Wedding Bell Blues

A colleague of mine — let's call her Beth — recently approached me with a very difficult situation.

Her brother, whom we'll call David, had come through a devastating divorce. He had spent several years praying for reconciliation, but his wife remarried and she was not coming back. He'd grieved terribly over the turn of events and turned to God and the Church for comfort.

David was still young and could not imagine living the rest of his life alone. He filed for an annulment but was told he did not have a case. It was not hard to empathize with a good man who could not believe God wanted him to live “a life of loneliness” all because of his wife's sin. He began dating a woman in his divorce-support group. They soon fell in love and wanted to marry.

Beth did not know what to say to him. She loved her brother with all her heart. Beth had told David she did not know if she would be able to attend his wedding if he went ahead with his plans. She spelled out that Christ's teaching, through the Church, was clear: David would be living in grave sin if he remarried without an annulment.

Beth came to me when she was having second thoughts. She was feeling afraid to follow through on what she had told her brother, for she knew her absence from his wedding would hurt David deeply. It would ruin a very good adultsibling relationship, too.

I gently reminded Beth that our faith does not consist of feelings or what we might personally think is right or wrong but on the reality that the Church is sustained by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit. We must trust in her wisdom for the good of our salvation and the effectiveness of our sanctification.

When David married, he took a vow to love his wife as his own body — to love her as Christ loves his bride, the Church. Jesus suffered for those who would love him and for those he knew would reject him. David made a vow to his wife to love her through sickness and health, and for better or for worse. He vowed to be Christ to her.

Whether his wife suffers from sickness of the soul or the body, the hard truth is that he is still bound to her in marriage. If the sacrament of matrimony was validly confected and received, nothing either spouse does can undo it before God. Even David's wife's walking out on him cannot undo the sacrament in God's eyes. God respects our free will that much.

God might be calling David to take up his cross and inter-cede for his wife's soul through prayer and sacrifice. Many say this is not fair. God's ways are just, but they're not necessarily “fair.”

We condone sin by our silent acceptance of it. If Beth attends David's wedding, she is showing she supports him in his decision to sin. So it is that, in reality, to not attend is the greater act of love.

Living out our Catholic faith can be hard. To be like Christ, we must die to ourselves and accept the will of the Father, just as he did. Sadly, many otherwise good Catholics are afraid to stand up for the truth. They're afraid they might hurt someone they love. Or they fear being rejected. Yet Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for yours is the Kingdom of God.”

We are called to proclaim the truth no matter how painful it might be for us or for the people we are called to proclaim it to.

The truth is sometimes hard — but it alone can set us free.

Jackie Oberhausen writes from Fort Wayne, Indiana.