“Hutch is so mean to me,” she
wept. I encouraged her to get him mental health assistance, but he would have
blown his stack. So I said, “Mom, YOU have to go to the doctor and find out
what’s wrong with HIM.” And so she did. And finally she understood she could
not take his behavior personally. He was ill.
At this point I said to her,
“You know Mom, you could get the church to make a determination of nullity of your marriage because they generally don’t do
Catholic weddings for people who have been in mental institutions (as Hutch
had).” Mental illness can make a person legally incapable of marriage, according to Church law. But she said, “Hutch didn’t know he was mentally ill when he married me.
He has a right to my faithfulness.”
And so she made the heroic
choice to remain in a marriage where she suffered emotionally. On a daily basis,
for 29 years until she died, she was nailed to the cross of her marriage bed. After
she died in the hospital, Hutch was upset because he couldn’t find her wedding
ring. But I thought to myself, “God
has removed it because the marriage is no more. My mother is free in death.”
Tora’s marriage to Hutch -- an
unbaptized man -- was that case I learned about when I was seven years old. They
could have sought a declaration of nullity because he was not a Christian. But she did not. As a result, Hutch, who had been very anti-Catholic through most of the marriage, began to be attracted to the faith. I suggested to Tora that when she suffered emotionally and physically (she lost one leg in her 70s due to peripheral artery disease) that her sufferings would benefit Hutch. "Oh, I so hope and pray so," she said, sitting in the chair with only one leg. Both legs pained her terribly, the visible and invisible one.
And with that choice, God created a fascinating dynamic. By the suffering Hutch created in their lives together, which Mom united to the sufferings of Christ, he was saved. She even had a vision of herself going to communion, and Hutch following behind moving towards God. "For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife; and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the believing husband: otherwise your children should be unclean; but now they are holy." (1Cor 7:14)
Though priests talked to Hutch about Catholicism after Mom died, they never asked, “Do you want to be baptized?” In
the nursing home, the priest showed Hutch where they had Sunday Mass. Afterwards, Hutch went to
Mass every Sunday until he died.
I once asked him, “Dad, why
don’t you get the Catholic sacraments and become Catholic?” And he answered,
“Susan, I don’t qualify.” But he wanted it; don’t you see? And so he had it --
Baptism by desire.
For every Sunday he went to
Mass, he didn’t go for the great sermons or to hear the Word of God. Hutch was
deaf as a doornail and wouldn’t wear hearing aids. He went because he believed
in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. I had seen him looking
covetously at the host when I gave Mom communion during one of her illnesses. He wanted Christ. The witness
of Tora’s life bore good fruit.
Whereas the decision not to
marry, opened the gates of heaven for Gilbert, the decision to stay married
opened the gates of heaven for Hutch.
Ultimately, we have to thank
Tora’s marriage to my father,
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My parents, James and Tora, on their
wedding day
|
James Burkhardt, for Hutch’s conversion and my
own. Tora converted to Catholicism because of his witness and that of his
mother’s, my grandmother Dora. He was the fisher of men, who caught such an
incredible swordfish (Tora) that on her tail came countless others into heaven.
Tora’s first marriage was
emotionally very happy, but lasted only seven years before he died. Yet in this
marriage too there was incredible suffering. My father had tuberculosis and had
to have one lung removed. Tora told me of that time in the hospital when he
used profane language, something she had never heard from him before, because
the pain was so great.
Then he spent a year at home
recovering, and gradually all their friends except one – Dean Howard – stopped
coming to visit. Because of that experience of abandonment, she made a point of inviting all
the little people with no families to Thanksgiving dinner every year when I was
growing up.
She remembered my Dad filing the
needle on his daily shot because unless it was sharp, it hurt! But that year
offered great happiness as well because they had only each other, and they
spent hours playing Scrabble and talking together.
 |
| Tora, Susan And James Burkhardt |
When Mom discovered she was
pregnant with me, my father was at the point where he nearly died. My birth came
with a lot stress for her as she had to keep a baby happy, and allow her ill
husband his sleep.
By the time I was four, he
was recovered. We were immensely happy. People remember my father for his
incredible sense of humor. So that year – 1957 – we set out for Detroit on
vacation to buy a new car.
We visited family in Ohio
where I came down with the measles. We drove south to New Orleans in the new
car with new seatbelts on our way back to Los Angeles. But people then weren’t
used to using them, so they weren’t on when we had a head-on collision on a
three-lane road that allowed people to drive both directions in the middle
lane.
My father’s remaining lung
was punctured by windshield glass and he died three days later on April 28,
1957, the feast of a saint as yet unknown to us -- Louis Marie de Montfort. My Dad was wearing a medal of the Sacred Heart, and had just been to confession the
previous weekend.
I was in the back seat when
the accident occurred. I had looked up just before the accident and I saw my
parents looking at one another with deep longing and love. In that last second
of their lives together, they taught me what life itself was all about.
There are bishops who want to give communion to divorced and remarried Catholics not living chastely. Perhaps they don’t understand the resiliency of
the Catholic laity, or the hunger of the human heart for God. With the right
teaching, I have seen ordinary people literally give their lives in horrific daily
suffering to remain in love and union with Christ.
If God is
for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him
over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?
...What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? ... No, in all
these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am
convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any
other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus
our Lord.
(Romans 8:31-39)
Read More about Tora's pro-life passion here: A Passion for Life
Vox Populi! In the Catholic Church, the cause for sainthood can begin with the voice of the people.
Would you like to see Tora Hutchison beatified by the Roman Catholic Church? Please write to her bishop and tell him her story has touched you, asking him to open the cause for her beatification, which is the first step towards canonization.
Please do ask Tora to pray for your intentions! She died on June 29, and my family and I go to Mass every June 29 and ask for big miracles. God has gloriously granted all our requests. We are not the only ones who have been so blessed through her intercession. Report miracles and ask the bishop to begin the process of her beatification. He is:
Paul D. Etienne
Archbishop of Seattle
710 9th Ave.
Seattle, Wash. 98104-2017
U.S.A.
Send a copy of your letter, if you wish to her pastor:
Father Peter Adoko-Enchill
St. Mary Star of the Sea
1335 Blaine Street
Port Townsend, WA 98368
U.S.A.
