Catholic Understanding of Marriage excludes the Divorce Mentality

Bai Macfarlane’s Introduction: Those who choose to marry as the Catholic Church understand marriage, are choosing a True Serious Religious Marriage. The divorce mentality that is prevalent in our culture is rejected by these couples when they choose the specific terms for their marriage contract. In 1988, Edward Egan presented this paper below, explaining the difference between the Permanence of Marriage chosen by couples marrying in accordance with the laws of the Roman Catholic Church in contrast to the partnership chosen by those who embrace the divorce mentality. This paper was presented as part of a symposium on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae.

In 1982, Edward Cardinal Egan was one of six canonists who reviewed the new Code of Canon Law with His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, before its promulgation in 1983. Cardinal Egan, originally from Chicago, completed his seminary studies at the Pontifical North American College in Vatican City and was ordained in 1957. In 1958, he received a Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University. In 1964, he earned a doctorate in Canon Law Summa Cum Laude from the Pontifical Gregorian University. From 1971 to 1985 he served in Rome as a judge of the Tribunal of the Sacred Roman Rota.Ê He was also a professor of Canon Law at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

Bibliography

Egan, The Most Reverend Edward M. The Permanence of Marriage and the Mentality of Divorce. “Chapter 14 The Mentality of Divorce.” Smith 221-235.

Smith, Russell E, ed. Trust the Truth: A symposium on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae. Princeton, NJ: Sponsored by the Roman Atheneum Foundation and the Aquinas Institute; 1988 at the Pope John Center, Princeton University, 1991

Republished

with permission of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, copyright holder.

The Permanence of Marriage and the Mentality of Divorce

On September 6, 1986, the New York Times ran an article entitled, “Britannica Computer Foils Tampering with the Facts.” The story was this. Toward the end of the previous July, one of the 130 editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica was served notice that his employment was terminated. Hurt and angered, he came to his former office by night and fed into the computer that contained the almost completed 1987 edition of the encyclopedia, several pieces of misinformation which, because of the nature of the computer process, soon made their way here and there into all thirty-two volumes.

When the situation was discovered early in August, it was feared that it might not be possible to issue the 1987 edition. Indeed, the misinformation seemed to have so thoroughly “infected” the entire publication that in a rather unusual memorandum to all employees, the Senior Editor, Mr. Norman Braun, is reported by the Times to have lamented, “Our hard work has been turned into garbage.”

Happily, Mr. Braun proved to have been overly pessimistic. For having guessed who was responsible for the misdeed and knowing his so-called “computer password,” in something less than six hours a raster technician managed to extract all of the misinformation from “the world’s oldest reference work still in publication,” restoring it to its usual and much-vaunted level of accuracy. The “sabotage” had failed, Mr. Braun announced at a press conference. The 150,000 sets of the 1987 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, each containing 44,000,000 wondrously truthful words, would appear as per schedule.

* * *

It is the thesis of this paper that something similar appears to have happened over the past twenty-five years to the Catholic understanding of marriage, particularly in the English-speaking world. Not out of hurt or anger, to be sure, but regrettably, nonetheless, a good deal of misinformation seems to have made its way into the computer. And if it has, I would suggest, it needs to be gotten out as soon as possible, lest Catholic belief about the fundamentals of marriage be seriously prejudiced.

To identify the alleged misinformation, it will be necessary to start with what I would presume to term the facts, the reality, the simple, even if prosaic, truth about marriage. However, in order to do this effectively, it might be well to make two preliminary observations. First, marriage is a phenomenon which can be analyzed from many points of view. Thus, it can be both fairly and sensibly discussed in terms of philosophy, theology, psychology, spirituality, even economics and poetry. It should not therefore come as a surprise to anyone that, inasmuch as marriage is commonly thought to entail rights and obligations, it can also be discussed juridically, that is to say, in terms of law.

Second, some things in life are by their nature complicated and elusive. Computers are perhaps an example. Others are more simple and accordingly understood, at least in their essentials, by the vast majority of adults of ordinary intelligence. Marriage clearly belongs in this second category. True, over the past quarter of a century and more, religious, and especially Catholic, authors from various disciplines have claimed to have discovered all manner of intricacies and nuances concerning it. Still, in its basics, virtually everyone knows what marriage is and knows, moreover, that he or she knows it. “Teflon-like,” marriage has allowed even the most recondite of ambiguities to slide off rather easily, leaving little trace behind, at least in the estimate of the average citizen, the proverbial man or woman on the street.

* * *

This said, we move on to what I at least would term juridical misinformation regarding marriage.

The word, “marriage,” has in most languages, if not all, at least two meanings. The first is the manifestation of the will to be married on the part of a male and a female. (This is often described as the exchange of marriage consent.) The second is the state of being married which results from the aforementioned manifestation of will. (This is often described as the marriage relationship, the condition of being married, or-if I might be permitted a bit of rather well-known Latin-the marital “society” [societal], “union” [unio], “communion” [communio], “partnership” [consortium], and even “bond” [vinculum or ligamen].)

Now I ask: How is marriage in its first meaning achieved? Please note every word. John and Mary consent to marriage by giving to and receiving from each other a commitment to do and not to do certain things. They enter a contract, form an agreement, constitute a covenant (all of these expressions are and always have been quite acceptable) in which they exchange rights and obligations or, to be perhaps more precise, in which they exchange a very specific right and obligation.

And what is that right and obligation? In classic Catholic teaching it is the exclusive and permanent right (from the standpoint of the receiver) and obligation (from the, standpoint of the giver) to perform together that act which has not surprisingly come to be called the “marriage act,” that act, namely, to which a male and female are drawn under a physical impulse from their Creator and whereby they make of themselves candidates to become co-creators.

Later on we will treat in some detail. whether this is indeed the only right the couple exchanges when by “doing” marriage in its first meaning, they consent to and constitute marriage in its second meaning. At this point, however, I would simply invite you to attend to exactly what has been said. John and Mary consent to be married by mutually giving and receiving a right which at least in traditional Catholic teaching is claimed to be the exclusive and permanent right to the marriage act.

* * *

Who in the world, you are perhaps asking yourself, would disagree with any of this? Many, I would reply. And their disagreements are intimately bound up with the misinformation of which I spoke above, the misinformation which I believe has somehow been fed into the computer of Catholic teaching about marriage and which in my judgement urgently needs to be gotten out.

I have never been altogether sure why the first piece of what I style misinformation has been so widely and enthusiastically proclaimed. Whatever of this, about the breadth and warmth of its proclamation there can hardly be any doubt. For example, in a book published in 1982 by an American theologian on the nature of marriage according to Catholic thought, it is repeated over twenty times in a variety of formulations.1 Similarly, in an article published in 1987 by an Italian canonist, it appears, again in variety, of formulations, over a half dozen times.2 In simplest terms it is this: According to perennial Catholic doctrine, the object of marriage consent is the procreation and education of offspring.

Certainly, one can understand an occasional “lapsus calami” about a matter such as this. However, grammar, if nothing else, should forestall relentless repetition. The object of marriage consent (marriage in its first meaning) is manifestly the state of being married (marriage in its second meaning). Standing before the altar on his wedding day, John does not consent to procreation and education of offspring; he consents to marriage. And incidentally, John knows this, Mary knows it, and even the local registrar of marriages knows it.

Why, then, the confusion? Frankly, as admitted above, I am not sure. Still, I would note that mistaking the classic, Catholic object of marriage consent does lend itself to a kind of “straw man” argument which may be thought by some to be an efficient means of casually dismissing the wisdom of centuries. The rhetoric might flow something like this: “Traditional Catholic teaching has championed so narrow and inappropriate a view of marriage as to suggest that when a man and woman marry, they consent to something extrinsic to themselves, something which does not even yet exist, something which may never exist, something solely on the physical or, worse yet, animal level, something to which they may have given little thought, something for which they may have little enthusiasm.”

Confronted by such reasoning, the ancient philosophers used to warn: “Ex falso sequitur quodlibet.” (“From a false premise anything follows”) For our purposes here it will be enough to observe, first, that the premise of the argument, if an argument be intended, is patently wrong, inasmuch as the object of marriage consent is not the procreation and education of offspring but rather the marital state, and second, that we will have occasion to address some of the conclusions later on at length.

* * *

The second piece of what I am defining as misinformation is no less widespread. It is this: Marriage consent may be fairly described in juridical terms as the giving of self to one’s partner and the receiving of self from one’s partner. Indeed, almost all who speak in this vein regularly claim that the giving and receiving of the selves in marriage consent, if it is to be effective juridically, must somehow be “total.” 3

Here I must ask you to allow me a disclaimer. As mentioned above, marriage can be rightly and properly examined under many aspects, among them the poetic. In fact, we might add now, the poetic frequently expresses about marriage, as it does about many things, truths which other endeavors, including law, are hard-pressed to articulate. Joyce Kilmer allows that trees have “hungry mouths” which are “pressed against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.” And he is, of course, correct, no matter what horticulturists and geologists may think about the matter. Still, we would have little good to say of the horticulturist who, having read Kilmer’s “Trees,” dug into the roots of elms and oaks expecting to find there oral cavities, any more than we would feel much confidence in a geologist who, having contemplated the same poem, came to hold that the earth is a mammal.

I have no problem whatever about someone’s speaking or writing in a theological, spiritual, or poetic context of a person consenting to marriage by giving his or her self to another and receiving that self of that other, totally or otherwise. I fully expect to find such statements in books of theology, spirituality, and poetry. Indeed, I am not even upset to discover them in books of a legal sort, as long as I can be assured that no one is drawing legal conclusions from them.

Gaudium et Spes speaks of marriage in this way.4 So does Humanae Vitae. 5 And so too does the new Code of Canon Law.6 You may on first hearing find this last statement a bit unsettling. Yet, if you reflect upon the history of legal codes, you will soon be calmed. The opening pages of the first book of the Code of Justinian, you will recall, is a theological, moral, and spiritual disquisition on the meaning and implications of the Mystery of the Trinity.7 Even codes are at times permitted to take flight.

No, there is no problem in stating in any context that marriage consent is wrought by a couple’s giving and receiving themselves and; if you like, giving and receiving themselves totally. A problem is, however, created if what is thus stated is somehow transformed into a premise in a juridical analysis and juridical conclusions are drawn from it. Juridically, no one has himself or herself to give another; much less can the self of one person be received, juridically speaking, by another. All of which is true whether the expression, “totally,” be added or not. For philosophically and juridically, self is an indivisible totality. If it could be given and received (and it cannot), the only way in which this could be done would be totally, as long as we are thinking and reasoning about marriage in the altogether legitimate sphere of law and things juridical.

I have personally seen any number of sentences, that is, judicial decisions, in which Church tribunals have declared marriages invalid because the man in question was found to be selfish or the woman in question was found to be grasping, and it was concluded that such persons had to be at the time of their marriage unable to give themselves to another, and especially to do this totally. If you wish just one example, I might refer you to a decision given at the Roman Rota “coram Egan,” as they say, on March 29, 1984, which reversed the judgement of a diocesan tribunal that had pursued this manner of argument.8 I speak here of a piece of misinformation, as I view misinformation, which has made its way far deeper into the computer than many might imagine.

* * *

The third and last piece of misinformation to which I would respectfully draw your attention is the most common and easily the most damaging. It can be articulated in many ways. All, however, come down more or less to something such as this: When a couple consents to marriage, they do it perhaps by exchanging an exclusive and permanent right to the marriage act, but also and particularly by exchanging the right to some additional thing or things without which the marriage would be invalid. These further objects of the exchanged right are one or more of the following: an interpersonal relationship, a community of life and love, self-completion, self-development, self-fulfillment.

What are we to say of this? I will endeavor to be as brief and clear as possible.

First, the expression, “interpersonal relationship,” in this context can have only two possible meanings. They are either the marital state pure and simple or the marital state with the proviso that it is to achieve at least a modicum of human, personal gratification for the parties, or to put it all quite badly, that it is to be at least reasonably successful, basically happy.

If one has in mind the first meaning, the marital state pure and simple, obviously no right to it can be exchanged, first, because consenting to marriage by giving and receiving a right to marriage is a meaningless redundancy, and second, because even if it were other than a meaningless redundancy, John cannot be given a right to marry Mary, any more than he can give Mary a right to marry him. (The same, of course, holds true for Mary vis-à-vis John.) The generic right to marry is a reality derived from the natural law. The specific right to marry this person or that does not, and cannot, exist.

If one has in mind the second meaning of a marital interpersonal relationship, that is, the state of being in a marriage which is at least in some fundamental sense happy, again no right to it can be exchanged, first and foremost because there exists no such thing as a right to a happy marriage. Moreover, even if there did exist such a thing, it is unlikely that any juridical conclusions about the validity of a particular marriage could be derived from it. For happiness is a most personal, individual, and fluid reality. Accordingly, one can hardly imagine a criterion whereby to measure how much of it a particular person or couple must be able to provide in order for their marriage to be counted as valid. Nor, we might add, has anyone ever been able to identify a criterion whereby to measure how much this particular person or couple were actually able to agree to provide on their wedding day, except, of course, in the case of someone who was so manifestly incapable of marriage on other grounds that there would be no reason to bring up such plainly unreal considerations as the exchanging of a right to a happy marriage.

This last remark brings us to what I at least would consider the heart of the matter. As everyone knows full well, long before discussions began in the Church about giving self in marriage, marital interpersonal relationships, and the like, canonical doctrine and jurisprudence had spelled out with remarkable logic, clarity, and thoroughness, what precisely is required by the natural and positive law for the validity of a marriage. When treating the capacities of the partners to the marriage, the requirements were quite impressive. In order to marry validly, it was determined,

1. One had to be of a certain age and free of such impediments as consanguinity, a previous marriage bond, or religious vows;
2. One had to know that marriage is a society of a man and a woman which is ordered to the begetting of offspring through corporal contact;
3. One had to enjoy the use of reason;
4. One had to be able to consider the wisdom of marrying with the kind of mature deliberation that a matter of such import requires;
5. One had to be endowed with both external and particularly internal freedom to marry;
6. One had to be both physically and psychologically capable of the marriage act;
7. One had to be able to commit oneself to an exclusive marital union;
8. One had to be able to commit oneself to a permanent marital union.

Now let us suppose for a moment that, in order to marry validly, it were necessary to give and receive a right to some basic, minimum measure of marital happiness. Is it even thinkable that a person could meet all the classic requirements for being able to marry validly as outlined above but could not do whatever is the minimum that could be reasonably demanded as regards marital happiness? The individual person is, as everyone knows, a substantial unity, operating with one mind, one will, one body, and one set of emotions. If he or she is of legal age to marry and without invalidating impediments, clear about the meaning of marriage, endowed with the use of reason, able to deliberate about a serious matter in a mature manner, externally and internally free, physically and psychologically capable of the marriage act, and capable as well of both an exclusive and a permanent union with another, he or she will certainly not find the reasonable and legitimate demands of the interpersonal relationship approach beyond his or her capacities. Without doubt it is possible to conjure up in one’s imagination a person who is able to do all that canon law has traditionally required of those who would marry but who is at the same time unable to do what is alleged to be demanded by the need to give and receive the right to a marital interpersonal relationship in its second meaning, that is to say, the right to a marriage with a basic minimum of happiness. The imagining, however, would, at least in my estimate, stand apart from the real, everyday world in which marriages are made and lived.

Regarding the right to a community of life and love and the right to self-completion, self-development, and self-fulfillment, I would repeat much of what has already been observed about the right to a marital interpersonal relationship. If by the right to a community of life and love you mean nothing more than the right to the marital state, pure and simple, with your chosen spouse, I would again assert that there exists no such right. If you mean something more, namely, the right to a basically agreeable, successful, or in plainest language happy marriage with your chosen spouse, I would again contend there exists no right to that either. Moreover, I would add, as was done above when discussing the right to a marital interpersonal relationship, that even if you insist that the last-named right does exist, you can rest assured that any problem which might arise because of its not having been exchanged in a particular marriage will be susceptible of adequate handling according to the principles of traditional canon law. For no one could measure up to all that the law demands in a person for a valid marriage without being able to provide, from the standpoint of his or her personal capacities, whatever are the behaviors or attitudes thought to be necessary by exponents of the community of life and love analysis for the validity of marriage. And precisely the same is to be said, congruo congruis referendo, as regards the alleged right to self-completion, self-development, and self-fulfillment.

Nor am I ignorant of the fact that among the defenders of the community of life and love approach, not a few place special emphasis upon the love dimension of the formula, maintaining that it cannot be subsumed under the general heading of basic, legitimately required marital happiness. To these, however, I would dare to repeat yet again what I proposed to the theorists of the interpersonal relationship, the fundamental community of life and love, self-completion, self-development, and self-fulfillment. And it is this: If a person be capable of doing all that canon law has been regularly requiring of those who would marry validly, he or she will be capable of giving and receiving the supposed right to that essential modicum of loving without which one might seriously and fairly determine that a marriage would be invalid. Recall once more, I dare to invite you, that canonical doctrine and jurisprudence warmly recognize the invalidity of the marriage of anyone who is under legal age and beset by invalidating impediments, unclear about the meaning of marriage, without the use of reason, unable to deliberate about a matter as serious as marriage in a mature manner, lacking external or internal freedom, physically or psychologically incapable of the marriage act, or incapable of either an exclusive or a permanent union with another.

* * *

Very well, then, let us assume for a moment

1. that when marriage consent is given, the parties consent to marriage and nothing else,
2. that when marriage consent is given, the parties may be conceived of as exchanging themselves in whole or in part, but that no juridical conclusions can be legitimately derived from such a conception;
3. that when marriage consent is given, the right of one party to marry the other is not exchanged, inasmuch as no such right exists,
4. that when marriage consent is given, the right of one party to marry the other happily is not exchanged, inasmuch as there exists no right to this either, even if it be shrouded in such attractive language as the right to an interpersonal relationship, the right to a community of life and love, or the right to self-completion, self-development, and self-fulfillment,
5. that when marriage consent is given, parties who are capable of all that canon law has over the centuries postulated for a valid marriage will be capable of engaging in as much relating, living, loving, completing, developing, and fulfilling as might be fairly required by a judge who has somehow divined how much relating, living, loving, completing, developing, and fulfilling is needed for a valid marriage and how much a person at the time of his or her wedding would have been able to provide during the course of married life.

* * *

And having assumed all of this, allow me now to inquire aloud how we might be able to remove the contrary information from the computer of Catholic thinking about marriage. Or to press the analogy even further: What is the “computer password” which we master technicians will have to use in order to extract what needs to be extracted?

At the risk of sounding simplistic, I would submit that the password is in briefest terms “the mentality of divorce.” This is what has somehow taken hold even among a goodly number of good Catholics, not in the sense that they openly and avowedly deny the permanence of the marriage bond, but in the sense that they have allowed themselves to make their peace with the “reasonableness,” the “logic,” above all, the “value” of putting an end in an orderly and civilized fashion to marriages which have not proved to be sufficiently “relational,” lively, loving, completing, developing, and/or fulfilling.

Once that mentality takes hold, all else follows with relative ease. The necessary formulae come to mind. Philosophers and theologians, psychologists and poets, join the parade. And of a sudden everything appears to make such good, modern, progressive sense. The notion of marriage consent is dismissed on grounds that are groundless. The male-female element of marriage cedes to preoccupation with the self. Exclusivity bows to relationship. Permanence is overwhelmed by completion, development, and fulfillment. In a relatively short span of time, nineteen hundred years of disciplined thought are upturned. We come to forget that marriage is not something about which all manner of ambiguities can be solemnly affirmed without, in due course, losing in the minds of many its identity, its reality, its God-given truth.

In 1983 and 1984 I published two long articles in English on the subject of capacity for marriage in a well-known European canon law journal.9 Each was accompanied by judicial decisions in Latin which I had written during my years as a judge of the Roman Rota and which were intended to illustrate what I had set forth in English. To my knowledge, what I had to say in these articles, all very much in criticism of current canonical positions regarding the nullity of marriage, was totally ignored, at least in print, until a few months ago. Last May, to be exact, there appeared an article in a Canadian canon law journal in which my objections were to be answered.10 And the answer? Ecclesiastical authorities must know what is being done in Church tribunals. If they are silent, we may fairly presume their acquiescence.

Such thinking is in my estimate altogether unsatisfactory. For, again in my estimate, it bespeaks an attitude which can take hold only when the mentality of divorce has found its way deep into the computer, only when we are looking for an escape from thought about or responsibility for what we are doing. Who weds the spirit of one age may be a widow or a widower in the next. Certainly, we have lived through an era in which marriage has been challenged on all sides, an era in which the permanence of the marriage bond has been thought, even assumed, in many quarters to be quite indefensible. Whatever of this, marriage in all of its authentic, God-determined reality may be reappearing on the horizon. Indeed, I am persuaded that there are signs of this all about us; and I wonder if we may not one day find ourselves “hustling,” as they say, to catch up with something that should never have escaped our grasp.

* * *

In a report issued last-May by the City of New York concerning what we in Gotham should expect in the year 2000, page after page provides statistical proof that our children are being destroyed physically and psychologically, for lack, above all else, of stable family life, with father and mother in the home and the children being reared there by them.11 Two years ago Senator Moynihan in a widely-acclaimed treatise on the family and the nation 12 and last year M. A. Glendon in a masterful work on divorce and abortion in America made the same point.13 Both, moreover, added that, while all of society is being damaged by the breaking-up of families, those who are suffering the most are the most vulnerable, the children and the women. I am reminded of Chesterton’s remark of seventy years ago: “The triangle of the father, the mother and the child. . . can destroy civilizations which disregard it.”14

And of late the same theme has been played as well in other contexts in a more cheery, upbeat key. This past June, for example, scholars from the University of Illinois informed us through the major newspapers of the nation that an American child can be expected to be academically successful in direct proportion with the number of years he or she has lived in a stable, complete family.15 Similarly, the current number of the review, Public Interest, reports on studies by a number of universities which are said to demonstrate that the adults in this country who are likely to be the most healthy are those who are married and staying married.16 Small wonder that on my desk as I type this paper there lies a popular tabloid in which virtually an entire page is dedicated to reporting that a candidate for the presidency, who has never evidenced much concern for things familial, made a brief appearance yesterday in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he addressed himself to the family no less than nine times. 17

In the light of all this, perhaps we Catholics would do well to consider our current direction as regards marriage and the family. The world may be preparing to move again down a different road, and we may be left behind. It may be time to take a careful look at our computer to be sure that everything in it bespeaks solid, Catholic truth.

In Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, a novel which has been on the best-sellers list for almost forty weeks,17 the hero is often tempted to break his marriage vows. On each occasion we hear him arguing with himself; and the argument regularly turns on the assumption that he, as a successful Wall Street bond trader, one of the “masters of the universe,” as he puts it, should not be held to the pedestrian rules which have traditionally governed marriage. His musings are clearly intended to bring a smile to the reader’s lips. Still, behind them lurks a truth which upon reflection may be rather disturbing. The laws of marriage and the family are not the business of the “masters of the universe.” They belong exclusively and permanently to the one Master of the universe. We are not in a position to change them or even adjust them, no matter how important or self-important we may be. And if such a position sounds a bit radical in these days of freedom and change, so be it. Nineteen hundred years ago it sounded radical, indeed, shocking, to the Apostles too.19 All the same, at the Master’s insistence, His will regarding marriage and the family was fed into the computer; and there it is to remain until how shall I put it? until the last edition comes off the press.

NOTES

1. T. Mackin, Marriage in the Catholic Church: What is Marriage? (New York: Paulist Puss, 1982).
2. M. E. Pompedda, “Incapacity to Assume the Essential Obligations of Marriage;” in Incapacity for Marriage, Jurisprudence and Interpretation (Romae: P.U.G., 1987).
3. The origin of the word, “total,” in this connection seems to have been the word, “omnis,” in the definition of marriage commonly attributed to the Roman jurisconsult, Modestinus. (Cf. “consortium omnis vitae” in lustiniani Digesta, 23, 2, 1: Mommsen-Krueger, p. 330.) For the Romans its meaning was probably something akin to our “in good times and in bad” (“in prosperis et adversis”).
4. Cf. # 48.
5. Cf. # 8.
6. Cf. Canon 1057, # 2.
7. Codex lustinianus, 1, 1, 1-27. Krueger; pp. 5-12.
8. Chicagien., coram Egan, March 29, 1984, n. 3.
9. “The Nullity of Marriage for Reason of Insanity or Lack of Due Discretion,” in Ephemerides iuris canonici, XXXXIX (1983), pp. 13-54; and “The Nullity of Marriage for Reason of Incapacity to Fulfill the Essential Obligations of Marriage,” in Ephemerides iuris canonici, XL (1984), pp. 9-34.
10. W. H. Woestmann, “Judges and the Incapacity to Assume the Essential Obligations of Marriage,” in Studia canonica, 21/2 (1987); pp. 315-323. (This volume appeared in the Spring of 1988.)
11. R. J. Wagner, ed., New York Ascendant: The Report of the Commission on the Year 2000 (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
12. D. P. Moynihan, Family and Nation (San Diego: Harcourt-Brace, 1986).
13. M. A. Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in Western Law: American Failures, European Challenges (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
14. Cf. G. K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce (New York: John Lane, 1920), p. 66.
15. New Fork Times, June 29, 1988, “Single Parent Homes: The Effect on Schooling:”
16. Cf. B. J. Christensen, “The Costly Retreat from Marriage,” in Public Interest, 91 (Spring, 1988), pp. 59-66.
17. New York Daily News, July 25, 1988, ” ‘Family,’ Sez Duke, Again and Again.”
18. T. Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar-Straus, 1987).
19. Cf. Matthew 19: 3-12; and Luke 10: 2-12.