The Wisdom of the Ages- or maybe just the Aged

The Archdiocese of Washington DC put forth their answer to Amoris Laetitia this week, and this review on The Catholic Thing  is well worth reading. It points out that the subjective conscience, being without full understanding of Church Teaching, is actually incompetent to judge morality. Moral Order exists for a reason.  Free will, while a great gift from God, is also a very dangerous gift from God,   Moral Order, when you enshrine it in your marriage and in your home, keeps your marriage safe from the very abuses I've written about in previous articles.  Far from being burdensome as most imagine, Moral Order frees us to truly love, as opposed to just "accept" and "tolerate" that which is wrong. And that, as you start your married life together, is an invaluable lesson- children need boundaries, and so does your marriage.

Circumstances do not change morality.   An easy way to tell true theology from fake, is to apply this rule.  If something is A True and Living icon , then it stays true regardless of circumstances.  Our marriage vows say In sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, until death do we part.  Those of us who hold true to those vows, no divorce is possible due to circumstances.

Part of my reason for starting this study is that, at least as of March 2018, I'm significantly more conservative on this subject than the rest of the Catholic Church.  This blog will either end up as a heretical view on marriage, or a catechism looking at the sad state of marriage in the 21st century and how to avoid your marriage bringing you a living hell. How do I know that marriage can end up in a living hell?  How do I know Divorce is intrinsically evil even though CCC 2383  says that in certain extreme conditions it is permissible?  Because in my country, over the last five generations, we've been running a living experiment in how to ruin families and destroy the sacrament, and we now know beyond any shadow of doubt that divorce causes hell in this life.   Even when done with the best of intentions, the best of reasons.  Even when you are certain that an abuser will kill you, divorce will make the situation worse.

Recently, Cardinal Cupich  suggested that the correct reading of Amoris Laetitia is that subjective conscience is the final arbiter of morality.  This leads to Three crises in Catholic Teaching  because it removes Catholic Teaching from the realm of objective fact, and substitutes subjective feeling. Archibishop Sample has already anticipated these issues , and his encyclical, A True and Living Icon, is the ultimate antidote to the confused mess that is subjective conscience interpretation on this topic.  For this blog, as I get more time to work on it later in the spring and this summer, it is Archbishop Sample's interpretation, not Cardinal Cupich, that is my standard for marriage.

It's been a busy month for me, and Primal Loss  is a very long book, but a necessary documentary of the evil that results from divorce; even when that divorce is caused by physical abuse.  It's a hard read for anybody whose lives have only been tangentially touched by divorce like myself, I think it would be a downright impossible read for some of my cousins whose lives have been devastated by divorce. Having said that, I think this book should be on the shelf or in the Kindle of every priest, and should be lent to anybody in the United States who is contemplating marriage.  Questions should be asked before any marriage, and this book explains why communication and commitment are important.  Also, seeing how other people's marriages have failed, will lead you to do things differently to make sure your own marriage will not.

Msgr. Charles Pope points out to us that one cannot prevent a divorce by banishing the couple in trouble from one's life, or by being so forceful that the couple, so intent on divorce, removes you from their life. But I am adamant that all divorce is a worse abuse than the abuse it is trying to prevent. I have never known any situation where adding the complication of divorce makes it better. Nothing has proven this more to me than reading Leila Miller's new book Primal Loss , the book that Msgr Pope was reviewing in the above article. This book shows the lies that marriage is primarily about the married couple, and that children are resilient; rather it shows that the damage done by even the most innocent and friendly of divorces, has philosophical revelations that reverberate down through many future generations. Likewise, the real life horror story of Moira Greyland's The Last Closet shows us just how bad a mindset based in the possibility of divorce can become