A close friend of mine recently finalized his divorce. He and his wife had been separated for a year and the last few years of their marriage had been difficult. They were very active in our parish. He no longer attends Mass here. I’ve continued to meet and pray with him as he walks this journey.
Given this experience, one might suppose that I would be among those hoping for some change in the Church’s discipline regarding divorce and remarriage. To be honest, however, I find myself torn in multiple directions and unsure about what I would do if I was a bishop attending the upcoming Synod.
Part of this is generational. I grew up in the 1970s, when divorce became more widespread than it had been previously. I still have vivid and difficult memories of when the parents of my best friend in grade school divorced. Another close friend, whose parents divorced when we were in high school, never seemed to quite recover from the experience. My own parents--who recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary--also went through some difficult times in the early 70s.
The indissolubility of marriage has also been central to my own spiritual journey as a married layman. I see marriage as a vocation that, in its own way, is as challenging and demanding a path to holiness as the various forms of religious life that the Church has historically championed. My marriage has brought me and my wife great joy. Like most marriages, however, it has also involved periods of suffering that we have borne for the love of one another and the love of Christ. In the midst of difficulties, it is a powerful thing to remember that I swore before the altar of God that with this person and no other I would work out my salvation as long as we both shall live.
The debate over the Church’s teaching on divorce is often portrayed as a conflict between an abstract legalism and the messy reality of human experience. But the experience that needs to be considered is not merely the experience of divorced and remarried couples seeking the sacraments, but also the experience of married couples--and their children--whose marriages have been strengthened--and at times even sustained--by the Church’s efforts to support marriage and strongly discourage divorce.
The good folks at Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate report that 28% of Catholics who have ever married have experienced divorce. While a daunting figure in many ways, it is significantly below the rate for Protestants (39%) and those with no religious affiliation (42%). There are many factors that explain these differences, but one of them is almost certainly a strong presumption against divorce that has historically been deeply woven into the Church’s culture.
I worry about what some of the proposals discussed at the last Synod would do to this culture. Many of the advocates of reform suggested their proposed changes would apply to a narrow range of hard cases; “not for everyone, not for no one” in Cardinal Marx’s formulation. I have never known a divorce that was not a hard case and it’s hard to imagine local bishops not coming under enormous pressure over time to be more accomodating. Couple this with a streamlined annulment process and the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage--which all parties in the Synod debate argued should remain unchanged--would look considerably weaker in practice than in theory.
One idea to counter this problem would be to couple the reform proposals with a more aggressive pastoral effort to support marriage, such as a renewed commitment to movements like Marriage Encounter and Retrouvaille and outreach to civilly married couples interested in bringing their marriage into the Church. I find the idea intriguing and should the Synod ultimately recommend any changes I hope that efforts like this are part of the package.
Human history, however, should make us skeptical that cultural norms can be sustained without imposing burdens on anyone. Most communities have historically relied on some combination of hard and soft sanctions to discourage behavior of which they disapprove. Just ask anyone who still smokes cigarettes! Relying on positive reinforcement alone has a poor track record of success. How many Catholics actually go to the trouble of choosing a personal penance now that the prohibition against the eating of meat on Fridays is no longer in force? I will confess that my own experience in this regard is not encouraging.
I suspect there are people on both sides of the current debate who will dislike the direction of these reflections. Defenders of the current discipline ground their arguments in the words of Jesus himself and the centuries-long practice of the Western church, not in the sociology of religion. Reformers, for their part, may be uncomfortable with the idea that individuals should be made to suffer for the sake of an abstract norm that fails to take into account the specificity of their circumstances. A weakening of the Church’s witness against divorce, however, could lead to consequences that would be anything but abstract. Those consequences would be measured in broken marriages, severed friendships, and psychological and economic harm to children that is real and measurable.
It may well be--and Pope Francis certainly seems to support this line of thinking--that when faced with this sort of difficult question, the Church should be willing to err on the side of mercy. It is worth pondering, however, whether a suffering borne to strengthen and sustain the marriages of others is precisely the sort of cross that Jesus called upon his followers to bear.
