Before divorce, what knowledge?

Do you still maintain that before introducing divorce, more knowledge has to be obtained, since from a general point of view it is more a matter of calculating social consequences than moral principle?
The knowledge at issue is more than statistics. Sadly, relevant quantities are still being queried. A persuasive argument in favour of introducing divorce is that nothing could be more threatening to a social texture based on marriage-grounded families than a prevalence of cohabiting couples.

The figure of one-in-five, or four, children being born out of wedlock is often quoted. But it is not known how many of these children are single-parented by teenage girls and consequently how relevant divorce would be as a remedy.

In another respect, it has been quoted that since the introduction of the new mediation process, the number of legal separations has fallen, but it is not known in how many cases the separation has still taken place in a non-judicial manner.

Plainly an inquiry into the results of the mediation system would be very useful for a deeper understanding of the undoubted malaise of the marriage-based family system. However, in-depth understanding is more urgent about the relation between the crisis of the marriage-based family and the structural changes in the wider social context.

Such socio-historians of the family with admittedly a Christian bias as Rodney Clapp, Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options (1933) and D.M. Mc Carthy, Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household (2001) have all supplied the same diagnosis.

The downward spiral in the West began with the Industrial Revolution. Previously, the marriage-based family was at the core of a 'household' or fairly extended network of people of different ages and genders bound together in varied ways to operate as an economic as well as an emotional unit for productive purposes, whether agricultural or artisanal or other. This kind of integrated, still relatively small sized, community was destroyed with the rise to dominance of the capitalist system based on the machine and factory organisation of work. The family became just an emotional haven, most often a nuclear trio of father, mother and child who find refuge from the surrounding social chaos by constituting a territory within which they provide each other with almost exclusively emotional mutual support somehow related to sexual experience.

This condition was bound to deteriorate. The consumerism that became the soul of the late phase of capitalism made the situation much more critical for the family that was no longer a household. An almost insuperable breaking point has now been reached as a result of the electronic revolution with each individual closing his or herself in a corner of cyberspace, with virtual communication nearly completely substituting flesh-and-blood exchanges.

What was the Christian response to this reduction of the marriage-based family to ghostly remnants?
In 1893 Pope Leo XIII, who authored the first social Encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which he presented his first critical assessment of Industrial Capitalism, also instituted for the first time in the history of the Church the feast of the Holy Family, actually on the third Sunday after Epiphany.

Since then, the feast has been moved about several times and it is now celebrated on the first Sunday after Christmas, in honour both of the Holy Family of Nazareth and the ideal of Christian family.

Somewhat strangely to my mind, the Church started to present a very different account of marriage and the family from anything that had been previously thought or taught. The new concept of the family seemed to be largely derived from the secularist philosopher Hegel, who denied that marriage was essentially a contract between two autonomous individuals and presented it instead as the coagulation into a single unit sharing the same kind of communion as Christians attributed to the Trinity.

Until then, hardly any Orthodox Christian would have thought that love understood as a psychological state of reciprocal good feeling was essential between marriage partners. Of course, husband and wife were supposed to come to learn to love one another over time, according to the Christian concept of love as service to one another and as Stanley Hauerwas puts it, marriage was supposed to help "to support an inclusive community of love by grounding it in a pattern of faithfulness towards another".

However, it was soon found out that too much was being expected of the family conceived as quite separate from the market place and the public sphere, almost as a walled-up space within which husband and wife re-energised their spirits depressed at their workplace and in the political arena, by drawing solely on the double resource of sexual activity and prayer, and equipped the young with the means to enter the struggle for survival outside its protective shelter.

Do you think there is any way out of this rather dismal prospect?

In Pope John Paul II's exhortation Familiaris Consortium, on the one hand there is a fairly closed continuation of what I am tempted to call the Hegelian, neo Christian Concept and, on the other hand, a call for a return to the earlier conception of family as household.
This implies that the family is located within a wider community. Only if sustained by appropriate structures, both secular and religious in the world outside it, can a family based on lifelong conjugality survive.

However crucial and important education for family life certainly is, it is not enough. It can only be effective as part of a more general enablement of the present generation to bring about the cultural revolution necessary for real human prosperity in the world ushered into being by the electronic revolution.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti