The person you love most can cut you the deepest. Anyone who has been married for a minute knows this.
As a spouse, you have literally mortgaged your entire life on this one person, this vow, this covenant, and on living and loving them until “death do you part.” When you’ve shared a bed with someone for a year, ten years, half a century, you get to know them pretty well, and vice versa. If you’re a spiteful person, you have plenty of ammunition you can use against them – and vice versa.
Though my wife and I have a good, healthy marriage, we are witnessing in friends the complete leveling of theirs. This is not the place to divulge details, of course, but I can say that their entire foundation has been called into question. For years they had been superficially coasting with minimal blood traveling through restricted veins, but recently an artery has ruptured in their marriage that has caused a proverbial aneurysm and brought it to the brink of collapse.
The issues are serious, and it will take an enormous amount of investment and re-commitment to bring it back from the ledge, not to mention the most important element of all, prayer.
Church as Spouse
I said when I was on The Journey Home that when I came into the Church at the age of eighteen, I knew it was for life. My First Holy Communion and Confirmation felt like I was literally “walking down the aisle on my wedding day.” So, I’ve always had this feeling that my relationship with the Church was not a fad or a passing commitment but in every way a covenant. And it is fitting that the Lord describes His relationship with His people throughout scripture in marital language. The Church is the spouse of Christ.
My wife and I are one hundred percent committed to one another, and one hundred percent committed to the Church as well. This is because one’s faith as a Catholic cannot exist in any real way outside of the Church. Many Protestant Christians have trouble understanding this reality. To Catholics, it is a foreign concept that one could “love Christ and not love the Church,” any more than one could be truthful in saying he loved God but hated his brother (1 John 4:20).
Ruptured Artery
Some people feel liberated by their recent throwing off of the shackles of the institutional Church – as in freedom from the gaslighting, the cognitive dissonance, the fear of the threat of eternal damnation, etc. They are making the claim that none of it is real, none of it true, and that the recent promulgation of the Vatican document, Traditiones custodies, proves that it’s nothing but nonsense.
Even worse, they are claiming that those who stay in the Church are fools suffering from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, especially since it’s obvious at this point that the Vicar of Christ himself is acting like an abusive father giving out beatings. They feel vindicated by their escape. The “I told you sos” from these religious pundits feel like salt in the wound for the rest of us (who hold to the traditional faith and Mass) who now have to contend with the “What nows?”
For the first time in my history as a Catholic, the thought came to me: “What if they shut down the Latin Mass and we just…stopped going?” What if we just gave up and said, “You know, I don’t believe any of this anymore.”
Life as a traditional Catholic is hard at this moment because we are dealing with the uncertainty of the future of our worship and also with the existential questions and the pragmatic “where do we go on Sunday if this thing goes through” decisions that we will soon need to make. The existential situation may be like many of those spouses being crucified in their marriages who have the temptation planted in their mind during those moments of insurmountable agony and betrayal: “What if I leave the house for a pack of cigarettes and just don’t come back?”
Humiliation and Heroism
My friend Leila Miller wrote an incredible book: Primal Loss: The Adult Children of Divorce Speak. The book gave voice to those who had suffered from the trauma of divorce – namely, the children – but some readers expressed concern that that couldn’t be where the story ended.
So she wrote a follow up book called Impossible Marriages Redeemed to tell the story of marriages that had been put up on the cross to be picked apart by ravens and yet did not come down off of it. By God’s grace, many of these couples experienced a complete destruction and leveling of their marriage and yet refused to concede. They tied themselves to the mast of the ship, like Odysseus, and stuck to their vows by sheer force of will.
And because they did not give up but, rather, threw themselves on the mercy of God to save their marriages when they didn’t know what else to do, God heard their desperate prayer and slowly brought their marriages back from the dead. With man, this was impossible. But with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).
The promulgation of Traditionis custodes feels like a similar kind of humiliation. All we want to do, as Catholics of the traditional persuasion, is to worship God in the fullest, most fitting way possible. Many of us can attest that our participation in the traditional Mass has borne good fruit in our lives and is not (despite the gaslighting) rooted in a spirit of disobedience. Were the CDF to say tomorrow, “You can no longer worship in this way,” many of us will be faced with the stark reality of asking: “Well, how are we to worship, then?”
I think about Padre Pio a lot when he was forbidden to offer Mass publicly and how difficult and painful that must have been for him. But he accepted it as a crucifixion in obedience. I don’t quite know if it’s an apt comparison because he was a Franciscan with a strict vow of religious obedience.
But I do wonder if many of us have been gliding along superficially in our faith and worship, ignoring the truth that if we are to follow Christ we are to be baptized into his death (Romans 6:3). What could be more painful than having the thing we care about the most ripped away from us, and even more painfully so, not by a Communist government or a leftist mob, but by the Church herself? I suppose it can be likened to the spiteful action of the spouse that knows us and our vulnerabilities well.
Christianity in the Desert
We may be on the eve of a period of uncertainty, liturgical wandering, and painful humiliation. And the threat of schism and defection to Orthodoxy and the SSPX may prove to be an extremely likely outcome. When it comes to the Vatican’s forecasting of who these traditionalists are, a friend aptly noted, “They are expecting college Republicans, and they’re getting the Maccabees.”
And yet, for myself as the spiritual head of my household, I believe the Lord is allowing this oppression. It is not an accident or something that falls outside of His will; nothing happens apart from His will! Should we be surprised that we are going through a crucifixion of sorts – as if this was not a part of our discipleship!
If the Lord is leveling His Church to the foundation the way He leveled the Temple, will He not rebuild it? Or do we not trust Him enough to guide us through this, but instead leave our marriage and forfeit the deepening of our faith and love in the Golden Years through the fiery trial (1 Peter 4:12)? We are people of the Resurrection, as St. Paul writes:
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all…. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:13-14.19. 57-58)
Firm Hope in Christ
I have hope. I must have hope to survive. If we go through dark times, we must then lean more on Christ to guide us through the darkness. If we are stripped down liturgically, crowned with thorns, we are in good company.
To the extent that the wheat is separated and the faithful are not blown away like chaff, that we endure our suffering and do not defect, we will be resurrected. If you don’t believe that, then upon what is your faith in the crucified Christ founded?
I don’t know what God is doing, but I lament and assent with Job: “Though He slay me, yet I will trust in him!” (Job 13:15).
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