Lex Anteinternet: Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domestic Law. Late 19th/Early 20th Century, Mid 20th Century, Late 20th/Early 21st Century. An example of the old law, and the old customs, being infinately superior to the current ones and a call to return to them.

Lex Anteinternet: Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domes...:  

Until Death Do Us Part. Divorce and Related Domestic Law. Late 19th/Early 20th Century, Mid 20th Century, Late 20th/Early 21st Century. An example of the old law, and the old customs, being infinately superior to the current ones and a call to return to them.

  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and their children, 1939.

Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.

For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body.

As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for hert to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

So husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

“For this reason a man shall leave father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.

In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.

St. Paul, Ephesians, Chapter 5.

As the old phrase goes, fools rush in where angles fear to tread, and my commenting here is, I am well aware, completely foolish.

I know next to nothing about domestic law, and even less than that.  I've never experienced any aspect of it myself personally, I don't delve into it regularly at work, but on odd occasion I, like every lawyer, must.

I don't like it when I have to.

When a civil litigator takes a look at domestic law, he often tends to be shocked.  I was that way when I looked into the topic of grandparent's rights some years ago.  The opponent was also shocked when I started treating the case like heavy duty civil litigation.  What the heck?  Well, the case ended up changing that area of the law after years of the domestic practitioners just doing the "well, that's the way we do this".

Not anymore.

Recently I've been looking at divorce law for a tangential reason, and once again I'm shocked and appalled.  

Wyoming uses "no fault" divorce, like most states.

Or maybe it doesn't.  More on that below.

No fault was the biggest insult to the law ever created and a knife to the gut of society.

Illustration of No-Fault Divorce. The petitioner is taking a blade to the gut of a helpless defendant.

The legislative stupidity in this area, however, started some time before that.  As such things often do, the story has a "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" aspect to it.

Let's go way back.

At least during the state's territorial days, court's would occasionally order a cohabitating couple to marry.  This led me to assume that cohabitation of unmarried couples was illegal, and perhaps it was, but I've not found any statutory basis for that.  I haven't researched it in depth, either.  Fornication was a crime in many states, however, and it might have therefore been one in Wyoming.  Additionally, Wyoming imperfectly adopted the Common Law upon statehood, and for that reason court's may have felt they had the authority to address cohabitation, which normally would result in a marriage by fiat (Common Law Marriage).  At least right around the time of statehood there was a statute that addressed this topic in the "statutory rape" context, but the fairly shocking provisions of it were that the ages addressed were 10 years of age for a girl, and 14 for a boy.  I.e., a 14-year-old boy was expressly prohibited by law from having intercourse with a ten-year-old girl, and would be tried for rape if he did.  Apparently the scriveners of the law in the Dakotas, which is where we obtained our first set of statutes, felt differently about very tender ages than we might.  Having said that, the bill in the legislature last year which provided:

20-1-102. Minimum marriageable age; exception; parental consent.

(a) At the time of marriage the parties shall be at least sixteen (16) years of age except as otherwise provided.

(b) All marriages involving a person under sixteen (16) years of age are prohibited and voidable, unless before contracting the marriage a judge of a court of record in Wyoming approves the marriage and authorizes the county clerk to issue a license therefor.

(c) When either party is a minor, no license shall be granted without the verbal consent, if present, and written consent, if absent, of the father, mother, guardian or person having the care and control of the minor. Written consent shall be proved by the testimony of at least one (1) competent witness.

Surprisingly, this bill was met with opposition.  Before that, ages below age 16 were allowed with the Court's consent, and amazingly, there had apparently been a few instances of that occurring over the last decade.

The change, anyhow, was in my view, a good one.  Most people would agree.

Up until 1941, Wyoming had a set of "heart balm" statutes providing for common decency, common sense, protection of the common good, and which were fundamentally grounded in the laws of society and nature.  In that year, just months before the Japanese would cause the balance of human decency to be to exaggerated towards oblivion, the 1941 Wyoming legislature eliminated them, stating:

The remedies heretofore provided by law for the enforcement of actions based upon alleged alienation of affection, criminal conversation, seduction and breach of contract to marry, having been subjected to grave abuses, causing extreme annoyance, embarrassment, humiliation and pecuniary damage to many persons wholly innocent and free of any wrong-doing, who were merely the victims of circumstances, and such remedies having been exercised by unscrupulous persons for their unjust enrichment, and such remedies having furnished vehicles for the commission or attempted commission of crime and in many cases having resulted in the perpetration of frauds, it is hereby declared as the public policy of the State that the best interests of the people of the State will be served by the abolition of such remedies. Consequently, in the public interest, the necessity for the enactment of this article is hereby declared as a matter of legislative determination. 

1941 Wyo. Sess. Laws ch. 36 § 1.

Horse shit.

The thing about the "heart balm" statutes is that they heavily weighted the importance of the male/female relationship in a legal and cautionary way. The causes of action were varied, but all of a similar nature. There was 1) breach of contract to marry (breach of promise), 2) alienation of affection, 3) criminal conservation, and 4) seduction.  This mean that there were real consequences for failing to seriously undertake the relationship from the onset, and in failing to take care of it.  Rarely noticed on this, the penalties fell more often on men, than women, but protected both.

What were these causes of action?

We'll take a closer look.

The proposal.

• Breach of promise.

Breach of contract to marry, or as it was more often called, "breach of promise", was a unilateral broken engagement. The non-breaching party was entitled to receive damages that included the benefits were that were to be had from the marriage and specific injuries to the plaintiff, including humiliation and psychological injury.

In the view of us moderns, this seems Victorian and quaint, but it was anything but.  Prior to birth control, relationships between men and women were, we might say, deadly serious.  While the social standards, based on Christian concepts and morality, meant that sex before marriage was frowned upon, and while it was also the case that a high percentage of people, particularly women, did not engage in sex before marriage, things began to break down when couples engaged and people knew it.  This does not mean to suggest that people behaved like they do now, as they certainly did not.

Engagement periods seem to have lasted a year or so, although there wasn't any set period.  One period etiquette book provided:

There are exceptions to the rules which govern engagements, as well as other things; but as in other cases, the exception only proves the wisdom and justice of the rule. There have been happy marriages after a few days' or even hours' acquaintance, and there have been divorces and broken lives after engagements which have existed for years. The medium, therefore, may be considered the best plan to pursue; namely, an engagement which is neither too short nor too long, but just sufficient to make a broad and easy stepping-stone between the old life and the new. The result of a very short engagement depends upon the strength and genuineness of character in the individuals, while the haste with which they have consummated so important a step says but little for their wisdom or prudence. A hasty and ill-advised marriage is a bad beginning in life. A very long engagement, on the contrary, is an eternity of that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, and it is much harder for the engaged girl than for the engaged young man who is "a laggard in love". She has to wait usually, while he works actively, bringing himself into new relations, obtaining new experiences, and in many ways living a life which she can not share, and which is more than likely to interpose a barrier between their mutual sympathy and confidence, and cause them to drift apart from each other.

Gems of Deportment and Hints of Etiquette, Martha Louise Rayne, Detroit: Tyler & Co., 1881.

There was more to it than that, however.  Close contact of this type was going to lead to something with some people.  Therefore, with a broken engagement, the female participant would be potentially at least slightly tainted in some fashion, either regarded as "ruined" or regarded as an obviously difficult and unmarriageable person.  There was a flip side to this, which we'll address below.

Additionally, in an era in which women had limited career opportunities, getting engaged set a woman on a certain financial course whose sudden end could be devastating economically.  It was assumed, naturally enough, that during the engagement she'd sworn off other suitors, many of whom would have moved on in the meantime.  Indeed, amongst the very old even now you'll frequently read stories of very elderly "first loves" reuniting, showing that whatever went wrong early on had forced them into other paths, even if they obviously retained affection for each other.

• Seduction

The flipside of breach of promise, this tort sounds obvious, but in practice it was less so.  The tort allowed an unmarried woman's father - or other person employing her services - to sue for the loss of these services when she became pregnant and could no longer perform them.  We recently saw an example of this being played out on the Canadian World War Graphic History blog in an entry concerning Lieutenant Colonel Charles Flick.

As that entry noted, Flick and one Kate O'Sullivan engaged in some sort of sexual act.  What occured isn't clear, but it seems pretty clear that Flick seduced Kate, or perhaps raped her.  In any event, Flick, then an officer in the British Army, was sued by Kate's father. As the blog notes:

In June 1898, London tailor Daniel O’Sullivan sued Lieutenant Charles Leonard Flick of the Honourable Artillery Company “for damages for the seduction of his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Kate,” with whom Flick had had an illegitimate daughter. The above letter was entered into the court record by the plaintiff’s counsel. As a result of pregnancy and alledged assault, Kate O’Sullivan had been unable to assist her father’s tailoring work. The jury found in favour of the plaintiff for £150.

Seem harsh (assuming it wasn't rape)?  Well, it really wasn't.  Kate, at age 25, was reaching the upper limit of her marriageable age at the time, and now she had a daughter to take care of without Flick.  Whether Flick tried to make it right (which was common) by marrying her or not, we don't know They didn't marry, however.   Mr. O'Sullivan was left, therefore, with the financial burden of his daughter, who could now no longer work, and his granddaughter as well.

While this may all sound pretty harsh, it reflected an economic reality that still exists.  Seduction continues to exist as a legal principle, even if we don't recognize it.  It exists in the form of child support laws, which achieve essentially the same thing, but through the partial intervention of the state.  At the time, it was up to people to take care of this on their own, which was not a less just system.

Flick, by the way, went on to a career in the British Army, serving overseas, and ultimately in the Canadian Army.  He was an opponent of Japanese internment in Canada, so no matter what his early story was, he wasn't entirely a terrible person.

• Alienation of Affection.

This occurred when someone interfered with the marriage, causing a spouse to lose affection, mostly often through seduction, but not always.  Indeed, meddling third parties could be liable for interfering with a marriage, including objecting in laws or even clergymen.  In the Wyoming case of Worth v. Worth, 48 Wyo. 441 (1935) a daughter-in-law suited her in laws on just such a claim, recovering the amount of $35,000 in damages.  The damages in such cases were for emotional distress and mental anguish, shame, humiliation, and economic loss, including financial contributions toward the marriage and potentially punitive damages.

The elimination of this tort created a situation in which unrestrained interference in marriages can and frankly does arise.  Amongst women, it tends to come up in terms of the "support" of female friends, many of whom have broken relationships themselves, or in some instances feel that a friend married beneath herself.  I've seen this happen first hand, with the women who don't have to live the consequences harping on tehir friend to divorce.

The flipside of this is that men do the same thing, but it tends to be over other issues, with those issues often being sexual.  In spite of they hypersexualized era in which we live, or perhaps because of it, it's frequently the case that couples enter a marriage badly damaged in this area and ultimately that impacts the woman much more.  Women with multiple sexual partners before marriage are almost statistically incapable of living out their marriage.  Women who have abused, on the other hand, tend to withdraw from the "marital debt" at some point leaving their husband's stunned.  In that case, the men will tend to get the advice from their fellows that they should dump their wives for a more willing, and often younger, partner, or they'll simply begin to engage in adultery and excuse their conduct.

• Criminal Conversation

Criminal conversation was similar to Alienation of Affection, but involved sex, so the last item noted here had arisen..  It was the tort of sexual intercourse outside marriage between the spouse and a third party, with each act being a separate tort, and the liable party being the third party.  Damages included emotional harm, mental suffering, loss of support and income, and loss of consortium.

Not surprisingly, this tort changed over time to something radically different, and it then allowed an unmarried woman to sue on the grounds of seduction to obtain damages from her seducer, if her consent to sex was based upon his misrepresentation.

The unifying thread in all of these is that they took marriage, and beyond that, the male female relationship extremely seriously.  For want of a better way to put, they took sex very seriously as well.

One of the things that the Sexual Revolution proved was that people were incredibly naive about sex, but not in the way that the revolutionaries imagined.  In fact, the pre revolutionary condition proved to be the wise one, as it grasped the nature of sex.  While perhaps not the best way to set it out, we'll quote here an item from Quora, which is always a somewhat dubious source of anything, which was on a thread on whether premarital relations should be illegal, which in a few countries they still are.  Some commentator noted:

Sex absolutely, deeply and irreversibly transforms

You

Physically, Emotionally, Mentally and Spiritually.

It transforms abusers and the abused,

It transforms actors in porn,

It transforms friends who do it casually,

It transforms one-night standers,

It transforms johns and the prostitutes,

It transforms gays and lesbians,

It transforms the masturbater,

It transforms viewers of porn,

It transforms people who only do it orally,

It transforms those who use protection,

It tranforms unmarried couples,

It transforms married couples,

Sex is a language of the body.

And it is a langualge that has a definitely fixed meaning.

It communicates an absolute message.

It says I AM YOURS, FREELY, COMPLETELY, FAITHFULLY and FRUITFULLY.

After sex, you will either be made or ruined

Physically, Emotionally, Mentally and Spiritually.

We can think that nothing in us has changed,

But we will never the same as before.

We can tell ourselves that sex is pleasurable and healthy exercise,

And that we will be worse off denying ourselves from the pleasure it gives.

But, we will still have trivialised the message our body has communicated.

When we add meanings to the fixed message of sex,

The message of our mind is not aligned with the fixed message of our body.

We are no longer integrated. We have lied.

Sex in forms that detract from its fixed message is an abuse of the body.

It is cripplingly addictive, simply untruthful, absolutely unfulfilling and very ruinous.

If you have not done it. Don’t begin.

If you have done it, learn from this and do your best to cease.

Be hopeful. Every Saint has a past. Every sinner has a future.

Remember, the purpose of sex can only be properly fulfilled within and after

Marriage.

Written almost like a poem, the writer is absolutely correct.  Psychologically, biologically and chemically, sex changes everything.  It binds the people, whether they wish to be or not.

Indeed, in the area of odds and ends, one of the commentators on Catholic Stuff You Should know once noted this in that he was with a group of friends who wished that he could still see women the way he had, before.  He remembered having done that, but the change was too profound to allow him to do again.  That's likely nearly universally true, at least for men.

On a scarier note, in an interview I heard some time ago from a very orthodox Catholic source, a person who assisted with exorcisms noted that in some cases the possession had come about during intercourse, the metaphysical nature of it being such that license existed due to the marital act for the possession to transfer from one person to another.

Now, people like to wink and note that even amongst members of Apostolic faiths, premarital sex is common. But prior to birth control, it was much less so.  It was not, however, nonexistent.  Part of the breach of promise recognized this.  But part also recognized that once couples head down this road, there's no real coming back, ever.

Ever.

And that, in no small part, is why "no fault" divorce works an irreparable and unconscionable injury to marriage, the married, and men and women in general.

It should not be allowed.

Before we look at that, or rather before we carry on directly, however, we'll take a big diversion. The reason is that we happened, in an unrelated fashion, upon something tagentially related to this topic and started a post on it, but then decided that it would really be better set out here.  

And that involves two videos from The Catholic Gentleman blog.

Normally I'd be very hesitant to post a video of this type, probably out of cowardice as much as anything else, but these are so well done, if not really titled correctly, I'm making an exception.  

They're really insightful.

Having said that, I'll retreat into cowardice a bit.  The mere title, "What women don't understand about men", can raise hackles and eye rolls.  And the fact that it's linked in from something called "The Catholic Gentleman" will immediately provoke cries of "rad trads" and patriarchist, and the like.

Well, actually, this is much more in the nature of informed evolutionary biology.

And, to note it again, they're mistitled.  That's because these two videos could just as easily be "What men don't understand about women, and what women don't understand about men, and why that's the case.

Now, these do take this topic on from a semi religious prospective, but only semi, which is really interesting in that this is from The Catholic Gentleman blog.  They creep right up on, and even cross deeply into, evolutionary biology, again in really insightful ways, and frankly if the religious aspects of these videos were omitted, they'd still be highly valid.  In the first one, in fact, the religious elements are hardly mentioned.

Now, a few warnings about these insightful videos.

About half of the first one is about sex, sort of, but not completely.  Rather, it's more accurately on how men perceives their relationship on a primary basis, which is heavily based on sex, which is part of the reason that they're so insightful.  It also means that they touch on a topic gently, but much more graphically, than has ever been discussed here before.  

Crud?  Yes, but more accurate in some ways than we care to imagine once certain lines are crossed.

But the times call for it.

Put simply, and grossly simplifying it, we're an animal whose evolutionary biology is really odd, and that's not a societal thing.  Of all the mammals, we belong to the group that has the highest degree of sexual dimorphism.  And of every animal in our group, the primate, we're at the top of the scale, indeed, over the scale, on it.  It defines a lot of who and what we are as an animal, and how the two sexes react with each other.

This is not, I'd note, unique to this analysis. The first time I recall reading this was actually a discussion on Homo sapiens evolution in The National Geographic decades ago.  The thesis to explain it is that in one of our homo ancestors, quite a few ancestors ago, the dimorphism began when the species intelligence advanced, resulting in an unusually long period before we're mature adults.  That meant that our mothers, or rather their mothers, had the responsibility of dealing with and taking care of the infant and child human for a long time. . . years in fact.  That caused the dimorphism.  Females evolved accordingly in one direction, and that direction emphasized security and relationships.  Males evolved in another, and those involved a set of things we have otherwise discussed here, but also, and we really haven't discussed hit here, sex.  The National Geographic author's assertion, and it seems well-supported, is that the evolutionary trade-off is that human males became basically ready, if you will, all the time and traded intercourse with human females, who are receptive, unusually, in varying degrees all the time. Females received food and protection.

That is, we'd note, a gross over simplification, somewhat.

As we're a very complicated species, with our big brains, it became more involved than that, but the basic elements remained.  Humans do look for lifetime mates.  Males are highly oriented towards connecting love of their mate, ultimately, with intercourse, and if it's absent, severe problems typically begin to arise.  Women place little importance on that, however, past the initial stage of the formation of the couple, and instead place an enormous focus on relationships and feeling safe. Women really don't understand that for a married couple, or perhaps we should say one in a real union, that for the male, if the physical aspect of it is absent, he'll feel frustrated, insecure, and unloved.  Men really don't get that women can simply omit this to some degree, or even entirely, and not feel the same way at all.  On the other hand, men don't grasp that if a woman feels insecure, it's relationship threatening.

The first video does a really good job of explaining that.  If you want to look into it, and do to my autodidactic nature I did, you can actually find a pile of stuff supporting what they're saying.

The second part of the first installment is on how men yearn for respect and equate love with respect.  Women do not.  Women expect support.  You can find lots of stuff on this as well, although you need to be careful.  One thing that is mentioned barely here, but which showed up in a net search, is that a female insulting a male, well, in a physical fashion in this arena can actually be devastating. There's an entire Reddit thread where a married man mentions this occurring in an argument which seems to have largely resolved on its primary point, but which seemed overwhelmingly likely to result in a divorce, even though the woman had repeatedly apologized.  Even other women were counselling, "dump her".

A couple of notes, before moving on, one that's touched on in the video, and another not.  The video makes a really good point, which has to do with male adolescence and how males develop. The context of it is in regard to transgenderism, and the point is made that the sort of crisis that males go through at a certain age, as things turn on, would be wholly absent for those claiming to be transgendered.  Without that, however, you really aren't male.  And no doubt the reverse would be true for whatever it is that women go through.

Men Did Greater Things When It Was Harder To See Boobs

BY: AMY OTTO

JUNE 23, 2016

7 MIN READ

Amy Otto, from The Federalist.

Not nearly as touched on, but a major problem, is that not only are men highly oriented in this direction, but at the point at which its realized its like flipping a switch that men can't get back from. This is mentioned in the excellent podcast Catholic Stuff You Should Know.  Men really can't' get back from where they started off, once they go down this path (and yes, I'm not going to fill it all in).  It's sometime wondered "how" Catholic Priests can endure their celibacy, and it should be noted that St. Paul advised that unless the person had the grace and call to do it, they shouldn't attempt it.  Most Priest who are truly called not only have that calling and grace, but they've likely never gotten to the point where the breaker was switched.  Once it is, enduring the celibacy would be difficult in the extreme, and we note that in fact not all have endured it.

The second video is on three different topics.

The first is how men handle insecurity and stress, which often is very aggressive, or at least some form of aggression.  The other way tends to be through addictive behavior.  

The prior set of statues took the relationship so seriously that it was somewhat difficult to contract in the first place, had very serious implications from day one, and was very difficult to break.  By being difficult to break, it protected first children, but then it protected the married men and women themselves.

This is not to say that all marriages were always rosy, but truth be known, the majority of marriages that break up do so due to transitory matters.  That's why divorce originally required proof of something serious.  Critics of the old statutes claimed that this forced people, and they usually mean "women" by people, to make up lies to obtain a divorce, and lying did indeed occur.  Missed in that is that the fact that lying was occurring mean that what was being claimed, such as mental cruelty, didn't really exist.  It was all just a matter of feelings.

That it is a matter of transitory feelings is borne out by the evidence.  At a bare minimum, it's reported that 27% of women and 32% of men regret their divorces, or are willing to admit that they do.  Given the nature of such reporting, we can probably easily assume that the real percentages approach at least 40%, if not higher.

Taken out of that, of course, are the percentages of those who divorce who simply kill themselves.  Suicide being a risk due to divorce is very well established, although statistics associated with the percentage that take this tragic route are hard to come by, with men being nine times more likely to kill themselves following or during a divorce than women. That last statistic is particularly interesting, as there's something about men that causes them to take that approach at a much higher rate than women, although suicide is an increased risk for men and women due to divorce.  Men, it is well known, tend to lose their social structure upon marrying, and it tends to devolve, over time, down to their wife.  Again, looking back to old wisdom, the Old Testament informs:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

They do indeed, and this does indeed become the case.  It's really easy to find examples of a wife's family essentially becoming the family of her husband, but it's much less common the other way around, in spite of what many people assume.  Men getting divorced tend to lose their entire families as a result, their wife, their children, and their wife's family, with nowhere to go. The failure is so existential, they'd simply rather die.  Women suffer to, but the classic "going back to her parents" is an option for them.  Men don't "go back to their parents". They go back to new dwellings alone.

Suicide is now so common with divorce that its frequently discussed in various divorce related circles, including legal ones.  Interestingly, the tragedy frequently is followed by the comment that if a person is edging towards this during the divorce in an open way, it should basically be disregarded, as that's manipulative. At some level, that's an incredibly self-interested set of views.  Self-slaughter if never the right answer, and from a Christian prospective, it's a mortal sin.  But the people who state "I feel guilty because my spouse killed himself" often really should feel just that. They abandoned their vows and the other person fell into despair, so  yes, you should feel guilty, and moreover, you in particularly should not "move on" into another relationship having helped kill, quite literally, your prior one.

All of this is also why the death rate associated with men is also falsely low.  Some go home and kill themselves sooner or later, but some simply drink themselves to death, or purposely engage in a lifestyle that will shorten their lives.  Some just die, broken-hearted.  Indeed, a bona fide medical condition, takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” occurs in a certain percentage of otherwise healthy people, killing 5% o those who obtain it, and causing long term health effects for 20% of those who aren't killed by it but survive.  In extreme cases, a related psychological condition results in a mental collapse in which a healthy person just gives up the will to live and ceases all efforts to do so, resulting in death coming within the span of a week unless people catch it and intervene.

Oh well, right?  We've moved on to the brave new legal world where the facts are made up and the answers don't matter, and just have to live with it.

No we don't. There are things that can, and should, be done. But what can be done?

• Be honest about the relationship between men and women.

It's ironic that in the age of freely available information, and great advances in society, that what people have learned is the mechanics of sex, but nothing about its existential nature.  This is a root part of the problem.

And I'm using the term "sex" advisably, not "marriage".

If the defenders of Catholic annulments are to be credited, the reason that so many are granted is that people just don't grasp the nature of what they're getting into.  As noted above, I'm pretty skeptical on that, but there's at least something to that.  Women don't seem to realize that once they become sexually active with a man he can't go back to the status quo ante.  They also, in many instances, don't realize (and again, Reddit is full of this stuff) that once the vows are exchanged and the presents opened, they can't really expect a return to the days of care and cuddling. For that matter, once children are born they're not getting back there either.  They will have achieved exactly what the New Testament provides, literally:

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.

He's not going to get over the "clinging". 

If the authors of The Catholic Gentlemen are correct, women need to grasp this. But there's a lot that men need to grasp as well.  And before we depart on this topic, we'll note, at least in undamaged women, and a lot are damaged, the psychological union that this creates exists too.

When I was looking up stuff for this post, one of the things I just ran across was a post by a woman who had initiated a divorce. Still convinced that she was correct in doing so, she was baffled by why she was repeatedly thrown into lamenting the divorce and the loss of her husband.  Of course, the Redditors came in with all sorts of "grieving" statement, and in a way they were right. But the reality of it is that she tried to cut something down that was within herself and killed it so it didn't die a natural death.  As that attempt at murder, and indeed it’s a type of self-murder given the nature of marriage, is ineffective, her DNA was telling her what society could not.  Her divorce is false. She wasn't the person she was before she attempted to divorce.

It's here where the videos linked in can do a real service.  Societally, we lie about sex all the time and have damaged people enormously as a result.  What we've essentially done is to encourage people to get on the perversion and decay train, and a lot have boarded it.  Then we're surprised by the result.  To give an odd example, everyone was surprised when "America's Dad" Bill Cosby turned out to be a serial sexual pervert.  But why? We knew that he hung out at the Playboy Mansion and everything associated with Playboy ended in perversion, long term.

This obviously goes beyond marriage, of course, and gets towards being honest about our psychology as a species, which we aren't.  We can pretend that the old standards went away, but the old DNA is still there.

• What can be done under the current law

Part of the reason, indeed a lot of the reason, things have gotten so bad is that divorce lawyers, have failed to really examine the law much, with rare exceptions.  

They should.

Quite frankly, it'll probably take conventional civil litigators to do it.

But what can be done?

Domestic lawyers really don't look at the law much.  They have just gotten used to "this is how things are done". An example of that is Wyoming's "no fault" divorce statute, which isn't really no fault. The Wyoming Supreme Court required proof on irreconcilability in a case for the first time this past year, which means it took somebody fifty years to wake up to the fact that the law requires the proof, although the case was very unique, however.

• Going back to the old law

We remind people of this:

People constantly imagine that when a mistake is made, and absolting hte old law here was a mistake, you "can't go back". 

Of course you can go back.

There actually is a movemen in the nation to move away from no fault divorce.  But to get back to the old law society will have to go a bit further back indeed.

It should.

Divorce laws requiring fault should be reestablished, and the "heart balm" statutes brought back. It's those latter causes of action that, as far as I'm aware, which nobody has preposed to restore.

They should.

• A societal reaction.

Finally, in order to really take this on, there needs to be a societal reaction, and this makes people very uncomfortable.

Very uncomfortable.

Part of the reason that we have so much divorce in our society is that we've allowed the conditions creating it. We've badly damaged the psychological makeup of our society over a seventy year period by losing what we knew about sex and the relationship between men and women. That's hard to come back from, but it needs to occur.  It'll have to start occurring on an individual basis.

Even when I was a college student in the 80's it was still the case that people living together without being married was frowned upon, even if it was no longer really societally prohibited.  Doing that on a non-married basis toys with the programmed in nature of sex and the relationship between the sexes in a  major way.  Indeed, in many societies earlier on, to do that was simply to create a married relationship that the couple was then stuck with.  Even in early Christianity, as is so often forgotten, there was no marriage ceremony early on.  The couple simply agreed to be married and moved in with each other.

Couples that "live together", as its now politely called, are creating a proto marriage whether they wish to or not, at least within themselves.  If this is not going to be frowned upon, it ought to at least be acknowledged for what it really does.

Beyond that, and it would have to start there, the easy separations that have come into being should not be so easily tolerated.  Couples break up and divorce, as we know, but it really doesn't have to be accepted by a party that didn't wish to, and if they didn't wish to, they should stand their ground in their status.  And this is true, in my view, of religions annulments as well.  To go against these, in Catholic terms, is regarded as absolutely shocking and subject the person who does it to attack.  Well, proclaiming that you view the other party as engaging in a fraud won't make a person popular, but standing for what is true often doesn't.¹

Footnotes:

While I'm aware that it will be a very unpopular thing to say, another aspect of this would be not to tolerate the divorce industry.

Like almost everything that plagues our society, there's a strong industrial element to all of this.  The corruption of marriage in the first place, by which we mean the corruption of the relationship between men and women, was brought about in no small part due the pornography industry, which is a subset of the sex trade industry.  As it took root, the entertainment industry, the medical industry and the legal industry became highly involved with it.

Law in American society has become an industry, and as noted, it's very tied up in it.  Law, like medicine, was a profession, but the corrupting influence of money has very much corrupted it.  Divorce litigation is its own industry.  There's no reason to respect it, or those involved in it, including lawyers involved in it.

Related Threads:

Et Ux*: A legal and societal history of marriage

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?

Courting

July 29, 1968. Humanae Vitae

Lex Anteinternet: Pope Francis on the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, what he really said, and the legacy of his Papacy.

Lex Anteinternet: Pope Francis on the Solemnity of the Epiphany of t...:

Pope Francis on the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, what he really said, and the legacy of his Papacy.

The news medial this morning is running the headline, in regard to Pope Francis, that:

Pope warns against ideological splits in the Church, says focus on the poor, not ‘theory’

Well, what did he really say?

Here it is:

HOMILY OF POPE FRANCIS

St Peter’s Basilica

Saturday, 6 January 2024

The Magi set out to seek the newborn King. They are an image of the world’s peoples journeying in search of God, of the foreigners who now are led to the mountain of the Lord (cf. Is 56:6-7), of those who now, from afar, can hear the message of salvation (cf. Is 33:13), of all those who were lost and now hear the beckoning of a friendly voice. For now, in the flesh of the Babe of Bethlehem, the glory of the Lord has been revealed to all the nations (cf. Is 40:5) and “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Lk 3:6). This is the pilgrimage of humanity, of each of us, moving from distance to closeness.

The Magi have their eyes raised to the heavens, yet their feet are journeying on the earth, and their hearts are bowed in adoration.  Let me repeat this: their eyes are raised to the heavens, their feet are journeying on the earth and their hearts are bowed in adoration.

First, their eyes are raised to the heavens. The Magi are filled with longing for the infinite, and so they gaze at the stars of the evening sky. They do not pass their lives staring at their feet, self-absorbed, confined by earthly horizons, plodding ahead in resignation or lamentation.  They lift their heads high and await the light that can illumine the meaning of their lives, the salvation that dawns from on high. They then see a star, brighter than all others, which fascinates them and makes them set out on a journey. Here we see the key to discovering the real meaning of our lives: if we remain closed in the narrow confines of earthly things, if we waste away, heads bowed, hostages of our failures and our regrets; if we thirst for wealth and worldly comforts – which are here today and are gone tomorrow – rather than becoming seekers of life and love, our life slowly loses its light. The Magi, who are still foreigners and have not yet encountered Jesus, teach us to fix our sight on high, to lift our eyes to the heavens, to the hills, from which our help will come, for our help is from the Lord (cf. Ps 121:1-2).

Brothers and sisters, let us raise our eyes to the heavens! We need to lift our gaze on high, in order to be able view reality from on high. We need this on our journey through life, we need to let ourselves walk in friendship with the Lord, we need his love to sustain us, and the light of his word to guide us, like a star in the night. We need to set out on this journey, so that our faith will not be reduced to an assemblage of religious devotions or mere outward appearance, but will instead become a fire burning within us, making us passionate seekers of the Lord’s face and witnesses to his Gospel. We need this in the Church, where, instead of splitting into groups based on our own ideas, we are called to put God back at the centre. We need to let go of ecclesiastical ideologies so that we can discover the meaning of Holy Mother Church, the ecclesial habitus. Ecclesiastical ideologies, no; ecclesial vocation, yes. The Lord, not our own ideas or our own projects, must be at the centre. Let us set out anew from God; let us seek from him the courage not to lose heart in the face of difficulties, the strength to surmount all obstacles, the joy to live in harmonious communion.

The Magi not only gazed at the stars, the things on high; they also had feet journeying on the earth. They set out for Jerusalem and ask, “Where is the Child who has been born King of the Jews? For we have observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage” (Mt 2:2). One single thing: their feet linked with contemplation. The star shining in the heavens sends them forth to travel the roads of the world. Lifting their eyes on high, they are directed to lower them to this world. Seeking God, they are directed to find him in man, in a little Child lying in a manger. For that is where the God who is infinitely great has revealed himself: in the little, the infinitely little.  We need wisdom, we need the assistance of the Holy Spirit, to understand the greatness and the littleness of the manifestation of God.

Brothers and sisters, let us keep our feet journeying on this earth! The gift of faith was given to us not to keep gazing at the heavens (cf. Acts 1:11), but to journey along the roads of the world as witnesses to the Gospel. The light that illumines our life, the Lord Jesus, was given to us not to warm our nights, but to let rays of light break through the dark shadows that envelop so many situations in our societies. We find the God who comes down to visit us, not by basking in some elegant religious theory, but by setting out on a journey, seeking the signs of his presence in everyday life, and above all in encountering and touching the flesh of our brothers and sisters. Contemplating God is beautiful, but it is only fruitful if we take a risk, the risk of the service of bringing God to others. The Magi set out to seek God, the great God, and they found a child. This is important: to find God in flesh and bone, in the faces of those we meet each day, and especially in the poor. The Magi teach us that an encounter with God always opens us up to a greater reality, which makes us change our way of life and transform our world. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI: “When true hope is lacking, happiness is sought in drunkenness, in the superfluous, in excesses, and we ruin ourselves and the world… For this reason, we need people who nourish great hope and thus have great courage: the courage of the Magi, who made a long journey following a star, and were able to kneel before a Child and offer him their precious gifts” (Homily, 6 January 2008).

Finally, let us also consider that the Magi have hearts bowed in adoration. They observe the star in the heavens, but they do not take refuge in otherworldly devotion; they set out, but they do not wander about, like tourists without a destination. They came to Bethlehem, and when they saw the child, “they knelt down and paid him homage” (Mt 2:11). Then they opened their treasure chests and offered him gold, frankincense and myrrh. “With these mystical gifts they make known the identity of the one whom they adore: with gold, they declare that he is a King; with frankincense, that he is God; with myrrh, that he is destined to die” (SAINT GREGORY THE GREAT, Hom. X in Evangelia, 6). A King who came to serve us, a God who became man.  Before this mystery, we are called to bow our heart and bend our knee in worship: to worship the God who comes in littleness, who dwells in our homes, who dies for love. The God who, “though manifested by the immensity of the heavens and the signs of the stars, chose to be found… beneath a lowly roof. In the frail flesh of a newborn child, wrapped in swaddling clothes, he was worshiped by the Magi and caused fear in the wicked” (SAINT AUGUSTINE, Serm. 200). ). Brothers and sisters, we have lost the habit of adoration, we have lost the ability that gives us adoration. Let us rediscover our taste for the prayer of adoration. Let us acknowledge Jesus as our God and Lord, and worship him. Today the Magi invite us to adore. Nowadays there is a lack of adoration among us.

Brothers and sisters, like the Magi, let us raise our eyes to the heavens, let us set out to seek the Lord, let us bow our hearts in adoration. Looking to the heavens, setting out on a journey and adoring. And let us ask for the grace never to lose courage: the courage to be seekers of God, men and women of hope, intrepid dreamers gazing at the heavens, the courage of perseverance in journeying along the roads of this world with the fatigue of a real journey, and the courage to adore, the courage to gaze upon the Lord who enlightens every man and woman. May the Lord grant us this grace, above all the grace to know how to adore.

Hmmmm. . . like a lot of things that Pope Francis is reported as saying, when you read it, it's not as radical as might be supposed.

On supposition, I suppose that the headline is drawn from this statement, and its echoes in this homily:

Brothers and sisters, let us raise our eyes to the heavens! We need to lift our gaze on high, in order to be able view reality from on high. We need this on our journey through life, we need to let ourselves walk in friendship with the Lord, we need his love to sustain us, and the light of his word to guide us, like a star in the night. We need to set out on this journey, so that our faith will not be reduced to an assemblage of religious devotions or mere outward appearance, but will instead become a fire burning within us, making us passionate seekers of the Lord’s face and witnesses to his Gospel. We need this in the Church, where, instead of splitting into groups based on our own ideas, we are called to put God back at the centre. We need to let go of ecclesiastical ideologies so that we can discover the meaning of Holy Mother Church, the ecclesial habitus. Ecclesiastical ideologies, no; ecclesial vocation, yes. The Lord, not our own ideas or our own projects, must be at the centre. Let us set out anew from God; let us seek from him the courage not to lose heart in the face of difficulties, the strength to surmount all obstacles, the joy to live in harmonious communion.

Let's reduce that down once again.

We need to set out on this journey, so that our faith will not be reduced to an assemblage of religious devotions or mere outward appearance, but will instead become a fire burning within us, making us passionate seekers of the Lord’s face and witnesses to his Gospel. We need this in the Church, where, instead of splitting into groups based on our own ideas, we are called to put God back at the centre. We need to let go of ecclesiastical ideologies so that we can discover the meaning of Holy Mother Church, the ecclesial habitus. Ecclesiastical ideologies, no; ecclesial vocation, yes.

I'm afraid that this is going to fall on largely deaf ears.  Frankly, while much of this homily I agree with, my ears are having a hard time hearing it myself.

Ideology is, frankly, not necessarily a bad thing.  Entire religious communities are based on certain ideologies.   And much of the current problems that have gone from smoldering to raging fires within the Church are due to their being ideologies that are not being dealt with, and have to be dealt with by, well, ideologies.

Pope Francis' detractors claim that he has ideology, and given his recent actions against some of his detractors, it's hard not to give this some credit.  He suppressed the Latin Mass and has acted against Cardinal Burke's privileges, which can be interpreted as an action against a certain conservative ideological wing of the Church. Perhaps that's a strike against ideology, but at the same time he's allowed a German wing that is only not regarded as schismatic as nobody has declared it to be to carry on in its conduct, at least so far.

This could all just be an effort to keep everything together.  But by suppressing conservatives and the highly orthodox, it takes on an appearance of adopting something else.  And even if it is not, the failure to address the German Bishops and the Fr. James Martin, S.J. has the impact of allowing a certain ideology to advance.

Pope Francis probably doesn't feel that a single homily will fix things, even if he cannot be blamed for stating his hopes.  But it's hard not to regard this Papacy has having wearied the orthodox, myself included, to where really getting behind Pope Francis in a statement like this is simply not going to happen.  One recent commentator from a Catholic university expressed the desire, which he acknowledged would not occur, that Pope Francis would resign.  I wish he would.  Everyone knows that given his current age, 87, he will not be Pope much longer and now contemplation on the nature of his successor is open.

Even at age 87 the Pope is perfectly capable of making major impacts in the Church, and that's part of the current tension. By acting where he wants to, and abstaining from acting elsewhere, things are happening.  While any just soul wishes him good health and continued life, the reality of our short lifespans means that soon we'll have a new Pope. The weary, while wishing him well, look towards that horizon with both dread and hope for the future.  I suppose those who have loved this Papacy do as well.  Everyone knows that day is coming.

And everyone knows that it is going to be a rough transition.  Part of that will be due to the legacy of Pope Francis, which not everyone will look back at fondly, myself included.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The Agonizing Advent of 2023.* Fiducia Supplicans...Press release concerning the reception of Fiducia supplicans.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: The Agonizing Advent of 2023.* ...:

Lex Anteinternet: The Agonizing Advent of 2023.* Fiducia Supplicans...Press release concerning the reception of Fiducia supplicans.

Lex Anteinternet: The Agonizing Advent of 2023.* Fiducia Supplicans...: The Conversion of St. Paul.  St. Paul said in his letter to the Corinthians: " Ἢ οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι ἄδικοι βασιλείαν Θεοῦ οὐ κληρονομήσουσι...

Advent is over, but the story lives on.

Three weeks ago, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) announced that there would be no more detailed explanations of the sort of blessings suggested in Fiducia Supplicans.  Well, the DDF has now issued something and it does provide detailed explanations.  Indeed, it's a major clarification making it plain that any blessing need be both spontaneous, and quite limited, even providing an example.

The document states:

Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith

Press release concerning the reception of Fiducia supplicans

4 January 2024

We are writing this Press Release to help clarify the reception of Fiducia supplicans, while recommending at the same time a full and calm reading of the Declaration so as to better understand its meaning and purpose.

1. Doctrine

The understandable statements of some Episcopal Conferences regarding the document Fiducia supplicans have the value of highlighting the need for a more extended period of pastoral reflection. What is expressed by these Episcopal Conferences cannot be interpreted as doctrinal opposition, because the document is clear and definitive about marriage and sexuality. There are several indisputable phrases in the Declaration that leave this in no doubt:

«This Declaration remains firm on the traditional doctrine of the Church about marriage, not allowing any type of liturgical rite or blessing similar to a liturgical rite that can create confusion». One acts in these situations of couples in irregular situations «without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage» (Presentation).

«Therefore, rites and prayers that could create confusion between what constitutes marriage – which is the “exclusive, stable, and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of children” – and what contradicts it are inadmissible. This conviction is grounded in the perennial Catholic doctrine of marriage; it is only in this context that sexual relations find their natural, proper, and fully human meaning. The Church’s doctrine on this point remains firm» (4).

«Such is also the meaning of the Responsum of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which states that the Church does not have the power to impart blessings on unions of persons of the same sex» (5).

«For this reason, since the Church has always considered only those sexual relations that are lived out within marriage to be morally licit, the Church does not have the power to confer its liturgical blessing when that would somehow offer a form of moral legitimacy to a union that presumes to be a marriage or to an extra-marital sexual practice» (11).

Evidently, there is no room to distance ourselves doctrinally from this Declaration or to consider it heretical, contrary to the Tradition of the Church or blasphemous.

 

2. Practical reception

Some Bishops, however, express themselves in particular regarding a practical aspect: the possible blessings of couples in irregular situations. The Declaration contains a proposal for short and simple pastoral blessings (neither liturgical nor ritualised) of couples in irregular situations (but not of their unions), underlining that these are blessings without a liturgical format which neither approve nor justify the situation in which these people find themselves.

Documents of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith such as Fiducia supplicans, in their practical aspects, may require more or less time for their application depending on local contexts and the discernment of each diocesan Bishop with his Diocese. In some places no difficulties arise for their immediate application, while in others it will be necessary not to introduce them, while taking the time necessary for reading and interpretation.

Some Bishops, for example, have established that each priest must carry out the work of discernment and that he may, however, perform these blessings only in private. None of this is problematic if it is expressed with due respect for a text signed and approved by the Supreme Pontiff himself, while attempting in some way to accommodate the reflection contained in it.

Each local Bishop, by virtue of his own ministry, always has the power of discernment in loco, that is, in that concrete place that he knows better than others precisely because it is his own flock. Prudence and attention to the ecclesial context and to the local culture could allow for different methods of application, but not a total or definitive denial of this path that is proposed to priests.

3. The delicate situation of some countries

The cases of some Episcopal Conferences must be understood in their contexts. In several countries there are strong cultural and even legal issues that require time and pastoral strategies that go beyond the short term.

If there are laws that condemn the mere act of declaring oneself as a homosexual with prison and in some cases with torture and even death, it goes without saying that a blessing would be imprudent.  It is clear that the Bishops do not wish to expose homosexual persons to violence.  It remains vital that these Episcopal Conferences do not support a doctrine different from that of the Declaration signed by the Pope, given that it is perennial doctrine, but rather that they recommend the need for study and discernment so as to act with pastoral prudence in such a context.

In truth, there are not a few countries that, to varying degrees, condemn, prohibit and criminalize homosexuality.  In these cases, apart from the question of blessings, there exists a great and wide-ranging pastoral responsibility that includes training, the defense of human dignity, the teaching of the Social Doctrine of the Church and various strategies that do not admit of a rushed response.

 

4. The real novelty of the document

The real novelty of this Declaration, the one that requires a generous effort of reception and from which no one should declare themselves excluded, is not the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations. It is the invitation to distinguish between two different forms of blessings: “liturgical or ritualized” and “spontaneous or pastoral”. The Presentation clearly explains that «the value of this document […] is that it offers a specific and innovative contribution to the pastoral meaning of blessings, permitting a broadening and enrichment of the classical understanding of blessings, which is closely linked to a liturgical perspective».  This «theological reflection, based on the pastoral vision of Pope Francis, implies a real development from what has been said about blessings in the Magisterium and the official texts of the Church».

In the background is found the positive evaluation of “popular pastoral care” which appears in many of the Holy Father’s texts. In this context, the Holy Father invites us to value the simple faith of the People of God who, even in the midst of their sins, emerge from their everyday lives and open their hearts to ask for God’s help.

For this reason, rather than the blessing of couples in irregular unions, the text of the Dicastery has adopted the other profile of a “Declaration”, which is much more than a responsum or a letter. The central theme, which invites us especially to a deeper pastoral practice which enriches our pastoral praxis, is to have a broader understanding of blessings and of the proposal that these pastoral blessings, which do not require the same conditions as blessings in a liturgical or ritual context, flourish.  Consequently, leaving polemics aside, the text requires an effort to reflect serenely, with the heart of shepherds, free from all ideology.

Although some Bishops consider it prudent not to impart these blessings for the moment, we all need to grow equally in the conviction that: non-ritualized blessings are not a consecration of the person nor of the couple who receives them, they are not a justification of all their actions, and they are not an endorsement of the life that they lead. When the Pope asked us to grow in a broader understanding of pastoral blessings, he proposed that we think of a way of blessing that does not require the placing of so many conditions to carry out this simple gesture of pastoral closeness, which is a means of promoting openness to God in the midst of the most diverse circumstances.

5. How do these “pastoral blessings” present themselves in concrete terms?

To be clearly distinguished from liturgical or ritualized blessings, “pastoral blessings” must above all be very short (see n. 38). These are blessings lasting a few seconds, without an approved ritual and without a book of blessings. If two people approach together to seek the blessing, one simply asks the Lord for peace, health and other good things for these two people who request it. At the same time, one asks that they may live the Gospel of Christ in full fidelity and so that the Holy Spirit can free these two people from everything that does not correspond to his divine will and from everything that requires purification.

This non-ritualized form of blessing, with the simplicity and brevity of its form, does not intend to justify anything that is not morally acceptable.  Obviously it is not a marriage, but equally it is not an “approval” or ratification of anything either. It is solely the response of a pastor towards two persons who ask for God’s help. Therefore, in this case, the pastor does not impose conditions and does not enquire about the intimate lives of these people.

Since some have raised the question of what these blessings might look like, let us look at a concrete example: let us imagine that among a large number making a pilgrimage a couple of divorced people, now in a new union, say to the priest: “Please give us a blessing, we cannot find work, he is very ill, we do not have a home and life is becoming very difficult: may God help us!”.

In this case, the priest can recite a simple prayer like this: “Lord, look at these children of yours, grant them health, work, peace and mutual help.  Free them from everything that contradicts your Gospel and allow them to live according to your will. Amen”. Then it concludes with the sign of the cross on each of the two persons.

We are talking about something that lasts about 10 or 15 seconds. Does it make sense to deny these kinds of blessings to these two people who ask for them? Is it not more appropriate to support their faith, whether it be small or great, to assist them in their weaknesses with a divine blessing, and to channel that openness to transcendence which could lead them to be more faithful to the Gospel?

In order to avoid any doubt, the Declaration adds that, when the blessing is requested by a couple in an irregular situation, «even though it is expressed outside the rites prescribed by the liturgical books, this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding. The same applies when the blessing is requested by a same-sex couple» (n. 39). It remains clear, therefore, that the blessing must not take place in a prominent place within a sacred building, or in front of an altar, as this also would create confusion.

For this reason, every Bishop in his Diocese is authorized by the Declaration Fiducia supplicans to make this type of simple blessing available, bearing in mind the need for prudence and care, but in no way is he authorized to propose or make blessings available that may resemble a liturgical rite.

6. Catechesis

In some places, perhaps, some catechesis will be necessary that can help everyone to understand that these types of blessings are not an endorsement of the life led by those who request them. Even less are they an absolution, as these gestures are far from being a sacrament or a rite. They are simple expressions of pastoral closeness that do not impose the same requirements as a sacrament or a formal rite. We will all have to become accustomed to accepting the fact that, if a priest gives this type of simple blessings, he is not a heretic, he is not ratifying anything nor is he denying Catholic doctrine.

We can help God’s People to discover that these kinds of blessings are just simple pastoral channels that help people give expression to their faith, even if they are great sinners. For this reason, in giving a blessing to two people who come together to ask for it spontaneously, we are not consecrating them nor are we congratulating them nor indeed are we approving that type of union.  In reality the same happens when individuals are blessed, as the individual who asks for a blessing – not absolution – could be a great sinner, but this does not mean we deny him this paternal gesture in the midst of his struggle to survive.

If this is clarified as a result of good catechesis, we can free ourselves from the fear that these blessings of ours may express something inadequate. We can be freer and perhaps closer and more fruitful ministers, with a ministry that is full of gestures of fatherhood and hospitality, without fear of being misunderstood.

We ask the newly-born Lord to shower a generous and gracious blessing upon everyone so that we can live a holy and happy 2024.

Víctor Manuel Card. Fernández

Prefect

Mons. Armando Matteo

Secretary for the Doctrinal Section

This should eliminate the need for large groups of Bishops to react, as they have felt in some regions they need to.  African Bishops, for example, would not really need to formulate a response.  Having said that, however, once the ball begins to roll, it's hard to stop.

Also clear, individual Catholic clerics who were creeping up on, or even over, blessing unions or appearing to do so now have to stop.  We should not, for examples, be seeing Fr. James Martin, back in the New York Times.  Indeed, unless a Times photographer just hangs around a church or is tipped off that somebody will be approaching Priest for an informal, and very short, blessing, there shouldn't be any Press photos at all.  Priests being besieged with "can we schedule a blessing" should not be relieved of that burden as well.

And the German Church, it would seem, is left with the decision to comport or go into schism.

Lex Anteinternet: 2023. Annus horribilis and a Gift.

Lex Anteinternet: 2023. Annus horribilis and a Gift.: 

2023. Annus horribilis and a Gift.

Jimi Hendrix playing Room Full of Mirrors

At least by some measures, New Years are supposed to be periods of introspection.  If so, the annual arrival of New Year’s this year certainly has been for me.

2023, by which I really mean the period from October 2022 to the present, has been the worst year of my life, and that’s saying something.

Probably only people who know me really well would know that I’ve had, at least by western world standards, a rough life to some degree.  My teenage years and early (20s) adulthood was overshadowed by the physical and accompanying mental decline of my mother, something that still hangs over me like a dark cloud in a lot of ways.  It certainly sprung me from being a child at age 12 to an adult at age 13 virtually overnight, and not in ways that were good really, but in ways you can’t ever get back.  My relationship with my mother really didn’t recover in some ways until she was near death, and it never recovered in some ways.  I’m still working on that, trying to understand that what happened to her wasn’t her fault, or anyone else’s.

Added to that, the death of my father at age 62 was an irreparable loss to me that I’ve also never recovered from and won’t be able to.  As I noted here the other day, being an only child meant that I didn’t have a sibling to help endure this loss with, and when he died the person then closest to me in the world died, leaving me with an obligation to my mother that was a very heavy burden under the circumstances.

In short, things haven’t been always a treat.

But then, are they for anyone?

It may in fact be the case that everyone’s life is rough, to at least varying extents.  Maybe its best if you don’t even recognize that fact.

Anyhow, in October, 2022, as I’ve noted here before, I had colon surgery, following a colonoscopy that revealed a polyp too big to be removed in that process.  I really waited well beyond the age at which you should have your first colonoscopy, which was inexcusable on my part.  Had I gone in earlier (a lesson for everyone who might read this), the surgery would never have been necessary.  Ultimately the polyp proved to be precancerous, and was “as close to cancer as it can be without being cancer”.

I was 59 years old when I went in for that and that’s the very first instance of surgery, other than I suppose oral surgery to have a broken molar and the nearby wisdom tooth, taken out.  What I didn’t really grasp, but should have even due to the oral surgery, is that I wasn’t going to bounce back right away.  I expected to.  I didn’t even really expect to be out of work for more than a couple of days, in spite of everything that everyone told me.

Well, I’ve never fully recovered from the surgery and I’m not going to, that’s clear by now.  I notice it mostly in the mornings.  I just can’t eat.  Things make me sick, no matter what they are, as a rule.  The onset of late in life lactose intolerance has made that even worse.  For decades what I ate for breakfast was cereal with milk.  I can’t really eat that anymore.

So be it, but what really surprised me was the onset of really deep fatigue.  I was simply worn out from the surgery and it lingered for months.  I was tired like I never had been before in my life.

To compound it, when the diagnostic films were done for the colon surgery, a MRI was done all the way up to my neck which revealed I had a sizable polyp on my thyroid. The same surgeon recommended that the thyroid come out and seemed to look at the question as to what to do as almost absurd.  I was so surprised, and so beat up from the first surgery, that I went to my regular doctor for a second opinion.  He referred me to an endocrinologist. That doctor had no qualms at all about what needed to be done.  It needed out, the risk of cancer was so high, I was informed, that it was almost certainly cancer.

Great.

I ended up having a partial thyroidectomy in Denver.  I was extremely hesitant about the whole thing.

Well, the polyp turned out to be benign, which overjoyed the medicos but made me feel like I'd done something I could have avoided. After surgery, I hoped to avoid medication (I've never had daily medications), but wasn't lucky there either.

Since the thyroid surgery, and particularly at first, on a lot of days I've just been in a fog and tired all the time. It’s a difficult thing to describe, as it’s a feeling that’s internal.  I don’t think anyone else noticed it at all, but plowing through my days, and that’s what it felt like, I just didn't feel right.  I complained a lot about it to my wife, but in retrospect now I realize that if you complain a lot about certain topics, it become routine and won’t be paid too much attention to, particularly if there are no external manifestations that are obvious.

There were in fact external manifestations, but they weren’t obvious to anyone but me.  Normally, I look forward to the weekends and feel disappointed if I have to work on Saturdays, which I often must do.  I was so tired and dragged down, however, that I actually started to look forward to having to be in my office on Saturday.  I’d drag myself out, a little, to go fishing and hunting, but my feet felt leaden and I just wasn’t having the fun I normally did, the exception being when my kids were here.

I just went in for a follow-up and upon examination just recently. At that time the doctor asked me how I was doing and I reported what I was feeling and experiencing.  He gave me a physical examination.  I didn’t have bloodwork yet, as doing this on December 26 meant that I didn’t have the chance to get it done.  Based on the physical examination, they determined they needed to up my meds. “Everything will be fine”, I was told.

The bloodwork came back and showed everything to be just what it should be.  They immediately cancelled the doubling of the meds.

Long story short, what’s going on is post-surgery depression, a thing I didn't know even existed.

This is, apparently, particularly associated with thyroid surgeries, although most people don’t experience it. To just sort of note what’s out there, here’s a medical journal report on it:

Thyroid surgery is usually recommended for thyroid cancer and can be to remove one lobe of the thyroid (partial thyroidectomy) or to remove the entire thyroid (total thyroidectomy). Thyroidectomy may also be recommended for certain non-cancerous disorders including hyperthyroidism and large goiters. The results of a total thyroidectomy is hypothyroidism which requires lifelong treatment with a thyroid hormone pill. Several recent reports have highlighted a decrease in the quality of life and an increase in depression in some patients with hypothyroidism due to thyroid surgery. Therefore, the authors have examined if there is an association between thyroid surgery and a new onset of depression.

Great.

Apparently post-surgery depression is a thing with older adults anyhow, and I’m 60.  But to make it even niftier, depression is even more associated with colon surgery.  Another medical journal notes

The prevalence of anxiety, depression and PTSD appears to be high in patients who have undergone colorectal surgery. Younger patients and women are particularly at risk.

I don’t know the cause of all of this, and there could be a bunch of them that occur to me, some of which actually wouldn’t explain it in my case.  But being honest with myself, one of the things has to do with a family history and my early life.

Anxiety of a type is a condition which occurs on my mother’s side of my family.  Not everyone has it by any means, but some do and at least in one case, my maternal grandfather, it was really noticeable.  He was by all accounts an extremely intelligent man, but as a young man he suffered enormously from anxiety which kept him from building a career at an age, in that era in particular, a person normally did, and which in turn kept him from marrying at an age when people normally did.  My grandmother was his fiancé forever, and its actually a bit surprising that she waited for him, but then she had her own background haunting her, that being that she was highly educated and intelligent, but her own mother was not particularly fond of her, and was open about it.

Ultimately my grandfather found a career in real estate in Montreal, and did well until the Great Depression. When the Great Depression hit, and funds trailed off, he turned to drink, something that plagued him for years.  Remarkably, probably in the late 40s or early 50s, a Catholic Priest apparently told him to stop drinking and he did then and there, cold turkey.  Even more remarkably, my Grandmother suffered a miscarriage with what would have been her eighth child and went to a Priest, maybe the same one, and asked if she could stop performing the Marital Debt.  He said she could. That means that my grandfather, for the last ten or more years of his life, didn’t drink anymore, which is where he had taken refuge from stress, and also lived in a sexless marriage, which must have added enormously to his stress.  Amazingly, he seems to have actually pulled his act together, and lived out the balance of his life as a happy guy before dying at age 58.  His siblings, however, never got to where they trusted him and that ended up being taken out, after his death, on his widow and surviving children.

That’s an extreme example, of course, but there are a couple of others.  Something afflicted my mother, but nobody has a clue as to what it was.  She recovered from a condition pronounced to be terminal, and therefore the early diagnosis was either wrong, or her recovery was miraculous (which is what I think it was).  Her recovery, while real, was never complete, however.  As another example, one of my cousins on this side of the family, named after my mother, and one year older than me, was so conscious of anxiety being a factor in her makeup, she purposely chose a scientific lab career in order to avoid it.  In her early 60s, the impacts of this have not hit her, but she’s dying of cancer presently.

I know now that anxiety has impacted me my entire adult live, although largely unacknowledged by me.  I don’t recall it being a factor at all until I was an adult, but the trauma of what I went through as a teen probably didn't help, long term.  The first time I really experienced it was when I worried about going to basic training, but I got over it quickly when I was there.  After that, it became clear to me that I experienced travel anxiety, which is a condition that is something that uniquely occurs in some people.  It’s hard to explain.  Ironically, I've traveled in my adult life a huge amount, and generally like where I'm going, once I'm there.

It’s when I became a litigator that I really became conscious of anxiety, however.

Litigation is an extremely stressful career as it is.  Anxiety runs rampant in the field.  According to the ABA, for lawyers in general, a study revealed:

• 64 percent of lawyers report having anxiety.

• 28 percent lawyers suffered from depression

• 19 percent of lawyers had severe anxiety

• 11.4 percent of lawyers had suicidal thoughts in the previous year

And that’s just regular lawyers.

There have been study after study on this topic, and they all come about the same, with some coming out much worse.  I’ve seen one article that has dissed these findings, but just one.  My guess is that probably double these figures (except for the self reporting anxiety, which would amount to a statistical impossibility) would be the case for litigators.

Indeed, I’ve long noted that most litigators actually won’t try a case.  I have tried a lot of cases, and one of the reasons why is that I’ve always been conscious of the duty not to allow a person’s anxiety to keep them from dutifully fulfilling their duty to their client.  I”ve sometimes worried, in fact, that I might possibly try more cases than others in order to counter the fact that anxiety might be infusing my views, but I don't think that's the case.  Anyhow, anxiety in litigation is so bad, as noted, that a majority of litigators actually won’t try a case.  I've always just been aware that it was there, can impact how you think, and set it aside.

In other contexts, I’ve long seen the impact of anxiety working itself out in destructive ways in the legal field.  I’ve known lawyers who were drug addicts or alcoholics, or who engaged in other destructive life choices.  I’ve known two who quit practicing due to anxiety, one self-declaring that and the other just not being able to overcome an addiction to alcohol otherwise.  One really well respected plaintiff’s lawyer actually disappeared from his household and family for a couple of weeks until he was found in a hotel in another state where he’d gone on a profound days long bender.  Three I’ve been aware of just disappeared, two resurfacing in a seminary and one in the People’s Republic of China.

This all being the case, while I’ve been a successful lawyer, law probably wasn’t a field that I should have gone into.  One lawyer friend of mine from Germany, whom I remarked to on this, dismissed this, saying “you are an intellectual, your choice was to become a lawyer or a priest”, which is an interesting way of looking at it, but had I been smarter, I’d probably have chosen the path of my scientific cousin in order to avoid the stress.

It doesn't matter now.  Like the Hyman Roth character in Godfather II, "This is the business we've chosen".  And by and large, it worked out well.  Being honest with myself, I've been able to do a lot of interesting things, and have constantly learned new fields and topics, all the time.  If you are an autodidatic polymath, it's hard to imagine a field that would actually offer so much as the law.  And if you do like visiting obscure places, at least prior to COVID, it really allowed you to.

In saying all of this, what I’m saying now is that looking back on the past horrible year, I can look back decades and see the points at which the stress rose up and made me act in ways I never would have, although never in a professional sense. Each time, really, was a cry for help, but cries for help don’t really come through that way if they’re not posed that way. And sometimes, there is no existential help, you just need to pick up your pack and carry on.

This past year, however, with the fog of post-surgery depression setting in, I was really unaware of it.

I should have been, as I didn’t mentally feel right.  I did keep mentioning that “I feel slow”, but that means you feel slow.  The real warning was when I absolutely exploded on two partners who have been keeping a long running irritating argument going for years, permanently ending it.  It needed to end, but blowing up on them was the wrong thing to do, and in retrospect I’m amazed that I wasn’t told to take a hike.

In Catholic theology there’s something called “the problem of evil”, which boils down to “why does God allow bad things to happen”. There are various answers to that question, but a universal partial response is that God doesn’t allow something to occur if he cannot bring good out of it.  In our temporary lives that can be awfully hard to accept, but I believe it to be true.  In this instance, I can now in fact see this at work.  In a way, this allows me to go back, but clear minded, to the beginning of my career as I now approach its end, but to be a kinder, more thoughtful person, and a more grateful one.  I do believe that people can and do change if they wish to, and while it’s not as if I’m now going to become an Iron Man competitor, or something, I am in a way following a bit of the same path taken by a friend who was very bitter about his legal career, and openly so, but in the last few years has become very grateful for it.  I have a lot to be thankful for.

I also have the chance now to beat anxiety that was lurking there, rather than to sort of give into PTSD, which is basically what I have had in a way.  That condition, known as combat fatigue originally, or shell shock, has been determined to be much wider than originally thought, and the frequent comparisons of litigation to combat are pretty accurate.  But knowing what’s what is frankly more than half the battle.

Part of that also I think is following a bit of what Alcoholics Anonymous and other addition programs have in their “twelve steps”.  I’m not saying I need to join AA or NA, or something but rather the page AA took from the advice of a Catholic Priest, which is similar to what Jews do on Yom Kippur, is to apologize to people you’ve hurt.  I’ve done that with four people already, which is probably the set I needed to.  But beyond that, part of it is being more tolerant to the people and conditions we routinely encounter, something that is difficult in a judgmental profession like the law.  

So, in the end, I’m grateful to have an outside professional let me know what was going on, and that its connection to surgery, twice will remediate, and indeed already are.  But beyond that, I’m grateful for the door it opened and which I’m walking through to be more aware.

Pax vorbiscum.