In my experience, it’s been taboo for a father to make any kind of serious decision about his children without clearing it with the mother first, whether they are married or not. I mean, really, could you imagine what would happen in most families if a father selected a day care or pediatrician, purchased clothing or school supplies (and not just the “fun” things, either) and if he were to suggest that a child had a health, behavioral, or learning problem, the mother’s reaction is quite likely going to be, “And if she does, it will be your fault because you don’t take proper care of her.”
:smack:
As for newly-separated women being high-fived, figuratively and otherwise, I see it all the time. I’m not talking about women leaving a relationship with a man everyone knows is no good, in which case it’s justified; I’m talking about women having this said about them by people who know little or nothing about the situation, or have only heard her side of it.
Disciples of Christ is one of the most liberal Protestant denominations. I’ve even heard them described as “Unitarians For Jesus”.
There have been some well-publicized stories in recent years of private schools not allowing a child to enroll because their parents were a gay couple. That brought up discussion from people in past generations about how (especially) Catholic schools banned kids with divorced parents.
As for “kids from broken homes” being blackballed, not only was it often assumed that the parents’ issues (okay, let’s face it, mother’s failure to keep her husband happy :dubious:) would rub off on other families, those kids were also often viewed as high risk for delinquency, drug addiction, and other negative things. There is some truth to that, but I believe that it’s not so much the divorce itself as the issues the parents had that led to it in the first place.
And that’s not even the same as a child who’s in a single parent home due to widowhood, or the parents never having been married. The death of a parent is infinitely more devastating to children than divorce.
This is GQ, which is supposed to be home to factual answers.
Your narrative above is bereft of factual answers. It does not accurately relay Catholic doctrine or teaching.
There is no per se ban on divorce. There is a ban on marrying another person when a valid marriage exists, and the Catholic Church does not recognize any way short of death of ending a valid sacramental marriage.
The Church does offer a process called annulment, which is a judicial, fact-finding trial to determine if the putative prior marriage was in fact invalid, due to some previously unseen defect. The granting of an annulment means that the former ‘marriage,’ didn’t really happen, despite everyone at the time believing that it did. (At least, in the view of the Church).
Of course, you’re free to disagree about what should constitute a valid marriage and what factors should lead to a declaration that it never existed. You’re equally free to hold your own opinions about whether a valid marriage can be ended by some legal process other than the death of one spouse.
What you’re not free to do is pretend that those contrary opinions are factual answers to questions about actual Catholic doctrine.
You report your brother’s opinion as an opinion, not as fact. And you’re wise to do so. Anyone can have an opinion about who’s on a train to hell. But there is a factual answer to the implied question, “Does Catholic doctrine hold that children born out of wedlock are somehow damned, or suffer from any spiritual malady?”
The answer to that is a resounding no. Illegitimate children may suffer some infirmity when it comes to rights of inheritance, but their state is no more or less sinful than anyone else’s.
I believe that your experience is more anecdotal and probably skewed by your relationships and not indicative of the population in general.
I am a divorced father and know many others that have taken their children to church, purchase clothing, taken them to their pediatrician, bought school supplies, helped with homework, taken them to therapists, and done all sorts of parenting things. Many of these things I was happy to discuss with his mother, but most of them I did without seeking some sort of permission from her. He’s no longer a minor, but the last time I reviewed the custody arrangement I had joint custody and was also his parent, nor did such agreement require me or her to get permission from each other over such parenting decisions.
In the OP there’s a question about what churches think about divorced fathers. The impression is that churches are bothered by divorced mothers but not by divorced fathers. I think I know why there’s this impression. I think that, among church-going families until fairly recently, more often it’s the father who left his wife rather than a mother who left her husband. The father would also simply quit going to church. The mother will want to remain a regular churchgoer, but the clergyman (or maybe just the general attitude of the congregation) would discourage her either by refusing to let her attend church or refusing to allow her to take communion or refusing to allow her to attend her children’s activities at the church’s school.
The clergyman or the congregation would often treat the husband the same way if he was dumped by his wife rather than him dumping his wife. That didn’t happen as often, I suspect, so it was rarer for them to have to worry about the wife. Even in those cases where the husband was dumped and he wished to remain a regular churchgoer, I suspect that for rather sexist reasons he often got treated more leniently by the clergyman or the congregation. The assumption then was that the wife was mostly responsible for keeping the family together and for regular church attendance. A husband dumping his wife (and not going to church anymore) was considered to be just a man acting like a man (a bad man admittedly but still typical male behavior). On the other hand, a wife dumping a husband or no longer attending church was more scandalous. How dare she not attend to her duties of keeping the family together and keeping them attending church! It would be like a man not paying his alimony and child support. A man who was dumped would thus be treated more leniently, even if at a deeper level the divorce was his fault.
As I said in the first paragraph, this attitude was common until recently. Let’s say that it was common from the 1930’s or so to the 1970’s or so. This is after the time that divorce became not that difficult but before the time that it became somewhat common (although I should note that the percentage of marriages in the U.S. that end in divorce peaked in 1981 and had dropped a bit since then). Since the 1960’s, it’s not as common to expect a wife to be responsible for keeping the family together despite what the husband has done. These days it’s more common for a husband and a wife to both be considered responsible for financial upkeep of the family, for keeping the family together, and, if they are churchgoers, for continuing to attend it.
I think it’s rare these days for people to celebrate getting divorced. It’s not a matter of shame, like it was at one point, but it’s not a matter of celebration either. It’s taken more as a matter of fact now.
One of the posters mentioned being barred from communion because of a divorce. I don’t know what the rule is about it. Regardless, some of the ways that a divorced person would be forbidden something that are mentioned in this thread happen despite what the actual church teaching is.
BTW, there’s a man at my church who’s getting a divorce from his husband. THAT would still send a lot of people into a tailspin.
About 15 years ago, when I lived here before (I lived in another city for about 10 years), there was a couple who attended with their three school-age daughters, and suddenly a little boy, who looked just like the girls, started attending with them. I assumed that he was a cousin or a nephew, but he turned out to be a child the husband had fathered in a one-time thing with one of her friends! :eek: Giving further details might identify the family, but when she told me about it, I said, “Wow! You’re a better person than I ever could be!” and she replied, “We have been married 15 years, we have 3 daughters together, and I love him.” She then added that there was absolutely no way she could divorce him for being unfaithful when she had done it herself.
They don’t go there any more, but I did see her a while back, and they’ve been married about 30 years now, and the kids are grown or nearly so.
My grandmother was divorced in 1920. She was a teacher, school principal, church organist, and, in general, a respected member of the community.
She achieved this by comporting herself in the only acceptable way a divorced woman in those days and in that area (central Pennsylvania) could: she never had a thing to do with any other man for the rest of her life.
Catholic teaching is that sex outside of a legitimate marriage is a mortal sin. Only those who do not have unconfessed mortal sins are supposed to take communion. Thus is it would be okay for a divorced person to take communion as long as they were either celibate or had recently gone to confession.
Some Conservative synagogues have pulled a weird sort of version of this. The Conservative movement requires that all members of affiliated synagogues (a synagogue can be affiliated with one movement or denomination, more than one, or unaffiliated) be Jewish (by contrast, someone who is not Jewish, but for whatever reason wants to be a member of a synagogue, can join a Reform synagogue). This doesn’t mean that non-Jews can’t go to Conservative synagogues, they just can’t be dues-paying members.
Anyway, a few Conservative synagogues make it one of their bylaws that both members of a married couple must join, so if a Jew is married to a non-Jew, the Jewish person can’t join a Conservative synagogue with this bylaw if the spouse isn’t willing to convert.
Since pretty much every synagogue allows only the children of members to enroll in the religious school, and celebrate b’nei mitzvah at the shul, so some Conservative synagogues effectively shut out the children of mixed marriages.
I know someone whose father remarried a non-Jew (years) after his divorce from her mother, and had to leave the shul he’d belonged to for more than 15 years-- not that it came as a surprise. He knew it would happen if he married this woman, and he actually changed synagogues before the wedding. But this happened just a year before my friend’s bat mitzvah, and she’d planned to have it at the synagogue her father left. So her mother, who was still single, joined that synagogue in addition to the one she’d been a member of for several years, and drove her daughter way out of her own convenience so she could have her bat mitzvah where she wanted.
She has no resentment for her father, and gets along really well with her step-mother. Personally, I would have been mad that my father couldn’t wait a year for the wedding. B’nei mitzvah is the first important thing a Jewish kid does. My eight-year-old is already planning his.
Someone I know who is Catholic told me that confession doesn’t count unless you have the intent not to do it again. If you are having an affair, and plan to continue to do so, you can’t just go to confession every week, confess, take communion, then resume the affair on Monday. I’d think the same thing would apply to a divorced and remarried person who didn’t sincerely plan on not having sex with the new spouse again.
Probably because it was generally the woman’s fault that the marriage broke up - she just wasn’t working hard enough at keeping the peace. Probably why beating one’s wife tended to be more accepted back when things were more religious. You were allowed to correct your property.
I for one am freaking glad that religion is decreasing in importance overall - though if the asshats that are trying to turn this country into “The Handmaidens Tale” manage it, we will quickly be getting the fuck out of Dodge. I guess if we can not get a permanent visa somewhere we will have to buy a boat and simply leave and stay in international waters as much as possible, and use short term tourist visas for resupply and repair port calls.
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Maybe not religious, but more primitive and less educated.
Actually, until recent years, IMNSHO divorces really were usually entirely, or almost entirely, the husband’s fault. That’s not true any more, unless you’re a divorced woman. :o Besides, why would a man want to get divorced, anyway, as long as he has a live-in maid, babysitter, and sex partner? :dubious: At least, that’s what I hear, A LOT, and just as much from men as I do from women, and from the same perspective as well.
I read a commentary written in the 1920s that could partially have been written today. Back then, divorces were usually initiated by women too, but back then, the most common grounds was desertion by the husband. Abandonment was usually catalyzed by alcoholism, and domestic violence was a common component, so she wasn’t sorry he left. The big problems came when she was an alcoholic too, which was (and still is) not uncommon.
@SaintlyLoser, yes to Latin Mass. I don’t know what the other thing is I’m afraid.
Um, why are you criticising me so strongly (and rudely - it’s quite unpleasant) when the OP was also “narrative” and several other posters have given anecdotal answers? The thread is in GQ but it is not, despite what you seem to think, asking only “what does the Catholic Church as an organisation say about this?” It asked about churches and talked about individual congregations, not just religious organisations as a whole.
In my view as a poster, one not imbued with any particular powers of moderation here, the OP in a GQ thread is not expected to provide factual answers. It is, after all, in the nature of General Questions to begin with a question, one which may well contain meandering narrative. It ought to be incumbent upon those replying, however, to eschew speculation and opinion and focus on providing factual answers to the question.
In my estimation, your answer did not do this.
While it’s not for me to moderate your participation, it certainly seems appropriate to highlight inaccurate information and correct it. I am not, in other words, criticizing you – I am noting that the information you provided was inaccurate and providing the correct information.
Yes, this is correct. In fact, each confession in the Roman Catholic tradition is typically ended with the Act of Contrition, which includes the words, “I firmly resolve, with the help of Your grace, to sin no more and avoid the near occasion of sin.”
But note that having the intent to stop is not the same as actually stopping – that is, as with much sinful behavior, you may genuinely resolve to stop the sin, but find yourself committing it again. This does not vitiate your prior confession or absolution in Catholic teaching.