[Divorce] has touched every family in the nation. Who does not know at least one family whose children require an essay merely to describe who under their roof is related to whom and how?56
The tragedy of divorce is not just what it does to marriages, but what it does to all of society. If the family, the cornerstone of society, is not solid, then nothing is solid. Things that were once enduring have become transient, and all relationships are merely temporary. If a spouse cannot be trusted, everyone (and everything) is suspect.
Marriages suffer today not because modern society listened to the Church. Instead, marriages are suffering precisely because society did not listen to the Church. Now, nearly 140 years after this encyclical, we are living with the consequences of not heeding the Church’s warnings about marriage.
Despite this, we are a people of hope. We believe in tomorrow, and we know that our God is a merciful God. In fact, Pope Francis never tires of speaking about the mercy of God. In his book The Church of Mercy, he reminds us, once again, that God is always waiting for us to come back and start again:
Maybe someone among us here is thinking, my sin is so great, I am as far from God as the younger son in the parable, my unbelief is like that of Thomas; I don’t have the courage to go back, to believe that God can welcome me and that he is waiting for me, of all people. But God is indeed waiting for you. He asks of you the courage to go to him.
How many times in my pastoral ministry have I heard it said, “Father, I have many sins”; and I have always pleaded: “Don’t be afraid, go to him, he is waiting for you, he will take care of everything.” We hear many offers from the world around us, but let us take up God’s offer instead: his is a caress of love.57
Chapter One Reflection Questions
“Socialism” has broad and powerful appeal still today, yet, under socialist regimes in the past century, millions of people have lost both their rights and their lives. What is the reason for its appeal? Why has it not worked in practice?
How were families affected by the Industrial Revolution, for better and for worse?
Pope Leo XIII positively rejected Marx and his socialist ideas because of their adverse effects on the family. In fact, in 1878 he wrote an entire encyclical entitled Quod Apostolici Muneris (on socialism) about this. In what ways does Marx’s ideology harm the family?
How has divorce affected your life or your family’s life? Have you sought healing for any wounds you have suffered or caused?
Alone, the individual is not the bedrock of society. Rather, it is the family that is the foundation of all of society. Why is this so?
With the legalization of same-sex “marriages,” we can no longer look at civil and religious marriages as a single entity; the ties between the two have almost completely unraveled. Today, some are calling for a separation of sacramental marriage from civil marriage, as is the practice in Mexico and much of Europe. Others protest this idea, claiming that if Church weddings are separated from the civil sphere, they are worthless. So, where does the Church go from here?
Chapter Two
Back to the Garden
Pius XI, Casti Connubii
Wars and Rumors of Wars
Someone once said that all the sins of the world can be traced back to the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis and the Garden of Eden. Without pondering on the happenings that occurred then, it is difficult to understand the heartbreak of the twentieth century. The century didn’t start out as a century of violence, social upheaval, and heartbreak. In fact, most people woke up on January 1, 1900, with a song in their hearts. Coloring everything was an energy, an optimism, and a feeling of confidence.
The nineteenth century had changed the world beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and there was every expectation that the twentieth century would “prove to be the best this ever-improving planet had ever seen.”58 But something went terribly wrong, and the twentieth century would prove to be the bloodiest century in history — fulfilling Pope Leo XIII’s vision in 1884. There were wars and rumors of wars (see Mt 24:6), including the most insidious war of all, the war on the family.
In this chapter, we will skip over the two popes who followed Pope Leo XIII (Popes Pius X and Benedict XV) and move ahead to the pontificate of Pope Pius XI. Pius XI was pope from 1922 to 1939, during the difficult years between World War I and World War II. The people in his hometown of Desio, Italy, always predicted that Achille Ratti would be pope, and indeed it must have been divine providence, for his path to the papacy was certainly a circuitous one.
An academic and a lover of books, Ratti spent the first years of his priesthood as a seminary professor before moving on to spend the next thirty years working as a librarian — first in the historic Ambrosian Library in Milan and then in the Vatican Library in Rome. He was well into his sixties when, in 1918, Pope Benedict XV asked him to change careers and take a diplomatic post in Poland. Within a period of four years, he went from being a diplomat, to a papal nuncio, to an archbishop, and finally a cardinal. In 1922, Cardinal Achille Ratti was elected pope. He took the name Pius, explaining that he was ordained under Pope Pius IX and it was Pope Pius X who called him to Rome to work in the Vatican library. Furthermore, Pius was a name of peace, and he wanted to dedicate his pontificate to promoting peace in a war-torn world. So, he would be Pope Pius XI, and, by all accounts, he was one of the “greats.”
The years following World War I were years of transition and revolution. The sheer loss of life experienced in such a short period of time was something dreadfully new and unprecedented. Consequently, an entire generation was infected with an “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” attitude, which manifested itself in a number of ways.
From the outset, the war had called into question many traditional habits and ways of thinking in Europe and, most especially, in the United States. Sexual themes were increasingly prevalent in media, becoming portrayed more and more regularly in movies, books, and magazines. Sexual behavior changed, and contraception became more technologically sophisticated and socially acceptable. Margaret Sanger was busily promoting “birth control,” a term she popularized beginning in 1914.59 Moreover, “the divorce rate doubled between 1910 and 1928, and it was in the 1920s that no-fault (mutual consent) divorce was brought up for the first time.”60 In fact, “one of the most striking results of the [moral] revolution was a widely pervasive obsession with sex.”61 This was the roaring ’20s, after all, the age of speak-easies, dance halls, and a relatively new novelty, the back seat of a car. This “disruption of traditional and conventional customs, manners, and morals left people adrift and struggling to articulate a new code of conduct.”62 This is the world and moral climate that Pope Pius XI inherited on February 6, 1922, the day he was elected pope.
As the twentieth century wore on, the devastating effects of these realities on marriage became painfully apparent. Perhaps the most insidious and far-reaching of the changed social norms was the widespread use and acceptance of contraception. Of course, none of this happened overnight. Honestly, to make sense of it, we need to go back to the late 1700s.
Most people credit Reverend Thomas Malthus, an Anglican cleric and scholar from Great Britain, with starting the modern sexual revolution. In his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” Malthus created the modern “population explosion” scare, saying that “unless it was checked, the population would outgrow food supplies, which would result in mass starvation.”63 He was a strong advocate for family planning, but only through moral means, such as delaying marriage and using sexual self-control.
His proposal struck a cord, as both men and women were increasingly seeking to limit the number of children in their families. No doubt, this desire was accentuated by the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society. Malthus died in 1834, but his population scare outlived him.
In