Mary KennyMarital fault must be considered in marital dissolution, writes Mary Kenny.
My colleague Brendan O’Regan used a significant phrase last week when he referred to “the divorced-remarried” as a category. I thought of a friend of mine who said, after the Synod on the Family, “divorce or no divorce, nothing will keep me away from the sacraments”. I found that touching.
She had been divorced after an abusive marriage, and any compassionate witness who was aware of the circumstances would have agreed that she had been a victim. She had never remarried. Canonically, she was in a different situation from someone who had contracted a second marriage after a divorce, but I am not sure if this is often sufficiently well explained. The phrase ‘divorced-remarried’ explains that a whole lot better.
And perhaps one of the problems in contemporary thinking about marriage and divorce has been the abolition, in secular law, of the concept of “the guilty party” and “the innocent party”. My husband, an Anglican with a liberal attitude, always said that this would bring trouble and injustice, and I think it has.
Traditional secular law on divorce discriminated between the partner who had committed the “marital fault” and the “innocent party”: this could mean adultery, it could mean desertion, it could mean cruelty. Sometimes judges implemented this custom with a rather flinty attitude: it could be disastrous for a woman to leave the marital home, and she might be deprived of custody of her children on that account. (This was the reason why Anna Karenina was regarded as a shocking book – the heroine leaves husband, home and child for a lover, although she does pay the ultimate price.)
Official attitudes to divorce began to change in the later 20th Century, and it was thought to be ‘cruel’ and ‘judgemental’ to apportion blame, when marriages often break down for more complex reasons, and ‘it takes two to tango’. It’s true that relationships are often complex: but a husband who beats a wife is in the wrong, full stop, and a wife who runs away with a lover has, unambiguously, abandoned the marriage. While relationships are nuanced, there can still be concepts of “marital fault”.
Especially when some people are divorced against their will: or when a divorce is the only exit from an abusive union. The ‘divorced-remarried’ is a useful and clear way of signalling that the Church is deliberating about the question of subsequent unions – it is not denying the sacraments to those who were “the innocent party” in any marital dissolution.
A most depressing contender
John Boyne’s novel A History of Loneliness has been nominated for an award for the Irish Book Awards of 2014, but I found it the most dispiriting book I read this year. It’s the story of a priest who becomes disillusioned with the Catholic Church, finds out his best friend, also a priest, is a paedophile, and that the establishment has covered up the offences.
Yes, there must be priests who become disillusioned with their calling and even lose their faith (and that happens in many professions: teachers who entered education bursting with idealism, later utterly cynical; high-minded doctors and nurses fed up to the back teeth with the system’s failings.) But I found the characters and social details of this novel so implausible.
The priest, Odran, was allegedly pushed into the priesthood by his mother (as was his paedophile friend): this might have happened in the 1940s or 50s, but it’s hard to believe it was typical in the 1970s or 80s. The priest’s mother is bigoted, reactionary and ignorant – hates Protestants, foreign food, and women having careers, and she’s supposed to have been a former Aer Lingus stewardess!
The fictional Archbishop of Dublin describes Mary Robinson as “that bloody West Brit bitch” – which archbishop would use such crude language? The Mill on the Floss is allegedly banned in a Dublin seminary in the 1970s: when it was being taught to schoolchildren in Dublin in 1954!
Even The Irish Times reviewer called it a Father Ted – over-the-top – take on Irish priesthood.
However, the book’s theme is the general awfulness of the Catholic Church (the villain is “the Polish Pope”, a theme repeated several times), so I expect it will be garlanded with prizes.
Life is too complicated for youth
There have never been so many studies on happiness, and never so much information demonstrating that we live in an age of enlightenment, with a support group for every kind of malady, physical or emotional. And yet the generation aged 14 to 18 is now being dubbed ‘Generation Anxiety’ because schoolchildren are afflicted by so much stress, bullying and pressure from technology.
Youngsters are exposed to far too much of everything. How simple life seemed when I was a teenager: I bicycled freely through the streets of Dublin at midnight with hardly a care in the world.