7. Divorce
Divorce (OSV Encyc. 1997)
A man and a woman marry because they are in love and want to share life together. They choose one another in preference to all possible others, because they think they will be happier with the other than with anyone else. In many cases it works: but not always. People gradually run into difficulties, discover each other's defects, get irritated, have small quarrels and then bigger ones, feel attracted to someone else... Love and fidelity often survive the crisis, and take on a more voluntary and mature form. The couple "make it". Other couples do not; love declines and finally "dies". Then the idea of continuing in a loveless marriage appears senseless.
If this has happened, what is reasonably to be done? What is the proper thing when two people who have married no longer love one another? The logical answer might seem to be, let them divorce and be free to start over again.
But, other considerations (like God's will) apart, are we not failing to answer prior questions that contain the real issue? How can two people who are so in love as to marry, come to be so out of love that they must separate? Is there not always an element of tragedy - that must leave behind it a taste of unhappiness for life - in putting an end to a joint venture of love? How is it possible that their love 'died'? Did it have to die? Could it have been saved?
Once one begins to treat divorce as a "progressive" or "good" thing, one begins to think (perhaps unconsciously) that the "death of married love" is an eventuality that has no great importance. Then, with an "easy way out" ensured, marriage becomes less of a commitment, people prepare less for it; when difficulties arise, perhaps they themselves struggle less and receive less help or encouragement from pastors and friends to keep it going. That way their love is not likely to survive. Does it matter?
When doctors start thinking that death is the logical result of illness, or that it is just as good an outcome as the cure of that illness, then something has gone badly wrong with medical outlook and practice. The modern approach to divorce shares that pessimistic attitude. Since the "remedy" is at hand in divorce, who cares if love grows sick and dies? Married persons should care! What person marries thinking it is a matter of indifference if the adventure of love he or he has embarked on turns out to be a failure? Marriage counselors should care, pastors should care; and they spend themselves more in helping marriages survive the pathologies they are bound to undergo, and in helping married people cure the infections that at times afflict love.
The real question is not just how long love will last, or what should be done if it fails, but how can love be made to last. People don't marry wanting their love to die; but they are not being taught or encouraged to keep it alive. True love pledges itself 'in good times or in bad'. Therefore what is natural, though hard, is to keep at the task of loving, of learning to love.
This is much truer still if children have been born. The Catechism (no. 2385) speaks of how children can be "traumatized and torn between their parents" by divorce. It is natural for parents to love their children, and to want the best for them. And the best for the children is that their parents remain together. But surely it is worse if they are always quarrelling? Were they always quarrelling? If they had borne in mind what they naturally owe to their children, they would have avoided quarrels, or would at least have had the humility to make up after each quarrel, and so prevented them getting worse. "For the sake of our children we will learn to get on": this can be the decisive motive for spouses who are getting on each other's nerves, to make a new effort. People can rise to great sacrifice for the sake of their children. Moreover if they do so, this new effort often makes each of them to become admirable again in the eyes of the other, and so their original love can in fact find a rebirth.
The argument "why should two people be bound together if they no longer want?", can falsify the issue of divorce. So often the fact is that it is just one of the two who no longer wants, who is tempted to quit; while the other still wants to work at making a success of the marriage they both pledged themselves to. When they married, a successful marriage was certainly what both of them wanted. But one or other, or both, has let himself or herself go through a gradual process of ceasing to want. There - at the start of that process - is where each has to be helped; there lies the problem.
Divorce does not make married life easier, unless one hold that it is "easier" to get out of the difficulties of married life by running away from them. That way people never learn to love. Moreover even if divorce made it "easier" for one side, it very often makes it much harder for the other; and always so for the children.
Divorce does not make for happiness. Divorce makes for divorce. Once the divorce mentality takes hold, people prepare for marriage less, think of its commitments less, make less of an effort to keep it going. It is no wonder that the divorce rate is much higher among divorcés who remarry; and among the children of divorced persons.
That indissolubility is a characteristic of every true marriage is explicitly recalled by Jesus: "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one'? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder" (Mt 19:4-6). So even if human reasoning at times finds it hard to understand why "no divorce and remarriage" is God's law, trust in his wisdom, readiness to bear the Cross if necessary (cf. CCC 1615), and the firm hope of gaining heaven by abiding by his will, should be sufficient to bring about determined acceptance of this law. If "no-divorce" is Our Lord's teaching, then he must provide the grace to make it possible for husband and wife either to live together despite their mutual differences, or else to separate but still to respect the marriage bond. Those who seek his grace, through prayer and the sacraments, will live up to his law and merit a special reward in heaven.