The Bible is a source of guidance for an informed conscience. Its richness offers comfort to its readers in their different cultures and circumstances. It also permits those readers to choose different sources of inspiration and draw different conclusions.

The bishops of Malta and Gozo, in seeking to guide their flock regarding the forthcoming referendum, chose to lead off their pastoral letter with a quotation from last Sunday’s gospel that indicates a single gateway to salvation: “No one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14, 6). One can read into the bishops’ selection their penchant for instruction: there is one way and we will tell you which it is.

While professing to feel in their hearts the cries of hurt from people who have lost their way in marriage, the bishops in their letter did not address the plight of those people but set them aside as a sad fact of contemporary life.

Yet the very same gospel reading, a few verses earlier, offers another message, not in contradiction but in amplification: “There are many rooms in my Father’s house.” (John 14, 2). One can understand those words to mean that, while there is a single gateway, there may be several paths leading through and beyond it. One can discern in this verse the hope-filled image of a welcoming Father, knowing each one of us far better than any human ever can and awaiting us all – in our diversity and our frailty – with open arms.

What a pity that the bishops did not use their letter on marriage to highlight the Good News of all-embracing love and hope.