As we approach the feast of St. Monica, we will find ourselves deluged on social media, as we are every year, with hot takes about how not to use the saints to encourage women to stay in abusive marriages.
These takes are sometimes even dramatically accompanied by photos of models bound and gagged or cowering under a clenched fist, as if women everywhere are literally held prisoner by their monster husbands and are simply awaiting permission from their friendly neighborhood blogger to break free of the mental constraints imposed upon them by an irrational church, run by priests anxious to keep them in their shackles. Are there some women in mortal danger? The world is a big place, so the answer is yes. Does anyone think that those women should be beaten, bound, and gagged because of dear St. Monica or the truly wise and delicate Élisabeth Leseur? Of course not. But it's Straw Man Season out there.
Let's be realistic about the state of marriage today. Very few, including priests, dare tell a woman to keep her marriage together, for fear of being accused of supporting and enabling abuse, which has become a catch-all word for a spectrum of situations, not all of them even a little dire.
Few have any idea how to encourage a woman in difficulty. No one knows how to help a couple recover and flourish. Many seem to have lost hope that a man can repent and change. Above all, no one feels comfortable urging discomfort and yes, suffering -- perhaps because we are all trying to avoid suffering ourselves in our worldliness. By my observation, even Catholic counselors, when told of a difficult situation, respond with advice to leave the union.
But let's stop. Let's return to the unbroken (but now bent) teaching of the Church that marriage is indissoluble. Yes, the Church can find that a marriage never occurred with a declaration of nullity, but no power can dissolve what has occurred (and that is not what annulment means!). "What God has joined, let no man put asunder."
We must stop giving people excuses for divorce. If there is a situation that truly puts anyone in danger, the Church has always allowed separation. Sometimes it is the only remedy, always with the hope of reform and reunion.
Somehow, oddly, separation doesn't satisfy those anti-St.-Monica pundits. They want divorce and they want it now. It's almost as if they don't think that marriage is, indeed, indissoluble.
Here is the crux of the matter: Parents often say, with the sense of having stated something rather fine, rather exalted, that they would do anything -- suffer anything, up to and including death -- for their child. Yet, when a couple divorces, they put a knife through their child's heart. They demonstrate that in fact, there is quite a bit they would not do for their children. They deal a blow, in the name of happiness, from which a person will never fully recover. And we in our Church today do not help them do better. Shame on us when we forget the example given to us by our great saints and instead jettison their witness.
Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak, a compilation of personal reflections, is the only book I know that conveys in a multi-faceted way that no one person could encompass on his own, the harm done to the child of divorce. Leila Miller, the compiler, has posted on her blog the insightful and important Foreword by Jennifer Roback Morse. Please read it, I beg you, before you give a big "you go girl, amen, preach" to those loud voices telling women to leave their marriage!
St. Monica, pray for us!
