Melissa Moschella

The Pope spoke about “wounded families” — in particular, cases in which the matrimonial bond has been sundered and a new union has been formed. The Pope reminded us that, though “such a situation is contrary to the Christian Sacrament,” the Church’s approach to those living in these circumstances “always draws from a mother’s heart,” seeking to understand, heal, and save.  He encouraged all of us to be welcoming and compassionate to these families, especially for the sake of the children, noting that “they are the ones who suffer the most in these situations.” These children are especially in need of “an example of committed and exercised faith,” but we will not be able to provide this example “if we keep them at arm’s length from the life of the community, as if they are excommunicated.”

Here I think it’s worth clarifying a crucial point that many people do not fully understand: The inability to receive Communion does not imply that one is excommunicated. As Pope Francis emphasized during the audience, those “who have established a new relationship of cohabitation after the failure of the marital sacrament…are by no means excommunicated — they are not excommunicated! – and they should not be treated as such: they are still a part of the Church.” To be excommunicated is to be entirely outside the community of the Church, not merely to be unable to receive sacramental Communion due to an aspect of one’s moral life that is seriously contrary to the Church’s teachings.

As Benedict XVI put it during the 2012 World Meeting of Families, divorced and remarried Catholics “are not ‘excluded’ even though they cannot receive absolution or the Eucharist; … they are fully a part of the Church.” He goes on to say that these individuals “are participating in the Eucharist if they enter into a real communion with the Body of Christ. Even without ‘corporal’ reception of the sacrament, they can be spiritually united to Christ in his Body.” They can find meaning in the suffering inherent in their situation if “they come to see that suffering as a gift to the Church,” as “something that is experienced within the Church community for the sake of the great values of our faith.”

The Church, like Jesus her Founder, exists to save sinners, seeking gently yet firmly to help them amend their lives, welcoming and understanding them all the while. But as Pope Benedict XVI points out, it is not enough simply to say to those in a difficult marriage situation that “the Church loves them;” rather, “it is important that they should see and feel this love. I see here a great task for a parish, a Catholic community, to do whatever is possible to help them to feel loved and accepted.” This great task belongs to each and every one of us.

— Melissa Moschella is an assistant professor at The Catholic University of America School of Philosophy.

Melissa Moschella

Those who have seen the movie “The Vow” may be familiar with the Carpenters’ story, but the movie doesn’t do it justice (the book is much better). Ten weeks after their wedding and less than two years after they met, Kim and Krickitt were in a car accident, which left Krickitt in a coma for four months and damaged her memory. While much of Krickitt’s memory returned, the two years prior to the accident — the time during which she and Kim had met, fallen in love and gotten married — were permanently erased. Social workers suggested that Kim should get a divorce, a move that would relieve him of responsibility for hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills. Kim, however, would not even consider it: “I had made my vows to Krickitt and there was no way I would ever have abandoned her.” While remaining faithful to Krickitt in these circumstances was difficult for Kim, Krickitt’s challenge was even greater: “When I came round from the coma, I had no memory of this whirlwind romance. My parents told me that I was married to this man, and they wouldn’t lie to me, so I knew that I must have loved him deeply. But I had no feelings for him at all…” Still, she said, “I had made my vows in front of my family and friends, to stay together, for good and for bad, in sickness and in health.” When Krickitt was well enough to return to her New Mexico home with Kim, to a place she had no memory of, with a man she was just beginning to get to know, things were rocky, to say the least. Yet Krickitt knew that Kim was her husband and was committed to being faithful to him, as this moving journal entry reveals: “Dear Lord, I really want to get back with Kim and get our new life going again.  I am relying on you to restore all of my feelings for our relationship…. Please strengthen our marriage and make it even stronger than it was in the beginning.” At the advice of a counselor, Kim and Krickitt began going out on “dates” to build new memories together. And it helped. As Krickitt explains, “Slowly and steadily, we created those memories together, and everything else slowly started to fall into place. Slowly, over time, my love did grow for Kim deeply, but it was never a fluffy, gooey falling-in-love feeling again… My heart didn’t skip beats; I didn’t feel swept off my feet. I would love to have felt that, but it isn’t the truth — I made a choice to love him.’

Krickitt’s words — “I made a choice to love him” — are the secret to their success in rebuilding a happy marriage. And they are equally the secret to success in any marriage. Though less dramatic than what Kim and Krickitt went through, there are times in every marriage when the feeling of love is absent and what remains is simply the commitment, the deliberate choice, to love one’s spouse. The opposite approach to marriage, in which marriage is all about emotional satisfaction and lasts only as long as the feelings of love remain, is at the heart of the crisis of marriage in our culture. This approach, in turn, is based on another great lie of our culture: the false view that emotions are the deepest and truest indicators of our identity, and that true authenticity means following wherever our emotions lead. But emotions are often more likely to be a reflection of the amount of sleep we got last night than of the deepest core of our identity.  It’s through reasoned judgment and reflection, not emotion, that we discover the bedrock values and commitments that form the core of our moral identity, and authenticity means being true to those values and commitments regardless of where the winds of emotion blow. Likewise true freedom is most perfectly manifested in standing by our commitments. Fidelity is the perfection of freedom, not the antithesis of it, even though sometimes it may seem burdensome. There must have been moments in which Kim and Krickitt felt their commitment as a burden and wished that they were free of it, but in remaining faithful to their vows, they showed the transcendence of human freedom over the limits of time and space, the vicissitudes of outward circumstances and even the inner pull of emotions, and in doing so achieved a deep love and happiness that would otherwise have been impossible. It’s this achievement that makes their story so inspirational to all who hear it.

— Melissa Moschella is an assistant professor at The Catholic University of America School of Philosophy.

Chad Pecknold

In his “Meeting with Families Address” at the Mall of Asia Arena last January, Pope Francis reminded the people of the Philippines that the family is a gift from God, and gifts from God are often threatened. He spoke to the people of the Philippines of the dangers which threatened Jesus and Mary, and how Joseph gathered up his young family, and fled to Egypt, finally settling in Nazareth. “So too, in our time,” Pope Francis told the crowd, “God calls upon us to recognize the dangers threatening our own families and to protect them from harm.” And then the Holy Father gave one of his most profound and penetrating warnings yet about America’s own struggle to understand the nature and meaning of marriage and the family:

“Let us be on guard against colonization by new ideologies. There are forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family. They are not born of dreams, of prayers, of closeness to God or the mission which God gave us…they are forms of colonization. Let’s not lose the freedom of the mission which God has given us, the mission of the family. Just as our peoples, at a certain moment of their history, were mature enough to say “no” to all forms of political colonization, so too in our families we need to be very wise, very shrewd, very strong, in order to say “no” to all attempts at an ideological colonization of our families. We need to ask Saint Joseph, the friend of the angel, to send us the inspiration to know when we can say “yes” and when we have to say ‘no.'”

Later he identifies the threat to the family as coming from those who would “redefine the very institution of marriage.” And the pope says that these efforts are in turn fueled “by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life.” There is, in other words, a kind of atheistic materialism which absolutizes relativity, and relativizes truth; which considers every standard arbitrary except the one it chooses for itself. Yet this strikes at the heart of the American experiment in “ordered Liberty.”

When liberty means the unfettered pursuit of anything we desire, the human soul is not liberated. It is merely enslaved by infinite desire. And this is what Pope Francis means by “ideological colonization.” In the context of the Philippines, whose people understood the ways in which political colonization had amounted to a kind of enslavement, so with the ideological colonization of the family.

America needs a similar message. Our very origins as a nation are bound up with the idea of an unjust colonization. But now the colonization is not political. It is ideological. Pope Francis says we must be “very wise, very shrewd, very strong, in order to say ‘no’ to all attempts at an ideological colonization of our families.” The very idea of an “ideological colonization of our families” is very wise, very shrewd, very strong. I expect it is an idea we will hear more about this fall.

—     Chad Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology at The Catholic University of America School of Theology and Religious Studies.

Melissa Moschella

The story of Carol Riddell and John Partilla, featured in the Vows section of The New York Times in December 2010, is a case in point. Carol and John, both with spouses and children of their own, met at their children’s school, and eventually fell in love. After much painful deliberation, they decided to divorce their current spouses and marry each other. The Times describes their dilemma: “Their options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly.”

Carol and John, like many in our culture, had bought into the lie that love is primarily a feeling, and that following your feelings is the only way to be authentic and free, regardless of how many other people are hurt in the process — think of the spouses and children Carol and John left behind. They are poster children of the false freedom the Holy Father warns us against.

The antidote to this destructive attitude is to recognize that marital love is not only or even primarily about feelings, but rather that it is a commitment, a commitment to stick by the other person, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part, to remain faithful through the inevitable emotional ups and downs of life. Love is a choice, not just a feeling, and keeping love alive in marriage means making many choices each day to think and act in ways that will strengthen that love, and to avoid thoughts and actions that will weaken it.

We strengthen love by choosing to dwell on and foster gratitude for a spouse’s good qualities, rather than to nurse resentments and grudges. We strengthen love by overcoming tiredness or a bad mood to smile, by offering a warm greeting when the person comes home, by resisting the temptation to criticize, by really listening to what the other person is saying, by taking a genuine interest in what the other person cares about, by making time to be together one-on-one, and so on. These choices may seem small, but they make all the difference. A daily effort in these little things will, together with God’s grace, take us a long way in attaining that freedom of heart, which Pope Francis exhorts us to seek, and which is essential for a happy marriage.

— Melissa Moschella is an assistant professor at The Catholic University of America School of Philosophy.