Why Marriages Without God Could Fail

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Pope St. John Paul II has much to teach the world about sexuality, marriage, and family life.

His groundbreaking Theology of the Body is still being unpacked by scholars and has been called by biographer George Weigel “a theological time bomb set to go off in the middle of the 21st century”. But the late pope’s insights were meant for all of us, not simply the scholar class, and in a 2003 address, he hit on a simple but profound truth—that the crisis of marriage in our society has, at its root, a false separation between what is earthly and what is divine.

John Paul II was speaking to those involved in the annulment process in tribunals around the world. He noted something that has been addressed in this space before by Lisa Duffy—that the problem in so many marriages and why, at the time of the address, 3.8 out of every 1,000 marriages ended in divorce is what happens—or doesn’t happen before the vows are taken.

“A relevant fact that emerges from the study of the case (annulment applications) is the diminishing awareness among the partners of the significance in the celebration of Christian marriage of its sacramentality.”

When my wife and I were in the midst of our four-year courtship, we both had our fears of how we would handle the day-to-day realities of married life. I had been through the annulment process already and had no desire to revisit it. We’re both middle-aged and rather set in our ways.

Could we handle the change that marriage inevitably brings?

One of my wife’s friends made a simple statement—“Don’t underestimate the power of the sacrament.” The reality is that when left to our own human devices, we couldn’t handle everything. Nor could anyone else. The grace that comes from the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony is absolutely essential to making it work.

The granting of an annulment is an acknowledgment that while a marriage might have been civilly legal, it was not sacramentally valid. My first marriage lacked sacramental grace because of issues that were in place prior to the ceremony. Making a marriage work in these situations is, to again borrow from Lisa Duffy, like trying to start a car that’s had the engine pulled out.

“…it is necessary to rediscover the transcendent dimension that is intrinsic to the full truth of marriage and the family, overcoming every dichotomy that tends to separate the profane aspects from the religious as if there were two marriages: one profane and another sacred.”

Note that the use of the word “profane” here is simply a reference to the more mundane things of this world. And it’s here that Pope St. John Paul II has hit on the core lie that permeates our entire world, and has particularly disastrous effects on marriage—the severing of the link between Heaven and Earth.

Restoring divine grace in relationships and marriages is simpler than it seems.

For a marriage to be what God intends for it, the couples simply must pray together, and ideally pray the rosary together. When my wife and I were courting, we made a commitment that we would do this together every day.

During a long-distance courtship, that sometimes meant having to get on Skype or the phone when we were both exhausted and weren’t going to talk beyond the rosary. Today, having been married a little over a year, it means sometimes having to do the beads when we would rather watch television.

We’ve come through a lot together. Within two months of starting to date, her mother passed away. My relocation from Wisconsin to Massachusetts was delayed by my own cancer scare. Our first year of marriage has been marked by a pandemic, a lockdown, and what seems to be more tension than normal in our world.

Would we have made it without the rosary? I don’t know. And I’m not really interested in finding out.

One who views the “profane” as the “real world” and prayer as simply a pious practice that provides some temporary comfort would see all our rosaries as a waste of time. Surely, they might say, putting that time into human planning and work would be a more productive use of time. I would strongly disagree and so would Pope St. John Paul II.

The life of Faith—our connection to Heaven and the angelic world that surrounds us—is very much “the real world,” and paying due homage to the Queen Mother keeps the grace flowing from that side of eternity to our own, and enables us to navigate the minefields that might otherwise trip us up in an institution that provides as many daily challenges as marriage.

“…distancing oneself from God necessarily implies a proportionate dehumanizing of all family relationships.”

Human beings are made to be in communion with God and with each other.

The communion we share with our spouse is a foretaste of the communion that will ultimately come between Heaven and Earth. It, therefore, follows that failing to embrace that communion inevitably leads us to distance from God…and thus a little less human in the process.

As I look back on the two-year period when I was trying to see if my first marriage was salvageable and the several years that followed the separation, I don’t know what the right term is to describe it. But “dehumanizing” does feel awfully close. The anger, disillusionment, and shame led me to feel a deep sense of disunion with the Church, at least its human side. It still feels surreal looking back on it, as though I was living in some kind of internal dystopia.

The saving grace was that as much as I felt isolated from the human side of the Church, I stayed connected with the more important and enduring side, the Divine life that comes through the sacraments and the rosary.

I don’t know how people live without God. And a simple address by a sainted pope to a group of annulment auditors managed to underscore just how impossible real success in marriage is without Him.

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