Is the advice abusive or is it holy?

rusmeister said:

Well, I imagine you could produce something from a couple of saints. But I think that even i you do, it will prove to be an extreme exception, a one-in-a-million case. I refuse to grant that such an extreme exception binds us to a refusal to decide whether it is good or bad in general to ask for mental or spiritual illness. We ought to ask for clarity of thought, and spiritual insight, even if our bodies are falling apart. I was speaking in general, and that means at least most cases, allowing for a very few exceptions. The greater danger is the desire of the 99% who seek Church approval of divorce to be seen as the 1%. Speaking roughly, we ALL tend to see our own situation as exceptional, and few things are easier in the face of a demand to shoulder a hard burden than excuses not to.

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I never said that this was common or the approved solution. all I said was that you do find it in our tradition.

abacabb3 said:

Yes, it's good advice from a priest who looks for that person for advice, as only someone would exceptional holiness should be givien such advice. When I ran the same situation by my spiritual father, he called it "crazy."

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well, that’s you and your spiritual father, not the people you said in the OP. perhaps it is crazy, I never said it wasn’t.

abacabb3 said:

crazy advice 9,999 out of 10,000 times can be called crazy without caveats

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unless you’re talking about that 1 time in 10000. and if we are speaking about pastoral care, we dare not call it crazy.

ArmyMatt said:

unless you’re talking about that 1 time in 10000. and if we are speaking about pastoral care, we dare not call it crazy.

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I think, Father, that in general, we ought not to even hear about that one-in-ten thousand case. What we the laity need to hear is what the 9,999 ought to be told. Instead, the de facto position is that the laity takes what ought to be super-rare, and treats it as the norm.

We need to hear a lot more about how we ought to see marriage in general, and to stop letting all the people who don’t want to hear it determine that we shall in fact not hear it in our homilies and counsel. The tail should not wag the dog, nor the exception effectively abolish the rule.

abacabb3 said:

If one hurts 9,999 out of 10,000 people that is not only crazy it's grossly negligent

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true, but we don’t know if it’s the 9999 or the 1 based on the info given.

rusmeister said:

I think, Father, that in general, we ought not to even hear about that one-in-ten thousand case. What we the laity need to hear is what the 9,999 ought to be told. Instead, the de facto position is that the laity takes what ought to be super-rare, and treats it as the norm.

We need to hear a lot more about how we ought to see marriage in general, and to stop letting all the people who don’t want to hear it determine that we shall in fact not hear it in our homilies and counsel. The tail should not wag the dog, nor the exception effectively abolish the rule.

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agreed. I wasn’t the one who brought this up. I only said that we don’t know if this is the 1 or 9999 in 10000.

abacabb3 said:

don't ever wear a seat belt by that logic, because it might impede you from getting out of a car if you ever crash into a lake and the car is underwater.

sorry, but we have to deal with the 9,999 and not the 1 out of 10,000 in normal conversation. again, if we are dealing with a clairvoyant saint, maybe we will change the MO. To treat it otherwise is absurd.

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except we’re talking about a pastoral encounter between a priest and members of his flock. your analogy breaks down since it’s not based on a personal encounter, but rather the odds of an event occurring.

and we do normally have to deal with the 9999, but not enough info has been shown to say whether or not this is the 9999 or the 1.

I think you misunderstand us, Father - at least, you misunderstand me. I, at least, am NOT talking ahout this particular pastoral case. There is a tiny chance - a miniscule chance - that such advice could be appropriate in this one specifc instance. No argument - you don’t need to keep repeating that. But we HAVE to speak in general, about what nearly all cases turn out to be.

That’s why I never comment on individual cases in divorce, but I am quite sure that the vast majority of them could be avoided if there were better pastoral care and catechism, if the priests stopped echoing the world’s teachings and stressed more what the Church actually teaches about marriage, in which divorce is essentially inadmissible, unlike the world’s contradiction of that.

The Church’s teaching is really hard and demanding. But it is what it is. Just for one moment speaking about this particular case, that is the one thing this particular priest seems to have right (though I stress “seems”), however wrong some of the advice seems.

End of commenting on this particular case.

Our own horrible sin, error, amartia, in this general issue is seeing marriage as purely individual, as being only “between the couple and God” and “nobody else’s business. But my marriage IS your business, insofar as we are part of one society or community. What I do affects you all, and were I to divorce, that would affect everyone in my community. A reliable “nation within a nation” is lost; a brick has been removed from the house and its structure correspondingly weakened. All of our neighbors and friends, to say nothing of in-laws, that counted on us being there as a family unit, as one thing - “The Smiths”, “the Robinsons” all of a sudden find a hole and a vacuum. I learned so much from Chesterton on the social effects that hardly any of us give the slightest thought to. “The Superstition of Divorce” made crystal clear to me WHY the hard teachings of our Church are right, WHY we do, generally speaking, need to learn to love our spouses when it becomes VERY hard, and generally speaking, we don’t want to. We want to run away, jump off a cliff, do anything in those hardest moments rather than love someone who is hurting us so badly. And we will swallow anything from the modern world, the modern “psych-“ sciences (insofar as they ARE science, that is, true knowledge of our nature), “self-help” books and gurus, rather than love someone who is behaving like our enemy, because loving your neighbor and loving your enemy are non-negotiables in our Faith, and possibly the hardest commandments. How on earth did we ever come to think we can make an exception for our spouse?

If one couple can divorce in the Church because of irreconcilable differences, then all couples can. All stability in the community is lost. And we wonder why we have lost all sense of community, why everyone now lives barricaded behind their own doors, why our neighbors have mostly become strangers. And the idea that the marriage still exists, even if a spouse must be commited to a prison or insane asylum, or if you have to separate in extreme circumstances, has been lost. The institution could be called a “martyrriage”, and that is DEFINITELY in our Tradition and part of a proper catechism, “the little martyrhood” of absorbing the sins of one’s spouse, and forgiving and loving, which really can be like martyrdom if they don’t reciprocate.

Every divorce in my old parish in Russia (and there were more than a dozen, where there were maybe a hundred regular parishioners) was a direct blow on my own marriage. I KNEW, when the first one of our friends went down, that every wife in church looked at each other and thought, “Could my husband also do that?” And the other divorces followed like dominos, and now that parish has fallen apart, divided by divorce before it was ever divided by politics. The community is irreparably broken and fragmented.

rusmeister said:

I think you misunderstand us, Father - at least, you misunderstand me. I, at least, am NOT talking ahout this particular pastoral case. There is a tiny chance - a miniscule chance - that such advice could be appropriate in this one specifc instance. No argument - you don’t need to keep repeating that. But we HAVE to speak in general, about what nearly all cases turn out to be.

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well, I do have to keep repeating it because others keep bringing it up. I wasn’t the one who initially brought any of this up. so, I am not misunderstanding you, rus.

rusmeister said:

Our own horrible sin, error, amartia, in this general issue is seeing marriage as purely individual, as being only “between the couple and God” and “nobody else’s business. But my marriage IS your business, insofar as we are part of one society or community. What I do affects you all, and were I to divorce, that would affect everyone in my community. A reliable “nation within a nation” is lost; a brick has been removed from the house and its structure correspondingly weakened. All of our neighbors and friends, to say nothing of in-laws, that counted on us being there as a family unit, as one thing - “The Smiths”, “the Robinsons” all of a sudden find a hole and a vacuum. I learned so much from Chesterton on the social effects that hardly any of us give the slightest thought to. “The Superstition of Divorce” made crystal clear to me WHY the hard teachings of our Church are right, WHY we do, generally speaking, need to learn to love our spouses when it becomes VERY hard, and generally speaking, we don’t want to. We want to run away, jump off a cliff, do anything in those hardest moments rather than love someone who is hurting us so badly. And we will swallow anything from the modern world, the modern “psych-“ sciences (insofar as they ARE science, that is, true knowledge of our nature), “self-help” books and gurus, rather than love someone who is behaving like our enemy, because loving your neighbor and loving your enemy are non-negotiables in our Faith, and possibly the hardest commandments. How on earth did we ever come to think we can make an exception for our spouse?

If one couple can divorce in the Church because of irreconcilable differences, then all couples can. All stability in the community is lost. And we wonder why we have lost all sense of community, why everyone now lives barricaded behind their own doors, why our neighbors have mostly become strangers. And the idea that the marriage still exists, even if a spouse must be commited to a prison or insane asylum, or if you have to separate in extreme circumstances, has been lost. The institution could be called a “martyrriage”, and that is DEFINITELY in our Tradition and part of a proper catechism, “the little martyrhood” of absorbing the sins of one’s spouse, and forgiving and loving, which really can be like martyrdom if they don’t reciprocate.

Every divorce in my old parish in Russia (and there were more than a dozen, where there were maybe a hundred regular parishioners) was a direct blow on my own marriage. I KNEW, when the first one of our friends went down, that every wife in church looked at each other and thought, “Could my husband also do that?” And the other divorces followed like dominos, and now that parish has fallen apart, divided by divorce before it was ever divided by politics. The community is irreparably broken and fragmented.

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I agree. not sure what this has to do with what we’re talking about.

abacabb3 said:

In this situation, the spouse with the mental illness is threatening to leave and the other spouse simply wants to keep the family together, but wants the other spouse to get help.

I have come to the conclusion that the clergy are little different than any other professional class. There are good doctors and bad doctors, few being the good. Good teachers and bad teachers, few being the good. Good mechanics and bad mechanics, few being the good.

The problem is clergymen are no different than these other professionals where they don't see their own ineptitude--and people trust their families to them. I have one priest told me he doesn't like being treated "like a censer monkey" and "automatic communion dispenser," confession booth, and the like. But in reality, unless you bring more to the table, simply wearing black does not automatically make someone respectable or even remotely close to good at their job. Sure, we the laity will nod our heads and be respectful for appearances sake, but it's not going to go further than that.

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The first sentence in your reply I totally understand. While I was coping with all that happened in my marriage, I was trying to keep the family together as well. I will say that I think this "keeping the family together" is more a female behavior than male. But that's generally speaking. I do agree that some clergymen are better at handling family or the personal struggles of individuals than others.