Mmmm. What’s the “reason to stay together”? That you, too, can be miserable for years and years but at least you’ll be lauded by your offspring, or their mates?

I’m sorry to be the fly in the ointment here, but it’s awfully darned easy to preach to other people to stay together in crappy circumstances when you yourself (meaning the writer, not you, literally, SeeDub) are esconced in a loving and faithful (to each other and to God, apparently) marriage.

Well, and not even “crappy circumstances”—crappy relationship, period.

I’m sorry; I stumbled upon your blog, and can’t resist replying to Anwyn above.

Why do you stay? Forget about theology and Scripture for the moment. A military man would be able to answer you (forgive my paragraph breaks here — the computer screen won’t let me see my comments unless I include breaks every so often). I’m not a soldier, but the soldier would know. You stay because you have made a vow. I could speak this way to a very close friend of mine, married to another person even closer to me: you stay, because you said, before God and man, that you would remain faithful to that person until death. That removes a lot of choices.

Thank God that it removes the choices, because I am absolutely persuaded — and I’m still not speaking theologically here, I’m still in the realm of the natural law — that people only begin the adventure of life when they cast their choices away. Any man who says, “I love Susie, but I don’t know that I will always love Susie,” does not love Susie. You don’t explore a room by remaining at the threshold.

I’m not Germanic, either, but the old Germanic code of honor, so praised by Tolkien, is that you fight all the more bravely when the cause is lost: then your arms are stronger, and your hearts bolder. That’s pagan wisdom, which would be baptized and transformed by Christianity.

If you ask, “What good did it do that he remained with her?”, aside from the incomparable good of her baptism, I could write for days — and I am rushing off to class in a few minutes. My first answer, though, would be, “Since when is it up to us to determine what good will transpire from our doing our duty?” Since when are we in the position of God’s Providence? To keep or break a vow does not fall under the virtue of prudence; how to keep that vow does, but that it should be kept is an absolute, as I believe Jesus has clearly said. Then what? What kind of soldier can claim to know more than the commander, and say, “I did not obey that command, because, from my position in this muddy foxhole, I could not see the point of it”? Or, “I did not obey, because obedience would have brought me much suffering”? As if obedience did not bring suffering to Christ?

But I should have thought, even if one has to be crypto-utilitarian about it, that the good of a love preserved, after all the heartache, was something noble and admirable.

But I should have thought, even if one has to be crypto-utilitarian about it, that the good of a love preserved, after all the heartache, was something noble and admirable.

I didn’t say that it wasn’t—but I also don’t know that it was love “preserved.” Personally I’d rather hear from the FIL himself on that subject rather than from the rosy admirings of the SIL.

.…aaaaand if I had realized to whom I was replying in my above comment I would have softened its tone. I apoligize for the snippiness, though I stand by the purport of the statement.

Apol-O-gize, even. Sigh.

So, Mr Esolen, when can we hope you will understand the complicity of the Catholic Church in this same Culture of Divorce when the Pope fawns over those who have maliciously abandoned their spouses by refering to how hard a burden they have but does not even mention those they continue to persecute and have abandoned, including their own children, many of whom leave the Catholic Church? Or, are you a cool aid drinker and find no fingerprints of clerical, canonical and pastoral abandonment in many Catholic marriages, when one spouse valiantly fights to defend their valid, sacrament as the entire Church structure fights to find some reason to declare nullity to justify the usually at the core, adultery, which drives the whole thing?

Comments other than condemnations, Sir?

I defected from the Catholic Church over these very issues after seventeen years of abuse at its hands through its open acceptance of my wife and her lover as a couple, while disregarding two Rotal decisions otherwise. These fakes called bishops and Popes will not address those of us who have resisted their well-camouflaged attackes on valid marriages. They hold all the power and direct the corruption, while scholars like yourself follow their corruption, ignoring or castigating those of us whose faithfulness to our valid marriages you should admire. Rather, we are easy targets because we call the corruption we see, exactly what it is—corruption and “faithful”. “good” Catholics find our anger and frustration worse than the adultery of our spouses and worse, it is blessed and rewarded by the Catholic Church. Such attitudes are very, very sick, indeed, and twisted and typical of “good” Catholics.

The Catholic Church functionally invalidates a valid marriage, for the good of the children of adultery so that the perpetrators of what used to be a crime in the Catholic Church can benefit from that crime-adultery and remain together as “brother and sister” while continuing to persecute often innocent spouses and denying them their rights—all with the blessing and encouragement of the Catholic Church!!! This is called JUSTICE!!!

It is really called the “Spirit of Vatican II” and “the Smoke of Satan”!!

Dear Karl,

You should read everything I’ve said about divorce, and all my criticisms of the foolish decisions the church’s hierarchy have made in this and other matters, in articles for Crisis (www.crisismagazine.com and www.insidecatholic.com), Catholic World Report (not sure of the website address), and Touchstone (www.touchstonemag.com), though T-stone is not a Catholic magazine. I agree with everything you say.

I hope you understand that that article is aimed at the entire church — it’s hard to distinguish among villains, after a certain point. If you live next to a sewage treatment plant, you’re going to be, hmm, affectied by it; and you’re also going to cease noticing it, after a while. I’ve been persuaded that of all the sexual evils of our day, and they are many, divorce is the worst, and I too am scandalized by the ease with which the American church hands out annulments (though it is not as easy as all that, sometimes).

Part of the problem is a selfish unwillingness really to support and sympathize with the victims. It’s really a strange phenomenon, isn’t it? “Forgiving” a repentant adulterer or adulteress who hasn’t betrayed US in particular, but somebody else, is easy to do and makes us feel good. But actually listening to the outrage of the person offended, gosh, well, let’s see, I’m late for my golf date at the country club . . . I don’t believe that the answer is that the church should cave in all the way and abandon its teachings, even though many priests and laymen, if not most, have abandoned them in preaching and practice. Consider it the devil’s neatest trick. C. S. Lewis put it nicely; I wish I could remember the precise terms he used. Basically, he said that the devil persuades Puritans to worry that they might be indulging their pleasures too much, and libertines that they might be practicing a hypocritical asceticism — you get the idea. It’s always to persuade people to worry about the one sin they don’t have to worry about, while the thing that damns them is in plain sight all along.

Karl, what happened to you is a scandal in more ways than I can describe. I’ve written that I think all Catholic bishops should wear a sign around their necks, a little reminder of judgment: a small image of a millstone, around a chain.

But my article was not meant to castigate those who have divorced; that horse is already out of the barn. It was meant to give solace to those who are still in difficult marriages, and also to raise the testosterone level of some countertenor hierarchs. And I think I know enough about marriage, by experience and observation, to conclude that if somebody wants a “reason” for divorce, there will always be one ready at hand.

Anwyn, I could have made the article much more brutal — respect for the dead prevents it.

Hi Tony—I’m sure you could have. My phrase “rosy admirings” was about me thinking I’d like to hear straight from the man who stayed with the woman through all of that rather than through the lens of admiration that he did so. I.E. I am not saying it isn’t admirable that he did so; I am saying I wonder what his private thoughts and feelings about it are—was it indeed “love preserved” or, at most, “duty accomplished?” And again I am not saying anything against that.

At most I am saying that soldiering on through a certain level of misery … I am uncertain that God demands it, though it is indeed admirable.

As for Karl’s issue … I hesitate to comment, but it seems to me that a child is a better reason to stay together than a vow, and that if the church bows to that reality and sanctions the child-bearing union that may not be a horrible thing—except he seems to be saying that they do it by breaking their own laws, which is exasperating at the very least and cruel to somebody in Karl’s situation, if I understand it correctly (and I’m not sure I do). And of course I am not saying a single word in defense of adultery.

I’m not Catholic and so can’t comment farther on what the two of you are discussing there.