The following is from an email from a Catholic Monitor reader:
Marriage: It Is What It Is
With all the fireworks over whether or not there exists a "state of emergency" in the Church, let us recall Heaven's warning that the final battle will be over marriage and the family. If there is a crisis, this is where it is to be found. We see all around us the devastating effects of neglecting the indissolubility of the sacramental bond through careless annulments (I use the term colloquially because this is not a scholarly piece, so there is no need to clutter up the comment box by getting all technical here), demonstrating that the institutional Church is quite prepared to abandon families to the "divorce culture" of the secular society. Good Catholic commentators and good Catholic organizations abound, who have the courage to denounce and attempt to counteract this obvious issue. But will anyone champion the reality of the sacramental bond when it is challenged the other way around?
I am a divorced Catholic woman (whoever stopped residing just then is part of the problem) who believes the common life I entered upon does not meet the Church's requirements for a sacramental marriage, although that is what I wholly desired and intended to live out at the time. I had dated (for a good two years) an ostensibly practicing man, a Knight of Columbus who had written his thesis at Franciscan University on the respective roles of husband and wife in an authentically Catholic home. As someone who had been on a long journey of reverting to the practice of the Faith, nothing mattered to me more. I remember going off into a green field all alone to sob with gratitude to God after my fiance and I had filled out the forms at Marriage Prep, remembering the sight of him checking off all the right boxes. It is nothing short of a gift of Divine Providence to find someone who actually believes these things in this day and age.
If only I had. Found someone like that, I mean.
During the deteriorating years of the common life that followed, his favorite thing to say--whether he had disappeared for days without explanation, drained the joint accounts and racked up exorbitant amounts of consumer debt contrary to all agreements again, torn up the house and had the police called on him to protect the children, quit another job with the attitude, "You want to feed the kids? Go beg from your rich daddy, for all I care!"--was, "Well, you're a Catholic, aren't you? You can't get a divorce!" When I reminded him of all we had talked about and promised to live out together so deeply, by God's grace, before getting engaged, he would shrug and say, "Oh, that? That's what everybody is supposed to say. You didn't actually believe I was going to do it, did you? What do you think I am--some kind of saint?" For my children's father, in other words, sacramental marriage is a mere ideal that we should recognize but not be held accountable for living up to, as long as we are, humanly speaking, doing our best--which is why I, for one, will never be a fan of Amoris laetitia Chapter 8. I had heard it all before, during endless arguments about nearly every violation of marital and even interpersonal and human integrity imaginable. Footnote 351 is the "theology" of the Culture of Death.
If something had happened after the ceremony to bring about these personality changes in him, then I would agree that the marriage was valid and its fallout something my children and I just have to depend on God to help us deal with. But it did not. Nothing happened, in other words, after the ceremony to bring about personality changes; the ceremony was a mask concealing vicious and even violent intentions in the first place. Why? Because of my "rich daddy," among other things, but mainly because hanging around with the Knights of Columbus is a good way to meet women who believe marriage is indissoluble and who will therefore allow themselves to be sponged off of, manipulated, threatened, violated, and ultimately abandoned over a much longer period of time, as long as you keep tearfully talking the Steubenville talk in the meanwhile and going to counseling just in order to tell people you've gone.
So I ask you--"Mary's Advocates" who see that annulment abuses exist but who see them through one lens alone; conservative canonists who "believe in marriage" and therefore won't help me at any price; tribunal judges who refuse to look at my case at all, warning me unofficially, "don't even try it;" rota judges who overturn 95% of American annulments just because they're American--who abandoned whom? In the end I was the one who had to file for divorce, because that is the only means which legal reality affords me of ensuring the physical safety of myself and my children, and which the banking system permits as a defense, in community property states, of the funds one needs, earned or inherited, to raise the children and to live on. I was the one who turned down every penny of child support and alimony, in order--when the children were old enough to carry cell phones and to call the police themselves, for I never left them alone with their father for a single minute until then--to limit legally mandated visitation as radically as possible. Since the separation I have never dated anyone, never ceased practicing the Faith, never wavered in my belief in the Sacrament of Matrimony. I have, conversely, chronically been accused of secular selfishness, financial irresponsibility, and a failure to honor the obligations of being a good Catholic wife. The Sacred Roman Rota, ruling that (in effect) all Knights of Columbus are to be believed unconditionally and that the outlook of Amoris really ought to be treated as magisterial, says I need to stop lying about all this and go back to him again. But I am not lying, as God Almighty knows. I am not.
Is marriage what it is, or is marriage what we make of it? If marriage is what it is, then it is just as wrong to insist that a relationship is a marriage when it isn't, as the other way around. Conservative advocates--and they couldn't be more right about this--champion the reality that marriage is between one man and one woman, but does that mean that every relationship between one man and one woman is a marriage? No. Petitions for a Declaration of Nullity should be considered individually, on their merits, rather than statistically based on the prejudices of one sociological side of the raging debate or the other. People petitioning for a Declaration of Nullity should be treated as people, not pariahs, by those whose judgment of a situation is based on criteria (which one, "husband" or "wife," had to actually file?) that are sacramentally superficial at best. If Mary's Advocates care so deeply about what the divorce-and-annulment mill is doing to innocent children, why don't they seem to care about what it is doing to mine?
A priest friend I was talking to the other day encouraged me to view my circumstances--mine and my children's--not only providentially, as within the permissive will of God in view of some higher if presently, humanly inscrutable good, and not only in the context of the wider debate surrounding the vexed subject of marriage and family per se, but also taking into consideration the institutional Church's "preferential option for the predator," (although it goes by the politically correct name of the "preferential option for the poor"). Sacred Scripture tells us that Christians, like Christ, must not cherish any such preferences at all, adhering to justice in judgment instead. Yet who could recount the occasions on which the headlines inform us that still another fraudulent Catholic who has been hiding abusive behavior behind a Roman collar or a wedding band or a charming, "humble" smile has not been held accountable but instead has been promoted or otherwise rewarded in some way? Do the judges considering my case lack sufficient facts or do they not care about the ones they possess? Do they want me to go back and be harmed or even killed because they don't understand the situation, or because they understand it all too well?
Those of us who discover--"too late," as my children's father and his collusive mother used to tell me--that the relationship is an abusive one are often advised by friends, family members, pastors, counselors, Cardinals, Amoris laetitia itself--to adopt the "Monica Option." After all, this saint stayed with her abuser and eventually converted him, so why shouldn't we? Since we targets are supposedly the not-holy-enough ones and therefore at fault (for why didn't I find out who he was before I married him? I made my bed, the canonical judges have decided, so I can just lie in it, for all they care) then we targets have no right to "harm" the perpetrators by insisting upon the predatory behavior being stopped, no right of bringing it to the light in order that it be stopped.
Sacred Scripture tells us that the first Christian obligation in times of moral conflict is to go to your brother in private, correcting him fraternally if that is what your discipleship demands, for his sake and the Gospel's as well as your own. If he listens and repents, you have won your brother over, as Monica did. Even she, however, did not overpower another person's free will, which is impossible. Sacred Scripture recognizes this reality by spelling out the next step to take--not that a disciple may take but that a disciple must take-- should your brother decide not to listen, when it is a matter of right or wrong and not a difference of mere opinion. Abuse of any stripe is a matter of right or wrong.
Do Catholics today recognize this truth, whether or not they recognize marriage as an indissoluble-except-by-death sacrament between one man and one woman? Evidently, all too often they do not. In sad fact it is mainly the conservative-leaning, defend-the-bond-even-against-right-reason crowd that finds itself aligned, however paradoxically, with the likes of Cardinal Daneels.
If we really meant to imitate Saint Monica, we would go on praying and imploring and weeping until the truth reaches every heart, rather than stopping short by calling evil good, or (c.f. Amoris Chapter 8) good enough. One cannot help but be reminded of the Catholic travesty and national tragedy of the judicially imposed death by starvation and dehydration of Terri Schindler Schiavo, for which her sacramental bond with Michael was used as a means. Nobody had to argue (as I argue in my own case) that she wasn't licitly married to him, but where was the argument that a Catholic husband, or any husband, or anybody at all, cannot commit such crimes under God's blue sky? Her bishop, having forbidden diocesan priests to witness to the sanctity of Terri's life on the sidewalks, absconded himself in order to escape the media spotlight; the highest profile priest ministering to her and articulating authentic Church teaching on the matter--Father Frank Pavone---has since been "defrocked."
And so we come full circle to the original flashpoint once again--is there, or is there not, a "state of emergency" in the Church? Was it, or was it not, necessary to get my children away to safety even by means of a decree of civil divorce? Does the exercise of authority by a Catholic--priest, bishop, teacher, parent, pope--extend to the bending or even the breaking of Catholic teaching? If so, or if not, in what does the obligation to be obedient finally consist?
As for me and my house, we will obey God rather than man.
Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia and for the restoration of the Church.
Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.
Conclave Notes:
-- Open letter urges Pope Leo XIV to correct ‘scandalous incoherence’ in Amoris Laetitia...[Wow! Even notorious Popesplainer Fr.] Harrison warns that Pope Francis taught a ‘dangerous self-contradiction’ on Communion for the divorced and ‘remarried,’ petitioning Pope Leo to correct the record. [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/08/open-letter-urges-pope-leo-xiv-to.html]
-- Dr. Seifert, regarded as one of the greatest living Catholic philosophers, founding Rector of the International Academy of Philosopher & friend of John Paul II, to Cardinals: INVESTIGATE FRANCIS' HERESIES, VALIDITY BEFORE THE CONCLAVE.."If Francis is found guilty of heresy or apostasy, then: - His cardinal appointments would be invalid" [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/04/dr-seifert-philosopher-personal-friend.html]
-- Are the Cardinals who will participate in the upcoming conclave authentically appointed & morally justified in voting, or will the shadow of Francis's possible illegitimacy cast itself over the next papacy? [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2025/04/are-cardinals-who-will-participate-in.html]
-- 5 Dubia Questions for 1P5's Steve Skojec & All faithful Catholics especially Francis is definitely Pope Cardinals, Bishops & pundits [https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/06/5-dubia-questions-for-steve-skojec.html]
Francis Notes:
l– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:
“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)
Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]
– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html
– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html
– If Francis betrays Benedict XVI & the”Roman Rite Communities” like he betrayed the Chinese Catholics we must respond like St. Athanasius, the Saintly English Bishop Robert Grosseteste & “Eminent Canonists and Theologians” by “Resist[ing]” him: https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/12/if-francis-betrays-benedict-xvi.html
– LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:
The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”
– On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:
“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”
– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:
“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.
Election Notes:
– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]
– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html
– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1
– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1
What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the [J6] DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”:
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1]
Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.
Pray an Our Father now for America.
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
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