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Tag Archives: Annulment

The Convenience of Marriage

30 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in C.S. Lewis, Humor, Matrimony, Sacraments

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Annulment, Divorce, Dying to Self, Marriage

From Lewis today I have this profound insight into marriage. (Well, actually, I just had to post it because it is so funny.)

Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I’m afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.

The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis

Of course the reason this is funny is because there is some truth in it. I am always a little skeptical whenever anyone tells me, “Oh, my wife/husband and I never fight or argue.” After all, marriage is the joining together of a distinct and unique man and woman who are also fallen and sinful. As a result, our pride will from time to time (or most of the time) get in the way – those are the times when we forget that marriage is about giving ourselves to our spouse and not about what we can get out of it. Too often we forget this and when we do then quarrelling will result.

Our modern society doesn’t really understand that about marriage and that is why (at least it is part of the reason) that so many marriages end in divorce.* Just because there are disagreements in a marriage doesn’t mean that you picked the wrong person and need to move on and find someone else. I think it is quite the opposite. If we would use those times of disagreement in order to look at ourselves and see what we need to fix within ourselves, instead of expecting our spouse to be the one to give in, then we would be living our marriages as we should and would also be much happier for it.

At this point someone may be making a thousand excuses in his mind of why he is not the one that has to change. When this happens we need to remember that part of being a Christian is learning to die to ourselves. And this dying to self also applies to marriage. Every time you go to your spouse after an argument and sincerely say, “I’m sorry”, and then amend your life (or at least try) then you are in fact dying to self. And it is that dying to self that will lead to happiness – in this life and in the next.

*(Marriages don’t actually end just because a judge has granted a civil divorce. If it is a valid marriage it only ends at the death of one of the spouses. Another point of clarification needs to be made – an annulment also does not end a marriage; instead, it is a declaration by the Church that the marriage was never vaild to begin with.)

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A Rival Good to God’s: On Cardinal Kasper’s Divorce Proposal

06 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by Fr. Moore in Catholic Obligations, Matrimony, Pro-Family, Sacraments, Thought for the Day

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Tags

Annulment, Divorce, Marriage

I just finished reading A Rival Good to God’s: On Cardinal Kasper’s Divorce Proposal from Crisis Magazine. You really should read the whole think at the link above. My summary of the article would be that you cannot fix the divorce and ‘re-marriage’ problem within the Church and within society by dumbing down the rules established for marriage by Jesus. If the Church were to implement Cardinal Kasper’s proposal it would only make the number of divorces go up and not down. My favorite parts are quoted below.

…in the many centuries when the Gospel informed the law, divorce was impossible in the West, or nearly so. The result was not widespread misery, but durable marriages that produced children who themselves entered into durable marriages. Lifelong marriage is not some ethereal ideal; it was the lived reality of the great majority of people in the West for most of history. The prevalence of divorce in today’s West is not the result of marriage becoming harder, but the result of divorce being made far easier. In the past, when people encountered problems in their marriages, they knew they had to find a way to work through them. Now, they think they can do what they want instead. Cardinal Kasper’s proposal seems to put an imprimatur on this way of thinking. It essentially accepts a Western world with 40 percent or so of marriages ending in divorce as a reality that cannot be changed, even though the Christians who emerged from the catacombs managed to change a Roman world where divorce was free and easy into a Christian world where marriages were expected to be permanent and generally were.

The article closes with the following:

A respectable argument can be made that the corrupting influence of the modern world has so degraded the popular understanding of marriage that there are more marriages that may properly be annulled today than in the past. But if this is indeed the case, what is needed is a clear and unambiguous reaffirmation of the Church’s teaching on marriage, so that the divorce revolution can be resisted and eventually undone. What is not needed is succumbing to the perennial temptation of choosing a rival good to God’s.

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Fr. Moore

Fr. Moore

Parochial Vicar Our Lady of the Atonement San Antonio, Texas FrMoore@truthwithboldness.com

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