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Getting It Right

I'm a little biased here, but my friend Casey Chalk is in a good habit of writing great pieces on the good life in some of the political magazines and websites. Here is one in The American Conservative. I endorse everything he says in this piece, but I want to take a little part of it and use it as a jumping off point for my own reflection here. Casey mentions fathers and sons especially, and how playing baseball, or even watching baseball, can bring them together. We don't talk enough about fathers. We don't talk enough about good fathers, and how necessary they are.

More than this, we don't talk about what a necessary blessing it is to be part of an intact family. I say "necessary" because there exists an obligation for all people of goodwill to fight for intact families. I say "blessing" because the damage of experiencing a broken family is outweighed in the lives of those from intact families by a factor of 10, and perhaps much more. The blessing is a gift of that benefit, and we need a stronger word than simply, "It's better if…" I contributed anonymously to this book because the experiences of children from broken families are not told. If we get to a point where the powerful are not ignoring the data about the kind of family structure that makes for successful people, then we will have plentiful information that is not simply stories to bolster this point. We could also talk about an implicit scientism, and numerous other things in that intellectual failure, but stories form an important part of the art of persuasion in these times. There is something about telling a story that creates a pathos which binds the hearers and the teller together in something special. Pardon the digression.

Are we willing to fight for marriage? I can remember a professor of mine at the seminary I attended in my Protestant days, who said passionately that non-Christians fight for marriage harder than we do. Are we standing around and simply shaking our heads, saying, "That's a shame," when we hear about Catholics married in the Church getting a divorce? Or are we getting in there and saying, "No, you can't do that" to the extent that we have influence over the couple? Abuse of various kinds always comes up when the topic of fighting for marriage and against divorce is raised. No one I know is suggesting that abuse is acceptable, or that to escape abuse is somehow a moral failure. Quite frankly, what we are really talking about are Catholics who are divorced and remarried civilly--against the Church's teaching--and are uncomfortable hearing from others about their sin. I do not know how exactly the bishops will handle the sheer number of people who are in this irregular situation. I do know that we should not excuse sin, simply because it has become acceptable, or has gone on a long time. I am confronted with the question that arises in myself whenever I consider divorce and remarriage: "Do I really intend to say that a person with free will and the grace of God through baptism at the very least is not able to detach themselves from an immoral situation?" Indeed, do any of us intend to say that the teaching of the Church about civil divorce and remarriage without a declaration of nullity, is in error? I know as much as anyone that the pastoral situations around these questions are not easy. But anything that suggests that God the Holy Spirit could make a mistake, and that the Church needs to "get with the times" is beyond the pale for me. And let us be clear that contraception is intimately connected to where we are with this question of divorce. It may in fact be largely the cause of many of these divorces. I run the risk of being dismissed as a reactionary for saying this, but I do not have the luxury of pretending to accept falsehood as truth. I am the living witness to the blunt force of that falsehood lived out in real life, and I cannot disregard my experiences, or the truth of the moral law, or the teaching of holy Church, in order to make people happy. It's a false happiness anyway, and we ought to know it.

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