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30 years ago in U.S. Catholic: Why divorced Catholics won’t just go away

Religion

By Dan Mintie

This article appeared in the October 1984 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 49, No. 10, page 6-12).

Ruth, 67-year-old pre-Vatican II daughter of the church in Portland, Oregon, married a blue-eyed dandy with a weakness for the grog. Brought up straight and clean, blue collar and Irish, to this day she hammers out by rote her reply to the bishop himself on her Confirmation day: What are the attributes of the church? The attributes of the church are three: authority, infallibility, indefectibility.

As her husband sank more deeply into alcoholism and began laying up the week’s pay against the horse-flesh at Portland Acres, Ruth held on through five kids: “I knew divorce and birth control were deadly sins before I was old enough to know what they were.” Thirty years later, the kids gone, worn out, she locked the door and filed the papers.

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Then off to church to try to explain. And the young priest with the open face and stole made from natural fibers takes it all in. When she had finished, he finally speaks: “Then why did you have all those kids? Why didn’t you use birth control? Why didn’t you just divorce him?” Too tired to slug him, Ruth walked away for good.

The trauma of divorce has affected the lives of at least 8 million Catholics, and the number continues to increase. “Speaking from my experience in the confessional,” says one priest, “this is the issue of the ’80s. I travel all over the place, and I’ve found this is the single largest reason people are leaving the church today.” Father James Provost of the Canon Law Society of America (CLSA) says he lacks adequate statistics to reach any conclusions about divorce among U.S. Catholics: “There are no hard data available; the federal statistics don’t ask for religious background.” But Kathleen Kircher, executive director of the North American Conference of Separated and Divorced Catholics (NACSDC), says that “Catholics are pulling their fair share of the U.S. divorce ratio and represent about 25 percent of the population and account for about 25 percent of all divorces.” A 1980 Gallup poll concludes that Catholics are just as likely to divorce and remarry as any other group in American society.

It’s a shame that so many divorced Catholics like Ruth believe they don’t belong in a parish anymore, says Eunice Dohra, a divorced mother of seven. She is assistant director of the Phoenix Office of Separated and Divorced Catholics, a resource and training center of the Archdiocese of Chicago that coordinates 60 parish groups for divorced and separated Catholics. “Many divorced Catholics in a sense excommunicate themselves from the church—even though they really are still a part of the parish community.”

There are many myths connected with divorce, says Father James Flosi, who directs Phoenix in Chicago. “Myth #1, that people who divorce are automatically excommunicated, has never been true. Myth #2, that those who remarry without annulment are excommunicated, hasn’t been the case since 1977. And another myth, that children of a nonsacramental second marriage are illegitimate or should be denied the sacraments, is completely false. These have caused so much pain.”

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Divorced Catholics enjoy the same good status of any other Catholic in regard to the Mass, Eucharist, and any liturgical function, says CLAS’s Provost. Catholics who remarry without annulment have an irregular status, but “they are not excommunicated, are under no special penalties, and are not excluded from receiving the Eucharist if they believe they should receive it.” Father Edgar Holden, director of the tribunal of the Seattle archdiocese, agrees. “Nothing in church law forbids a person with irregular status from receiving the Eucharist. This is a personal decision of conscience. We suggest that if people feel unable to reach a decision on their own, they ask their pastor or spiritual director for assistance.”

Despite official recognition, increasing numbers, and assurance that they are still a part of parish life, a number of divorced Catholics report that well-educated, well-meaning, non-divorced Catholics send out the message, “Come to church but stay way back.”

“I was teaching at our parish school at the time I divorced in 1977,” says Mary Ellen, a Chicago woman. “A fellow teacher came up to me and said, ‘Well, now that you’re divorced you won’t be able to go to Communion with your class anymore.’ Until that point I’d assumed that someone as knowledgeable as a teacher in a Catholic school would know that wasn’t so. I began to wonder how many others people even less informed would think the same thing.”

Pat, divorced after 18 years of marriage, recalls a meeting of Eucharistic ministers where a prominent parishioner popped the question, “But Father, what should I do if someone comes to Communion I know is unworthy to receive?” “I just sat there bristling,” she says, “my hair standing on end, thinking, ‘Okay, Father, let’s have it—what should he do?’”

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Father, it seems, does better sometimes than others. In this case he gently explained that the man’s job was to distribute the Eucharist, not judge parishioners’ souls. Other times Father takes a harder line. “My pastor took me aside after my second marriage and said, ‘I know you’re a good person but I’m going to have to ask you to take Communion at another parish,’” says one woman.

The coldest shoulder

Divorced Catholics who choose to remain at a parish may suffer a kind of banishment; the Amish call it shunning, when the community leaves behind a member it considers fallen from grace. It’s a kind of death. And though a sympathetic pastor can sometimes set the tone of a community’s response, sometimes he must swim against the current.

Says one woman, “Even though our priests have announced from our pulpit that we are free to come to Communion if we are free in our own consciences, we have lay ministers who keep saying that we are unworthy, that they will refuse us Communion. I find this the hardest of all, that many people in our community are not as accepting as the hierarchy is.”

Says Pat, “Suddenly the parish I’d worked in for 19 years considered me a bad person.” “I found out right away who my friends were and who they weren’t,” says Mary Ellen.

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Don, a divorced father of four, says, “One thing I learned is that divorce ruptures not only the marriage but communal relationships as well. A divorce does violence not only to the couple but to all the overlapping circles of people associated with them—children, parents, friends. This is probably inevitable since all these relationships were based on factors that will now be completely changed. I’ve occasionally run into the attitude, ‘I thought we were all in this together. Here you are turning your back on the problems that we are still committed to face. You chickened out.’ It’s almost kind of jealousy.”

“People look askance at divorced people, particularly divorced women,” says Marie, mother of four, divorced in 1969 after 16 years of marriage. “There is this feeling that divorced women are loose women. I probably believed this myself before my divorce. People think that you’re free to live the swinging-singles life now that you’re no longer married. For six years after the divorce all I did was go to work, come home, take care of the kids, clean the house, go to bed, get up the next morning and go to work again. I didn’t go to one movie. I didn’t go anywhere except to church.”

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“I was amazed to find out how many people blame women when a divorce occurs,” says another woman. “They think that relationships are women’s business; and, if they fail, she is to blame.”

“I think there’s a real onus on women who don’t end up with custody,” says Don. “I got all kinds of credit, perhaps undeserved, simply because I had the kids.”

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Says another father also awarded custody, “People come up to me all the time and ask how often I get to see the kids. ‘Every night when I get home from work,’ I reply.”

“The insensitivity can be enormous,” says Marie. “Nobody would treat us this way if there had been a death in the family—but this is just what it is like, a death. People actually go through the same grieving process in either case.” Dohra agrees: “The divorced person needs time to grieve, get angry, feel despair, for divorce is a death.” “I believe it’s far worse than a death,” says a priest active in ministry to divorced Catholics. “It’s a living death; the partner is still there. Because of the children there is still a need to relate.”

Why the gap between the image and the reality?

“I think we need to take into account these people’s sensitivity, their high quotient of hurt,” says Father Barry Brunsman, another priest who counsels divorced Catholics. “Their antennae are out for any kind of rejection that they might otherwise shrug off. I did an experiment one Sunday and asked from the pulpit how many people would welcome a divorced person into the community. Every hand went up. Then I asked, ‘If you were divorced, would you feel welcome in this church?’ Four out of five hands remained down.”

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It is not just hypersensitivity that makes many divorced Catholics feel alienated from the church. The horror stories are too persistent for that. “We’ve been called lepers,” says one woman. “Adulterous,” says another. “Very few communities are willing to face up to the trauma divorce causes with the community itself,” says Don. “People have given over to the institutional church the responsibility to regulate the community’s interest in the marriage bond. They don’t want to touch it.” The bottom line, says Don, may be that divorce raises fundamental questions that married couples find too threatening to ask about their own relationship. “If your best friend drops dead of a heart attack, you’re going to have a hard time not thinking about your own health. Same thing with divorce.”

Annulment anguish

An incredible folklore surrounds that complicated process known as annulment. “You can get one if you have enough money,” says one woman. “I remember back to when annulments meant something, when you weren’t given one just for breathing in when you should have been breathing out,” says another. “The best thing I ever did,” says one man.

Mary Ellen began to seek an annulment but soon gave up. “I found the papers very difficult to fill out. It seemed like a very punitive process to me. I was the one who wanted the marriage to last. I felt like I was being punished for something that wasn’t my fault to begin with.” Says Pat, “I’m in my 50s, and I’m not getting any younger. I met a man who loves me, who wants to marry me. It could take two years for the annulment papers to come through. I’m not going to wait.”

Ty, a divorced Episcopalian, recently remarried a Catholic woman. A priest at the local tribunal knew the particulars of Ty’s first marriage and assured him he would have no problem obtaining an annulment. Though he knew that being married in the church was important to his future wife and her family, Ty decided not to obtain an annulment. “I’m sure there are such things as legitimate annulments, but mine would not be one of them. I think that many of what the Catholic Church calls annulments are simply divorces and should be called divorces. It’s not an honest system in this case, just a way for the church to legitimize a situation it refuses to accept. I went through the divorce nine years ago. I don’t want to go through the whole thing all over again.”

Don disagrees. “Most people I know who are critical of the annulment process have not really tried it,” he says. “They are reacting to an abstract conception of the whole thing. I sought an annulment after a very unhappy divorce, after experiencing a judicial system that was adversarial, impersonal, and extremely judgmental. By contrast I found the annulment process open, supportive, and expeditious—not one that judged my marriage.” Don applied for an annulment “because it was important to our families but also because I believe there is an appropriate communal interest in any marriage that the church can represent. As a Catholic I had a stake in that. In addition I found the annulment helped me identify problems in my first marriage and focus on my next relationship.”

“The director of the tribunal told me to go home and write my marital history,” says Marie. “I did and found it was one of the most important things I’ve ever done. I began to look for the first time at the manipulative ways I managed relationships. I had resented the way my husband treated the kids and me, and I responded in indirect ways. I’d put salt on his eggs when I knew he hated his eggs salted—the little things that only wives know about husbands. When I could finally accept my responsibility for the breakup of the marriage, the healing finally began. Today I am much more direct, honest, and open in my relationships. I’m right up front about what I like and don’t like.”

Dohra of Phoenix agrees that “You have to take time, but it makes you think. We’re finding that more people divorce a second time unless they closely examine what went wrong in the first marriage. We recommend all divorced Catholics go through the annulment process; it helps them discover a lot about themselves—and they are less likely then to take all the psychological baggage into the second marriage.”

An 8000 percent increase

Church law requires three factors to be present for a valid marriage, says Holden of the Seattle tribunal. First, consent: “If someone marries a homosexual who withholds this information until after the marriage, consent could not truly have been given.” Second, intentionality: “If someone marries a foreign citizen to allow them to remain in the country, clearly this would not constitute valid intention.” Finally, capacity: “A person who is mentally disturbed, who suffers from psychic disturbance, may lack sufficient use of reason to enter marriage and live out that commitment. It would be difficult for a schizophrenic person to carry out the obligations of marriage.” If any of these three factors is missing, for whatever reason, the marriage is invalid. In addition, says Holden, “The church requires a certain canonical form. For baptized Catholics this form is that they be married before a priest or deacon with two witnesses. If this form is lacking, the marriage is invalid.”

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But what about those who did not marry closet homosexuals, foreign nationals, or schizophrenics? And who had some good years? “Sometimes,” says Holden, “what shows up ten years down the road was present long before the more obvious manifestations occurred. If you take a very close look, you find that those behaviors were present at the time of marriage (and might affect its validity). In the annulment process we study the time of the marriage itself, but sometimes you can only see a marriage clearly ten years down the line.”

From 1968-78 the workload of tribunals in the United States exploded from about 300 cases annually to more than 26,000—an increase of 8000 percent. Kathy Kircher of NACSDC attributes the dramatic rise to the increase in divorces and to the streamlining of the annulment process that accompanied the birth in 1970 of the American Procedural Norms. But these figures might be misleading; although U.S. tribunals report hearing 66,000 cases in 1982, the Canon Law Society estimates that these represent only about one tenth of the potential cases that could have been presented that year. In other words, nine out of every ten potential petitioners never seek an annulment.

Many Catholics would like to welcome into the annulment process those Catholics who presently stay away. Unfortunately, the bulk of the changes in the New Code of Canon Law regarding the annulment process affect only the tribunal personnel themselves, not the petitioners. According to Provost, the two things petitioners may notice is that the process will take six to eight weeks longer and be more expensive. (Annulments now cost anywhere from nothing to $600 or $700, depending on the extent the tribunal is subsidized by the diocese.)

“I feel strongly that the tribunal needs to move toward more direct contact at the parish level with the person going through the procedure,” says a 13-year tribunal judge. “The sacrament of Penance used to talk about the judgment seat, about priests as judges—these terms aren’t heard any more. The focus is reconciliation; the minister is the good shepherd who welcomes back the lost sheep. I think the same kind of thing needs to happen with the tribunal. For one thing, the terminology needs to change from talk of tribunals and judges to language of reconciliation and support. People need to be allowed to form their own conscience as to whether they are free, rather than being handed a piece of paper.”

A growing number of priests seem uncomfortable cast as “judges” in the annulment process. “Suppose we have a case based on capacity,” says one. “What really constitutes capacity? What if we’re in a 51/49 situation? Or what about fear at the time of marriage? How much fear nullifies a marriage? It seems to me we’re being asked to make judgments only God should make.” Accordingly, tribunal priests and pastors now turn more to an informal process for certain Catholics. Says one, “Last year I handled 84 formal cases at the tribunal, but I’m sure I handled at least that many pastoral cases in which witnesses were missing or the spouse was lying and the rubber stamp just wasn’t possible.” Although these pastoral cases are also recognized by the church, more than a few Catholics aren’t entirely satisfied unless they obtain a piece of paper that formally releases them from a previous marriage. “We live in such a legalistic society,” says one priest, “that we take this mindset into everything we do. People want proof; they aren’t satisfied unless they have a piece of paper they can show somebody else.”

Growth at the grassroots

As the institutional church has wrestled with questions of divorce and remarriage, in the last ten years divorced Catholics have forged ahead and established widespread grassroots ministry throughout the U.S. church. As late as 1970 efforts to establish support groups for divorced Catholics were repeatedly quashed by bishops and priests fearful of the effects they might have on married Catholics. Such resistance still exists, but it seems to have become more the exception than the rule. “It is now the ‘in’ thing to have an apostolate for the divorced and separated,” says Brunsman. “It would be preposterous not to address this issue at the parish level.”

Today NACSDC numbers over 1000 affiliate groups throughout the U.S. and Canada. “Beginning Experience” weekends—based on Marriage Encounter weekends but offered to divorced persons—are now held regularly throughout the country. In Chicago, Day of the Phoenix, sponsored by the Phoenix office of the Archdiocese, is held annually for divorced and separated Catholics; and now five other dioceses have adopted the Phoenix concept, says Flosi. The day features dozens of workshops that range from “The Divorce Experience: A Growth Process” to “Self-Help Tips on Car Maintenance.” “The support is there, if people can just find out about it,” says Dohra.

“When I first joined the divorced Catholics group, it was a little too cliquish for my tastes,” says Mary Ellen. “But I hung in there because I knew these were the people I needed to be with. At the first Day of the Phoenix about 500 people showed up, which was a great consolation to me. I realized that I wasn’t the only one. Even if the hierarchy wasn’t speaking compassionately to our situation, I felt that there were responsible people in the church addressing this issue. And so I never felt like a renegade or that I had been abandoned by the church.”

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One of the main challenges that programs such as Phoenix face is attracting men’s participation. “The old refrain in every group I’ve worked with,” says one priest, “is ‘Where are all the men?’ It seems men have a harder time talking about their feelings throughout the divorce. They are much more likely than women to jump into a new relationship right away.”

“I think it’s based on a mistaken understanding of manliness,” says Joe, a divorcee active in the Beginning Experience program. “Men consider it a sign of weakness to ask for help. The first weekend I attended I thought, ‘I don’t need this. These people are a bunch of losers; I’m different.’ But what I found out was that I wasn’t different. I was one of them. At that point I began to discover that, like them, I could be happy, I could find peace and joy.”

Says Marie, “I’d like to remarry, to have another intimate relationship, but I’ve done a lot of work on myself and I’ll be damned if I’m going to go out and marry a man who hasn’t worked on his stuff. But very few men seem willing to do that. They’ll go to workshops to learn how to manage money, but they won’t go to a divorce group to learn how to manage human relationships.”

The second time around

The second marriage can be tricky. “We caution people to wait at least five years before remarrying,” says Eunice of Chicago’s Phoenix office. “That’s an average, and that’s whether a person has been married one year or twenty years. The time for reflection is very important.”

“Those who want to remarry need to consider several issues,” says Flosi, “whether they plan to seek an annulment or marry again outside the church. First, they have to go through what’s called the ‘divorce process’—a psychological, spiritual, and intellectual cleansing, a release from their first marriage. They feel guilt, failure, a loss of trust, and a deep depression. It takes a long time—as Eunice said, at least five years, sometimes more, sometimes never—to get through these feelings. You know that they are through the divorce process when they can honestly say that they don’t feel a need to get married again; they feel complete in themselves. This is very important, because if they don’t finish this stage, the chances of a second divorce are great—60 percent of Catholics who divorce and remarry divorce again.

“There’s also the children to consider. Insecurity crops up from time to time in kids’ lives if they’ve never been able to process the divorce; and it’s a lot harder for them to get over it than the parents, especially if they are young. They may have problems in school, feel anger, suicidal, have learning disabilities, and feel powerless and afraid that they will be abandoned. The positive side to this, though, is that children of divorce are stronger individuals than other kids. They can handle more trauma. They are more careful in choosing a partner when they marry, unless they are fleeing from a bad situation.

“So people who consider remarriage need to talk with their kids to let them know they really care about them, and not be surprised if problems arise.”

Susie Yehl and Father Medard Laz have organized a support network for children whose parents have died or divorced, called Rainbows for God’s Children. In the last six months it’s been introduced into the Chicago Catholic school system. Says Flosi, “It’s been very effective. A facilitator, who may be a parent, a teacher, or a professional counselor, meets with groups of the children and they talk out their problems. Other dioceses are incorporating the idea.”

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People who consider remarriage also need to think about the various family members they will associate with once they move into a new family. They have to remember, says Flosi, that the immediate family consists of four adults, not two, plus easily eight grandparents, and so on. “It gets very complex, and it takes a lot of thought to work it out.” Above all, Flosi emphasizes again, the person who wants to remarry needs to be sure that they love themselves and do feel complete as a single person. “They must be able to say, ‘I don’t need to marry.’”

“We ask a lot about what the church can bring to divorced people,” says a priest who is a 20-year veteran of the ministry to the divorced. “But I think it is just as important to ask what divorced people can bring to the church. And what is it they bring us? Compassion. These are people with a deep understanding of themselves and of others and of loss of all types. These are the ones who, time and again, are there to comfort others experiencing human loss. With their suffering seems to come a deepening of their Christian commitment. Never have I seen such tenderness in a community, such care for one another.”

Around the block from Ruth lives another couple, two more of the 8 million divorced U.S. Catholics. They have been married without an annulment for several years. She still plays the parish organ; he still sings in the choir. Every Sunday the priest sees them sitting alone while the rest of the choir files down to Communion, and every Sunday he asks himself the same question, “What are we doing wrong?”

Image: Flickr photo cc by Robert Occhialini

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