In the context of the upcoming Synod of Bishops of the Catholic Church in October 2014 which will also deal with the topic whether the Church should have a more lenient attitude toward those Catholics who have broken their marriage vows and who then proceeded to remarry outside the Church, I tried in a recent article, “Mercy for the Little Ones – Amid the Devastation of Divorce,” to point out some of the grave effects that a divorce has on the children of that fractured marriage. Having had as a young child the painful experience of the divorce of my own parents, I would like to convey here some additional reflections I have very recently had on this matter. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to present some further reasons for us to do our nearly utmost to prevent divorce and to support those responsible representatives of the Catholic Church in their own attempts to defend Christ’s full teaching on this question of matrimony, and to do it especially at the upcoming Synod in October.
It might be helpful for anyone who would consider divorce or who has a friend or relative who now does consider it, to reflect upon some of the often unanticipated consequences of divorce upon the major events in the life of those children of that broken marriage. As I propose to show, the manifold consequences of divorce will also affect any major family feast and recurrent holiday of those children for the rest of their lives.
Whenever there are important events in the children’s life, such as academic graduations, marriages, sacramental baptisms, but also any major sacred holiday such as Christmas and Easter, the children will be confronted with the question, whether their divorced parents would still be willing to join in together with their children for that often-intimate event. In most cases, once the step toward divorce has been taken, the customs and incentives to self-control and courtesy are broken or weakened; and much strife, hatred and bitterness thereby estranges the divorced parents more and more.
By way of making my thoughts and experiences more vivid and clear, I will give a hypothetical and extensively imagined example in which I combine and concentrate the many awkward situations of different families so affected by divorce. This extended example will attempt to show us the agony of feasting in the context of divorce.
Let us imagine a family with four children, Michael, John, Lynn and Sarah, whose divorced parents – Karl and Suzie – have also now both remarried. The father, Karl, had been at the root of the divorce because he had committed adultery. Later, he married that woman with whom he committed that sin. Three of the children of the original marriage went to live with the mother, but the fourth child, Michael, chose to live with his father. Both new marriages of Karl and Suzie have also brought half-siblings into the lives of the four children of the original family.
Now we consider the matter of feasts and of true festivity, or its absence, in this riven family.
Whenever there is a major family feast of their children, each of the parents usually attends the feast with his or her new companion. There are tensions between all four of them, one of the new spouses, for example, having actively contributed to the split of that first marriage. Then, there are the grandparents from both sides who harbor resentments toward one or the other of the parents because of the divorce. The grandparents on the father’s (Karl’s) side resent that they barely see their grandchildren any more, because Suzie, the mother, has estranged the children from the Karl’s parents. Karl’s parents resent that they now have a closer connection with the children of the second wife which she had from her own previous marriage. The grandparents do not feel close to them because these children are not their own blood, and they do not care for the new wife of their son, in any event.
Let us go back to the four children in this disordered circumstance. Let us now first consider the younger son of the divorced couple, John. John has grown up since he was five years old in this fragmented situation. He feels never truly welcomed by the parents of his step-father. He knows that whenever his older half-siblings – the children of the second wife of his own father – come for a visit to his step-grandparents, they are given special gifts and memorabilia from the family, such as special jewelry from the family treasures. He notices that he and his siblings are put in the second row, as it were. When there is a family gathering with his step-grandparents, he sees how the grandmother gives all her attention especially to his half-siblings and barely even greets him. (From her perspective, she is so glad even to see her true grandchildren at all, that she tries to benefit from that meeting as much as she can.) John goes home from that particular family gathering with a sad heart. His heart is wounded because he feels rejected and less loved than the other children. He feels rejected and without his doing anything wrong. And he knows that the gifts given by his step-grandparents to his half-siblings are not just of a material nature, but they signify clearly that the receivers of the gifts are loved more.
Then we come to see that John’s own sister’s marriage approaches. Sarah has lived with their step-father since she was three years old. The question arises: Who will walk Sarah down the aisle to the altar? Will it be the father, Karl, whom she barely knows because the hardening estrangement between her parents has led to bad strife and a deep rift between the father and his three children; or, rather, her step-father, instead, who has cared for her more attentively all these years? An answer cannot be found without hurting someone in the process. She had seen that, when her brother John was commissioned as a captain in the army, he had asked his step-father with whom he is very close “to pin him” in the customary as well as official ceremony. His own father, Karl, was wounded by his decision and had decided not to participate in this event at all, which absence left John himself, but also his older brother Michael, who grew up with Karl, with a great sadness. Yet, John’s loyalty was stronger to the man he grew up with than to the man to whom he owed his very life.
To whom shall John, who is now just finishing his own doctoral dissertation in the field of military history, dedicate his book when he wants to dedicate it in gratitude to his own parents? Shall he just write: “With love and gratitude to my parents”? Then his beloved step-father would feel left out, because he is not really his father. Shall he name all three parents’ names? Might as well just dedicate the book to someone else. Whatever he would do, it would hurt someone, reminding all parents involved constantly of the unnatural situation.
Let us now consider a marriage feast. All the parents, the original parents and the step-parents included, are present. Sarah has chosen that her brother Michael lead her down the aisle, so as not to offend either of her fathers, namely her own father and her step-father. At the family gathering afterwards, some relatives of the bridegroom in their festive speeches make references to the oddity of the family situation — the family of the bridegroom is more conservative — and embarrasses the family of the bride. One of them even makes a pun, asking all the brothers and sisters and half-siblings of the bride to stand up so that the guests could recognize who all belongs to the bride’s family! In conversations with the bridegroom’s family during the dinner, John hears all kinds of rumors about how his own father is really at fault for the whole calamitous situation of his family. He is hurt by these alleged facts and the breaking of family privacy because his father is thereby broadly demeaned, and John thus bears resentment towards his own sister and her new husband for having apparently spread such rumors and claims. When he later speaks with his sister Sarah about this matter, it comes to a greater conflict as to who was at fault in the original divorce of their parents. It is a struggle which even taints the happiness of the newly wed Sarah. Though brother and sister are close, they do not speak with one another for a long time.
Michael, the oldest son of the divorced couple, looks upon this situation in a different way, however. For, he grew up with his own father. He was very attached to his father and old enough to be able to move with him when Karl had left the original family home. Michael, when he heard about the rumors at the wedding against his own father, broke relations entirely with his mother and his sister Sarah for many years. He believes that his father is not at fault at all, since Michael was never willing to get a fuller truthful picture of the earlier family tragedy, in part because it would hurt him too much to hear any criticism of his father who is the only family member in his life with whom he has a close bond.
Sarah is now having some difficulties with her own husband, and so soon after their own marriage. She realizes rather quickly that she is very discontented with her husband. She tends to see him always in a negative light and magnifies his faults, rather than being happy and prompt to see his good will and his many strengths, as well. Only after talking with a good friend does she realize that she has imitated her own mother, with whom she grew up and who constantly pointed out to Sarah all the defects of Sarah’s father and why she could not live with him any more. Sarah herself has already had the temptation in her heart of giving up — and breaking up — her young marriage. Because she lacks a forgiving attitude and fortitude, she is too harsh with her husband, especially when she detects any trait that reminds her of her own father whom she learned, from an early age, to disrespect.
That is why Sarah had even tried to avoid visiting her father Karl on the major holidays, even though in the early years, she could not avoid it because of her father’s legally stipulated visitation rights. Those holidays, however, were nightmares for her. She spent Christmas Eve with her mother, drove three hours on Christmas Day to her father and his second wife whom she disliked altogether, and making that onerous journey only so that she could stop by on her way back at her maternal grandparents’ home. In any case, she was always so tired and exhausted after these days, and also so filled with resentment and anger. The Easter before, the children from a previous marriage of the second wife of her father who now lived with her own father, Karl, had brought much unhappiness to her, as well. They were of course favored by her father and his new wife because of their close relationship and they made her feel like an outsider and intruder during her visit, and therefore were so repellent to her that she would have preferred to have left the Easter Feast altogether, and immediately.
Now that the newly wed Sarah is expecting a child, she dreads already the forthcoming Baptism of their first child. Where will her husband and she seat all the parents involved, without offending anyone? Who will sit next to her at the table? If she invites her father, he will insist upon coming with the children of his new wife. Sarah nearly wished, therefore, to have their baby baptized in complete privacy, instead. The birth of their child also reminds her of the day when her own mother told her how she had actually killed her own child in the womb, in despair, and had done it shortly after she first discovered that her then husband — the father of Sarah — had been impurely disloyal to her with another woman. It pained Sarah’s heart to discover that, because of the divorce, her own pre-born brother or sister was not even allowed to live, and she sometimes still sorrowfully ponders how he or she would have been and what she would have looked like. She also dreads, once she ponders over her family situation, how the family might break apart altogether and irreversibly, once one of the parents dies and the indecent and acrimonious struggle over the inheritance then starts. Both parents have expressed already fears about it, and the grandparents have already started to hand down parts of their belongings selectively and preferentially to those family members that were of their own blood.
How painfully have been the most important events in the lives of these children of this severed family, after having been first tainted by the broken bond and breached vow of the parents. How discordant have been the family feasts which are meant to bring joy and happiness into our lives. Too often they have been distorted and even turned into the opposite, into sadness and anguish.
It may be fitting now that I apologize for having strained the heart and imagination of the reader of this article, especially in this rather concentrated tale of tragedy. I wish to assure the reader, however, that this narrative is not an account of my own personal history, but it is, rather, a compilation of many different situations that I have either reliably heard of, or have experienced myself in slightly different ways. I intentionally went into all the details here so as to make it more concrete and illustratively specific what divorce more deeply means for a child, practically, and more intimately for the individual soul. What would likely be the adverse consequences for the Faith of such a conflicted and uprooted child, one can only try to fathom. And we also should try to empathize with such a trust-breaking effect.
If one frankly faces the moral and spiritual pains that a child of divorced parents has often had to undergo, not only for the lifetime of the parents, but beyond (especially if one also considers the strains in the mutual relationships with other brothers or sisters and half-siblings), one should find it very worthy to fight courageously with all one’s might and conviction against the insidious act of divorce. This does not mean that one fights without mercy against divorced persons, no, not at all. One has to defend the principles, and to make them known to all men, showing them the very evident ill fruits of divorce by using trenchant evidence, solid reasons and sound conclusive arguments why divorce has to be avoided in the future. We also should stress how important marriage is for the protection of the vulnerable unborn child. Any Catholic who loyally cherishes the natural and supernatural life of the child, must know that the danger for the unborn is much higher outside the stability and shelter of a steadfast and loyal marriage. Once a marriage is severed, there are no facile solutions for healing most of the already broken family ties (even though many children of divorced parents might yearn in their hearts for a final reconciliation of their parents). We all who have had that rift in our lives still have to bear it as our special cross, by means of which offering we may hope to contribute a little to the healing of the marriage bond in the future. We especially need to point out the grave and ongoing consequences of divorce — for the little ones, the children (not to mention for the spouses themselves!); and, now that the accumulated experience and palpable ill fruits of divorce are so vast, we should show, with the help of lucid reasoning, the gracious beauty of a marriage that holds in good and bad times, and does so with perseverance, abiding sacrifice, love and loyalty (remembering always Christ’s own sacrifices for us!). Finally, we will only recover the dignity of marriage with God’s help, with His indispensable Grace, and with a recovery of a deep and living Faith.
Our own little family has just recently considered together some of the implications of the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. If one remembers that book, the youngest daughter of the Bennet family, Lydia, elopes and thereby places her whole family in a hazardous situation of shame, and she recklessly makes it nearly impossible for her own other sisters thereafter to marry well, or even to wed a good and reputable man, given her family’s now damaged good name. I could well picture how feminists and others might mourn the fact that, at the time, family life had such restrictions and firm standards, and thus had to be attentive to the enforced sanctions that prevailed, concerning the continuous moral conduct of a family’s children, especially in relation to courtship and marriage. Yet, if one considers the above-described perplexity and woundedness of Karl and Suzie’s original family, how can one not agree with the importance of moral boundaries and monitory taboos for the preservation of the bond of marriage and for the long-range protection of the children unto their flourishing happiness – in time and eternity! How else can one prevent the spreading calamities that come from a divorce, if not by putting them under a stricter social taboo which will greatly impair one’s welcomed acceptance into any worthy social life if one violates its firm and coherent moral standards. (One might refer in this context also to the necessity to suppress criminal conduct with the help of social taboos. What would be the consequence for our lives if a murderer or swindler would become communally acceptable!) Now that we have been purportedly liberated from such limits and taboos, just look at the terrible tragedies which have brought such ill and worsening fruits to so many thousands and thousands of souls!
Therefore, I once more beg our beloved Church to assume again, and more forcefully, the role of a moral teacher and spiritual mother to all men; and to teach mankind the trustworthy way to happiness and to the true flourishing of a life of grace. May She — Sancta Mater Ecclesia — remind us all — also the divorced and the broken ones, but especially the ones who are now still inclined to go the final step into a divorce — that true happiness, even on earth, only comes if we follow God’s “Manufacturer’s Instructions”: His Commandments, His Precepts and also His Counsels. He loves us best and gives us the laws we need for a good and full life. The Laws of God are Acts of Love.
