“Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness…”
Isaias 5:20
“He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, both are abominable before God.”
Proverbs 7:15
Why is it that every time some self-styled “reformer” sets out to do away with the ancient, commonsensical, and unchangeable teaching of the Church on the question of divorce and remarriage, they immediately trot out children like human shields for their agenda? Divorce and remarriage, one of the most anti-child programs ever dreamt up in the pit of hell, must be allowed, celebrated, destigmatized, promoted, or excused — why? — because we must think of the children!
This is a damned lie.
It is a lie, however, that Pope Francis — based on those whom he has invited to play key roles at the Synod — appears to be entertaining. Cardinal Kasper and the Gang have embraced it. And why should they not? The Old World septuagenarians gleefully hacking away at the sacrament of Holy Matrimony haven’t experienced its horrors themselves. They were raised in largely traditional families before the culture went completely to hell. They don’t have children or grandchildren who’ve suffered through it. And they haven’t been around Catholics who were experiencing it and also had the moral vocabulary to explain to them properly just what it had done to them, most likely because those poor souls had been deprived by these same shepherds of the catechesis that would have equipped them to do so.
I wish I could impress upon the Holy Father just how critical it is that these men not get their way. I have both the practical experience and the moral vocabulary to explain what is being proposed. My parents divorced when I was in college. I wasn’t a small child, and I wasn’t living in the home most of the time. My three younger siblings were, however, and I’ve had a front row seat to see that emotional trauma play out in their lives, and, to an extent, experienced it in my own. What happened in my own family informs my bias, but it’s one that comes directly from experiential knowledge – knowledge that is evidently lacking in the halls of Casa Santa Marta.
Let’s be clear about something from the start: divorce, unless one spouse is truly abusing the other, or presents a clear danger to the children, is an undeniably selfish act and a mortal sin. “Remarriage” after divorce is compounding that selfishness with even more selfishness, and that mortal sin with more mortal sin. And who suffers? The children, always. They suffer first, they suffer longest, and, I would argue, they suffer the most deeply.
In his August 5th general audience, Pope Francis expressed a concern that people not make fun of children for being illegitimate, or having divorced or remarried parents. He indicated that we need to accept these harmful and sinful situations in order to help children:
“I would like to focus our attention on another reality: how to take care of those that, following the irreversible failure of their marital bond, have undertaken a new union…If, then, we look at these new bonds with the eyes of little ones – and the little ones are looking – with the eyes of children, we see even more the urgency to develop in our communities a real acceptance of persons that live such situations.”
This acceptance, however, cannot heal what has been broken. It will not fool the little ones into thinking that all has been made right. To help these children, we should be doing all that we can to prevent them from experiencing the breakdown of the family in the first place. We should be decrying easy divorce and guilt-free remarriage. We should be stigmatizing it and shouting our disapproval of divorce from the rooftops until nobody — save those in real and desperate need — dared do a thing like it again. That this never seems to occur to those charged with leading our Church highlights the depth of the misunderstanding swirling around this issue like a black hole, pulling all of us into the growing morass.
Let me again be clear: what the kids on the playground or the old ladies in the neighborhood say is the least of a child’s concerns when their parents split up. A child is the physical embodiment of the love of his parents. Because of this, a truly existential crisis ensues when a child realizes his parents no longer love each other. Love, remember, is an act of the will, not a fluffy feeling. Love requires work. Effort. Selflessness. There are few greater violations of love than when parents can’t even bring themselves to make the effort to work through their problems, stay together, honor the covenant they made with God, and the fulfill the duties they owe to their children.
If the home is the domestic church, then divorce is a Great Schism.
To Pope Francis, I say: Holy Father, if you spent half the time and energy on fixing these schisms in our domestic churches, perhaps your efforts to fix the one with the East would find success. Do you not espouse an “Ecumenism of Return” in the family sphere, either? Do you not recognize that the only dialogue that bears fruit is the kind that restores unity?
Societally, culturally, this entire mess has been created because adults want to be the children. Pope Francis seems convinced that any luxury in the developed world exists because it has somehow been stolen from the developing world. Is it so hard to believe, then, that a mother or a father who wants to “follow their bliss” or trade their spouse in for a newer model, or just “see other people” is living a juvenile existence, an existence that comes at the cost of the happy infancies and healthy adolescences of their own children? A parent cannot act like a child without stealing that childhood from those who most need them to be grown ups.
“Kids are resilient,” we hear the divorce enablers say. “What’s good for you is going to be good for the kids, too.” Or how about, “You deserve to be happy”? Lies all, and flimsy rationalizations. Let’s tear them down, one by one.
All human beings are “resilient.” People have survived unbelievable accidents and misfortune. Our bodies are quite adept at maintaining homeostasis, and regaining it when it is lost. This does not mean that our arms grow back if we chop them off. Similarly, children are resilient insofar as they do not have static preferences, expectations, or routines. They can survive drastic changes in living situations and home environments. That does not mean that they are thriving, or healthy, or happy. Children whose parents are divorced have higher than average rates of divorce themselves. They have a higher likelihood of psychological problems, criminality, and academic failure. How much of this is because they are still bearing deep and painful scars from their dysfunctional childhoods?
Can’t this be avoided by letting the divorced remarry? Won’t those new, “stable” homes with loving and emotionally healthy second (or third, or fourth) husbands and wives be much better for the children? After all, what’s good for the parent is good for the child, right? Following that same logic, it must be OK to hand booze-filled sippy cups to stressed out kids. No? Well it also doesn’t wash when you use this excuse to justify getting a love mulligan. Aside from the grave moral problems with “remarriage” after divorce, there are a litany of practical ones. As we have seen, divorce is hugely harmful to children, and the divorce rate in second and subsequent marriages is astronomical. Furthermore, “remarriage” cruelly solidifies the divorce that precedes it, further convincing the child that he was a mistake of some sort, the result of relationship that was never meant to be.
Perhaps the worst excuse is the most common: “I deserve to be happy,” or, “I deserve a chance at love,” or whatever other variation upon that theme the Devil is seductively whispering into the straying spouse’s ear. This is an insult to the dignity of the children who will have their happiness stripped away by the breakdown of their family, and to the intelligence of the person to whom the lie is uttered as though it means anything other than, “I’m simply too selfish to care about anyone else but me, and too lazy to even try.” I don’t care what your novels or your therapist or your friends at book club have said to you, human persons do not have a right to romantic love. Romantic, self-giving, physical, and emotional love and intimacy are gifts that one human gives to another. A gift is not something a person is owed by right. In refusing to allow people to have an extramarital freebie, the Church is not depriving anyone of anything that they need, deserve, or are owed, period.
Let us remember what the purpose of marriage is: the sanctification of spouses and the rearing of children. Which children, exactly, are being raised to fruitful adulthood by elective dysfunction? When people get married, their selfish desires must take a back seat, especially when children come along. If you are thinking to yourself, “I need to be happy/sexually fulfilled/self-actualized. The kids will get over it eventually”, then your priorities are the exact opposite of what they ought to be.
Why, then, are our bishops — and yes, even the pope! — getting soft on this? Are they afraid that if they tell people the rules, they’ll all leave? This is ridiculous. Sacramental marriages, being nowadays one choice among many in a pluralistic society, are things that people enter into out of either concern for their souls or concern for what other people think of them. For this reason, people can certainly find it within themselves to stay in them and make them work, and could be helped to stay in them if the Church would only exert some legitimate moral and social pressure. The vast majority of people drift out of marriages through weakness, aimlessness, and selfishness. These are traits that look for the easy path, not the arduous one, so why hand it to them on a silver platter?
It’s past time somebody forced the weak, the aimless, and the selfish to be accountable for their choices. This should be the focus of the theologians, priests, bishops, cardinals –and the successor to St. Peter himself — at the upcoming Synod on the Family. We need means by which to shore the family up, not easier ways to tear it down.
GREAT! EXCELLENT!
Divorce is a Nuclear Bomb on the Nuclear Family, especially for children.
I have seriously prayed to God that I have a horrible death before I even want divorce of my wife and children.
I would consider my life is an abject failure if I ever divorce and abandon my family.
When I proposed to my wife, I told her that we were getting married in the Catholic Church, until death do us part, and I don’t care at all how many divorce laws are there out there.
I told her, when we marry, we are like on a boat in the middle of the ocean. If a storm comes and the boat starts sinking, start bucketing out water, there is no life raft to escape our marriage.
She agreed.
God willing, so far, so good, hardly any problems in 13 years.
Fabulous article and insight!!!
A
CHILD
OF THE
SIXTIES
(or
“fool me once, shame on
you”)
Daily Mass
In uniformed
plaid
Then
suddenly
Adults went
mad
Priests
danced round
Nuns turned
hip
Fathers,
mothers
All jumped
ship
Michael
rowed
His boat
ashore
Through the
Sanctuary
Door
Simoned-sermons
Garfunked
too
Jesus loves
you
Coo-ka-choo
Jesus Christ
Superstar
God is dead
So who You
are?
Morning
pills
Eat the
Bread
Grace
Slicked-souls
Will feed
your head
All were
Virgins
Female Ghost
Solitary
Feminist
boast
Tell what’s
happening
What’s the
buzz
Bishops do
What never
was
But one
Bishop
Stood up
straight
Great
man-Mitred
Gainst the
gate
Great
man-Mitred
Took the
Cross
Plugged the
hole
To stop
Priest loss
And to this
day
Green
fields, no dream
Because of
him
Vocations
stream
And along
the
River banks
they line
Rosaries in
hand
For both Tiber and Rhine
We believe
in God
Four
marks…the Creed
If this flow
continues
Your waters
will bleed
But not with
Christ’s
Most
Precious Blood…
A
mitred-muck
Of
sin-scabbed mud!
“Divorce is a puss-filled, germ-oozing, cancerous, leprotic scourge that never heals. Divorce destroys marriages, relationships and families and serves but one purpose – to placate the selfishness of one or both spouses, at the expense of the children, who alone suffer its consequences.”
The above is a quote from the second blog post that I ever wrote in which I gave my definition of divorce. I can truthfully say that after 5-1/2 years nothing has changed that would cause me to re-define divorce as a “good”. There is nothing “good” in a divorce…it is the most heinous example of lack of Catholic Charity that ever was known. It is made worse by the implicit acceptance of divorce by the modern Church, as they strive harder to promote second marriages and marital happiness for adults, while forgetting the documented harm divorce in general causes to innocent children. The outright abandonment and lack of enforcement by the Bishops of the seven Canons that mandate seeking spousal reconciliation is akin to dereliction of duty, in my opinion. Why? Because they take the word of a civil court that a Sacramental Marriage is beyond repair and simply choose not to try.
Your comments about children mirror my own harsh criticism of parents who seek the easy way out of marital woes by forcing upon their own children the evil of divorce and its seemingly eternal consequences. They say it is “for the Children”, but they lie. And many petitioners probably don’t even research the negative affect divorce has had on children before even pulling the trigger, let alone research and follow recommended guidelines for children. They couldn’t possibly, else they could not bring themselves to force upon their own children what they would never want done to themselves.
Divorce is evil. Divorce has no part in Catholic Families. Divorce has been made to look beautiful and fulfilling. But no matter how hard one tries mask the odor, it will still reek of Sulphur and always will.
No one – not even the Cardinals in the upcoming Synod – can make something good and holy that has as its core requirement, the harming of the innocent.
If I remember the numbers, there were a couple hundred annulments in a year about 50 years ago but now we have tens and tens of thousands of “annulments”. Just go get an annulment folks are told and so it happens. It affects the children the same as a divorce and with the stamp of approval of “the Church”.
The tribunals are an abomination. They need to be cleaned up.
“The Old World septuagenarians gleefully hacking away at the sacrament of Holy Matrimony haven’t experienced its horrors themselves. They were raised in largely traditional families before the culture went completely to hell. They don’t have children or grandchildren who’ve suffered through it.”
This is key. I think many who so easily justify divorce have never had to experience their own parents splitting up and their family being demolished. I also have a tough time believing they even particularly care what divorce does to children. A good book on this subject is “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce” by Judith S. Wallerstein.
Thank you for this article. This expresses what I was expecting before last October’s Synod, and now barely dare to hope for from the upcoming one. Thank you so much.
It does appear that our dear Pope and his handpicked conspirators have decided to accommodate the morals of the world, having lost lost faith in Christ and the abundant grace offered to those who seek His help. May God help Pope Francis and all of us.
Bless you for writing so forcefully and with such acumen.
O, and do you know who always used to cite the putative good of the children results that would flow naturally from his plans?
William Jefferson Blythe Clinton
As a child of divorce, thank you for this.
The leaders of the Church have no “misunderstanding” of the damage divorce (and contraception, abortion, co-habitation, and illegitimate births) have on individuals, families, and society since the Church has always condemned those things that damage the soul and the family. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing, pathetic heretics and apostates, who are doing the work of Satan and they know they are.
Pope Francis could put an end to this endless attack against Christ by simply saying the Church has spoken and She cannot speak any differently, but he hasn’t and he won’t because he, too, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
I am a child of divorce. Worse, my parents gave up my younger sister for adoption because my father simply disappeared after the divorce and my high-school educated mother could not find a job that could support four children. I suffered, and still suffer, from the effects of not having my father there for me. It was difficult to put food on the table at times and I can’t imagine the pain my mother had for giving up one of her children. In addition, I never knew any of my father’s relatives. One entire side of my biological family is unknown. My brother, sister and I never knew our younger sister. The family torn asunder from divorce, the effects of it lasting forever.
Divorce is terrible. It is a pain, a hurt, so great that one can never get over it.
” Worse, my parents gave up my younger sister for adoption because my father simply disappeared after the divorce…”
I cannot even imagine. How horrible! I’m so sorry to hear this.
Thank you Steve. I didn’t mention that this was in the 1950’s when there was a stigma against those who divorced or that my father, in his drunk rages, threatened my mother and us kids with a gun on more than one occasion. But interesting to this discussion is that my Presbyterian mother took the words of Jesus Christ seriously when he said one who divorces and remarries commits a sin as she never remarried.
I located my father 50 years later. I telephoned him and a woman answered the phone. I told her who I was and asked if I could speak to my father. I wanted to tell him I forgave him. I heard him say in the background “why would I want to talk to her?”
Just awful.
Abominable. May Our Heavenly Father comfort you.
Do you think things would have been better if your parents had not divorced? Would having a drunken violent brute in your house have been an improvement? (And please, no, “maybe he would have gotten better.” Clearly he didn’t.)
Of course I cannot say whether things would have been better if my parents had not divorced, could I?
The point is divorce seriously harms people. That is why Christ forbid it.
Well written.
Bravo! Among many others, I thought your line “Do you not espouse an “Ecumenism of Return” in the family sphere, either?” was especially profound.
I was rather upset at recent words by the Pope in this regard as well. If we simply accept divorced and remarried folks with open arms, then we are essentially forgetting the children, the spouses and many others who are suffering from the first marriage. We are forgetting that there might be a spouse and children praying for the return of their straying parent. That would only be more and more unlikely to happen if we simply try to make them feel most comfortable with their new adulterous relationships.
Also, what is to stop us from then trying to make same-sex couples or some other bizarre type of couples feel welcome?
This is so beautiful. I grew up in 50s & 60s, in a Catholic neighborhood and I occasionally talk to some of my childhood friends. Our parents were wildly imperfect yet almost all of them them stayed together till the end. Although many of us had tough childhoods, those that I speak with are uniformly grateful that our parents gave us the true model of the Sacrament of Marriage. How heartbreaking for all those millions of broken families, broken children, broken adults.
The author asks the right question then gives the wrong answer. “Are they afraid that if they tell people the rules, they’ll all leave?” Umm yes. Who here has known a divorced and remarried individual who actually stayed in the Church? I don’t know a single one. And I’m not including the ones who stay and go to communion as if there was nothing wrong.
John 6:61-70 should answer why that’s their problem, not the Church’s:
“61 Many therefore of his disciples, hearing it, said: This saying is hard, and who can hear it?
62 But Jesus, knowing in himself, that his disciples murmured at this, said to them: Doth this scandalize you?
63 If then you shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?
64 It is the spirit that quickeneth: the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I have spoken to you, are spirit and life.
65 But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning, who they were that did not believe, and who he was, that would betray him.
66 And he said: Therefore did I say to you, that no man can come to me, unless it be given him by my Father.
67 After this many of his disciples went back; and walked no more with him.
68 Then Jesus said to the twelve: Will you also go away?
69 And Simon Peter answered him: Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.
70 And we have believed and have known, that thou art the Christ, the Son of God.”
Understood. But, in my experience anyway, once the parents leave the kids go with them and they don’t come back.
That is not universal, however. It is certainly up to the Church to try to bring the children of divorce back into the Church, but that should never be done at the expense of doctrine, nor would a change in doctrine help such people. How could it? You sound like an apologist for the evil of divorce.
Not an apologist for divorce at all. In fact, like Pope Francis, I think more should be done in marriage preparation classes to hammer home the indissoluble nature of marriage.
I’m glad to hear it. Then it’s about time you re-examined some of your views on this topic. What the divorced and “remarried” need to do is give up their adultery and come back to Mass and the Sacraments. Also, you seem to assume that the children of such broken marriages somehow cannot be reached by God. Watering down Church teaching would not bring them back.
“Divorce and remarriage, one of the most anti-child programs ever dreamt up in the pit of hell, must be allowed, celebrated, destigmatized, promoted, or excused — why? — because we must think of the children!”
I know. It’s appalling.
“I wish I could impress upon the Holy Father just how critical it is that these men not get their way. I have both the practical experience and the moral vocabulary to explain what is being proposed. My parents divorced when I was in college.” — Mine did too. Terrible.
“Let’s be clear about something from the start: divorce, unless one spouse is truly abusing the other, or presents a clear danger to the children, is an undeniably selfish act and a mortal sin. “Remarriage” after divorce is compounding that selfishness with even more selfishness, and that mortal sin with more mortal sin. And who suffers? The children, always. They suffer first, they suffer longest, and, I would argue, they suffer the most deeply.”
Absolutely! I’m kicking myself for not having written this myself.
“This acceptance, however, cannot heal what has been broken.”
BINGO! Accepting the suffering children is one thing. Accepting (and condoning) what the parents have done is abominable and deprives the children of their sense of justice and even deprives them of the healing that might come if only people would recognise their actual plight: “Yes this is a terrible thing which has happened to you. I’m so sorry.” How hard would it be for people to simply say that?
“We should be stigmatizing it and shouting our disapproval of divorce from the rooftops until nobody — save those in real and desperate need — dared do a thing like it again.”
YES!!!
This is an excellent article, Gemma Flyte. I remember approaching a Jesuit priest after Mass to gently call him out for saying ‘all are welcome’, ‘all are welcome’, ‘all are welcome’ messages, several times throughout the liturgy. I appealed to him, as Scripture instructs you appeal to an older man, – with similar arguments. I remember his face to this day: initially a syrupy expression of false sympathy was struck up. I wasn’t looking for counselling however – I was gently rebuking him, man-to-man. When he realised this the mask fell and a contemptuous sneer replaced it, and moments later we parted ways.
The quote from Pope Francis is the most lacking in wisdom things, of which I am aware of, that he has said. I say that in humility.
‘Pray to be able to see my Son in your shepherds. Pray to be able to embrace him in them.’
– extract from Medjugorje message to Mirjana, August 2, 2015
We could lie and hope in the first flush of mass divorce– but varieties of cohort studies since then have shown us the truth we wanted to deny– divorce is like amputation to children, and their entire lives can be bent and damaged by it. http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol30/61/30-61.pdf
Late to the party… just saw the article on BigPulpit…. Would that every priest laid this out for engaged couples. The “lack of catechesis” excuse is wearing thin… we have on average one wedding per month at our church- the priest can’t one-on-one counsel these couples, MAKE SURE they know what they are getting into, perhaps have them sign something attesting to that fact to put with their marriage certificate? No? Because we don’t want to have to hold folks accountable down the road when things get haaaard? That would be to awkward? The people might get mad and leave in a huff? Aren’t we talking about the SALVATION OF SOULS here? Faith just seems like a pantomime to so many… going through the motions, but we all know it’s not REAL. I’m sorry to say many of our priests put forth this attitude too… I pray they won’t pay for this in Hell. Sorry if I sound bitter- ya want to hear my sob story? My parents married in the Catholic Church in 1969- my dad left in November 1988, my brother’s 11th birthday. When said brother tearfully begged him not to go, he knelt down, looked into his eyes, and said, “I have to be happy.” Then mom made it her mission to find a MAN, left us with grandma while she hit the bars, found a man practically homeless and brought him home to live with her and her 3 small children… because SHE deserved to be happy. Mom married the guy, but won’t try for an annulment because she says it would be too difficult. She could have grounds, since my dad cheated on her during their engagement and possibly at the time of the wedding. but she was too embarrassed to tell anyone so has no proof. Oh, and mom is wife number 3 for her husband, so there’s the issue of getting HIS marriage annulled. Priests, yes priests (the buck stops with THEM), MUST prepare these young people better… they must PREACH the sin of cohabitation and pre-marital relations and divorce while the kids are in the pews, a captive audience. Goodness knows the parents probably won’t do it- my mom told me to live with my boyfriend because “Hey, it’s the 90s and you could save some money.” Thanks for listening.
Divorce is never a good thing. I was having problems in my marriage some years ago now. I started seeing counselors – error! – I spoke to priests most who told me I had reasons. I was even told it was harmful for my sons to see the way their father treated me emotionally. (I know, I know, bs). I did see someone for a bit of time but that stopped when my sons refused to meet the person. Guilt is a good thing. It drove home some miserable truths and a commitment to live a single life. My ex (annulled) and I are good friends for it seems he isn’t going to remarry either. Even though our sons are young adults, it’s injured them. All this bull about “healing” and moving on …. moving on to what? Bigger and heavier crosses? Naw …..
Lately I’ve been thinking of my dad who passed away 6 years ago now. There was a time when my dad turned alcoholic. He was a cop and maybe had reason to drink, but oh was he scary. He wasn’t always nice to our mom, but mom did what she had to. One day he was rushed to the hospital – pancreatitis. He almost died. Had my mom left with the seven of us, my dad could have ended up drowning in his own vomit. But she did stand by him. She misses him still. She helped him to become a better man … the man whom we all loved and continue to miss.