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With respect I find some of the notions here a little insulting.
I am the father of a child which is biologically another man's. My previously divorced wife is a wonderful, loving, and caring person. She divorced her husband after a few years coming to the realization that he wooed her and married her to gain residency support (he is a foreigner), and after used her financially, abused her emotionally, etc.
She tortured herself going deeper in debt, and giving more and more of herself to this con man in an effort to "save" the marriage, because she felt sort of as you are professing here. That God did not want her to divorce, and that she did not want to be disobedient to God or his blessing of marriage.
This just enabled the con man to continue to drain her emotionally and financially, and made the process of divorce more complicated, longer, and uglier than it had to be as a result. As the divorce process went on, she came to find out he has done this sort of thing in a serial manner, he had been married and divorced once already back in his original country, and as of today has at least 7 children with 4 mothers (my wife was the third mother, first in the US). There could be more.
I am not saying she is innocent in this. She admits she made some selfish and not very God honoring decisions to get into that mess.
My point is, the blessings started with the divorce process. Although he was cheating on her, that was not apparent at the time she filed divorce. He had never physically abused her. He just never really, honestly married her for reasons of love, interest, or desire. Just a narcissist trying to use people.
He also had no interest in his daughter. He refused visitation after a while, and was more concerned with gaining control or profit out of the home they owned, and a jointly owned income property.
Today, my wife and our daughter live in a very loving and positive two parent home. This guy was all too happy to sign over his rights so I could adopt the young girl who I feel God has given me and blessed me with even though she is not of my blood. We raise her as her own and have a very happy and well adjusted little girl. Nobody was innocently conned into raising another child, trolling dating sites, or doing anything mischievous or underhanded.
My family, and her's has histories of adopting and raising a spouses child too, and those "kids" grew into very well adjusted, successful adults who love their adoptive parents as their own, just as their adoptive parents love them as their own.
So although divorce is a tragic event when it occurs, in many instances it occurs for very good reasons and is proper and needed and can be blessed by the Lord.
As for whether there are any winners... I guess that depends how you look at it. A divorce is a terrible thing, but if in the end a child ends up in a happier, more loving, more stable home environment than would have existed keeping a toxic marriage together, there are winners too. I have seen it tons of times.
So I do not think it appropriate to make some of these negative blanket generalizations. They simply are not always true, and belieiving they are always true could cause people to take positions which will ultimately do more harm than good.
You were a good person to go into a situation like that and that guy sounds like a piece of dirt. In fact that loser man should be deported because he is trash. The reality is most situations I know are not like that, they are of step parents struggling financially and with drama to become involved with a person who is only using them for something. The men I have seen on the dating sites with kids are looking for a new wife to help financially support his kids and that is wrong.
You were a good person to go into a situation like that and that guy sounds like a piece of dirt. In fact that loser man should be deported because he is trash. The reality is most situations I know are not like that, they are of step parents struggling financially and with drama to become involved with a person who is only using them for something. The men I have seen on the dating sites with kids are looking for a new wife to help financially support his kids and that is wrong.
A single dad is dead in the water unless he is smokin hot top 1%. I know guys that are just checking off years till they get to take the big dirt nap, they love their kids but outside of that their lives are miserable, if a guy does not find a mate after their kids become old enough to become aware of the situation it probably wont be good for anyone.
So they should call it what it is--it's a divorce. In both cases, both parties wanted to marry. They were happy together and had babies.
That did not keep ONE person from changing position and forcing the other to become divorced. (I don't know how you can say they were happy together and had babies. Neither has any impact on whether one person was forced to become divorced.)
I think the OP is confused about what the Church actually teaches about marriage and divorce. The Church actually views civil marriage and sacramental marriage as two different things but they are both significant in their own right. You can be civilly divorced but you are still married in the eyes of the Church.
Now as for the Church being "strict"...I don't think so. The latest evidence about the sheer number of annulments given out to Americans compared to the rest of the world is alarming, so in a way annulments have become the new Catholic divorce. Annulments are supposed to be for rare occasions where a sacrament truly did not happen. One case would be if a spouse or both were forced to get married to each other against their will. Adultery is not actually considered good basis for a divorce or an annulment, because a couple could have consented about the marriage and fully knew what they were doing at the time of marriage. A 7-year itch affair does not negate any of that.
I think the Church needs to be stricter and more serious about marriage, especially before people get married. There are so many loopholes nowadays.
I occupy the middle ground on this debate. I think the Catholic Church is right to not simply endorse divorce for any reason. That being said, I think there are plenty of cases where remaining in a marriage is actually more harmful and teaches the children all the wrong things about marriage.
I realize I'm speaking anecdotally, but I married into a large Catholic family (Remained staunch Episcopalian, however, because I respectfully disagree with any number of tenets held by the Catholic church). There are the typical family squabbles in the extended family. At the same time, there are marriages so bad, so poisonous that any rational person would have left them, yet are held together because a priest advised them to remain together at all costs.
The most extreme example is my wife's aunt and uncle who had eight kids, six boys and two girls. The husband was a complete philanderer and spendthrift. Worst of all, he was a sexual predator who would expose himself to nephews and nieces and molested his own daughters for years. This was public knowledge in the family, yet the bastard was never arrested and continued to be invited to the family get togethers because nobody wanted to make waves. They all wanted to be supported of Mary Louise. In my book, if you know that someone is molesting a child and do nothing, that's as bad as holding the child down for the predator.
So when my daughter was small, I told this guy in uncertain terms what would happen to him if he ever came within fifty yards of her: Physical harm followed by a call to the police. And yet, in some parts of the family, I was considered to be the heavy for actually wanting to protect my daughter.
The point of all this? Despite the man's outrageous behavior, despite the true and lasting harm he was doing to innocent children, the wife actually worried what the church would think of her divorcing him. So she put up with his shenanigans year after year until the guy finally died of a heart attack last year. Nobody mourned the guy's passing, yet the full extent of the psychological damage inflicted on his daughters is yet to be seen, and only an idiot would argue that the emotional toll of a divorce would have been worse.
There are too many points in this thread for me to go back and try to highlight. But first and foremost I would like to point out that I think the OP's views are offensive to me. If you are a catechist in a Catholic Church, I suggest that you express your feeling to your DRE with full disclosure as you have stated them here. As a parent, I would find it appalling to know your true feelings and to find out that you were educating children.
As someone stated, the Church recognizes marriages to be sacramental. One must prove a marriage to be UNsacramental to be granted an annulment. I know this because I spent three years in the process. During that time I did some major soul searching. I confessed my sins to my God, my priest and my then and now husband. This process was not taken lightly. My ex-husband did not want a divorce and he did not want an annulment. He was given an opportunity to contest it and chose not to.
You were a good person to go into a situation like that and that guy sounds like a piece of dirt. In fact that loser man should be deported because he is trash. The reality is most situations I know are not like that, they are of step parents struggling financially and with drama to become involved with a person who is only using them for something. The men I have seen on the dating sites with kids are looking for a new wife to help financially support his kids and that is wrong.
Thanks and I apologize for being a little puffed up over it.
You are right, in that there are a lot of just ugly situations overall too. My cousin is a single mom and has had a constant struggle with the father of her two year old to just get some support. He refuses to be a part of his daughter's life at all. To me that is a sad state of affairs. They were never married of course.
I guess for me, in the context of the thread and which you did point out earlier is that a lot of consideration needs to go into the acceptability of divorce. I think this extends well beyond the existence of children, but should not be completely seperate either. There are situations where a couple remaining together has shown to be more detrimental to the kids.
It's sort of a case by case situation which often present great obstacles to positive solutions.
My mother needlessly suffered due to the churches incorrect and ignorant stand on divorce. See could not receive the so-called sacraments must of which are in error scripturally including the Eucharist. She sat in back crying at every service .
These bureaucratic pagans manufactured so many doctines and that fact "wasted my mothers energy on matters that in
the first place was blasphemous and victimizing" My father was an alcoholic and an adulterous and according to scripture
acceptable for divorce . She never remarried until he died as well. Not that it matters one bit she was granted a dispensation from the diocese regarding her divorce
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