Customer Reviews

Growing in Faith When a Catholic Marriage Fails: For Divorced or Separated Catholics and Those Who Minister with Them

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In day to day life, when I meet people and discuss the fact that I build and write for Catholic web sites, I occasionally encounter individuals who are bitterly separated from the Church owing to circumstances involving an ended marriage. The common denominators in these meetings are the sense of pain I feel emanating from the separated brethren, and the discomfort I feel in advising them on how to reconcile with the Church.

Thanks to a new book from Catholic author and mother of six Antoinette Bosco, I now have the perfect resource to offer these types of friends and acquaintances. Growing in Faith When a Catholic Marriage Fails: For Divorced or Separated Catholics and Those Who Minister with Them (Resurrection Press, July 2006, paperback, 128 pages) is the perfect resource for any Catholic wanting to know more about the Church's ministry to those whose marriages have ended. Bosco, herself a divorced Catholic, shares not only her own personal story and perspective but also the truth about Church teachings, doctrine and processes. This book is a work of great love, encouragement and hope. For those dealing with ended marriages, it offers support and practical wisdom. I plan to keep copies on hand to share with those I meet who need support an advice when dealing with the difficult issues of divorce.

Antoinettte Bosco must receive a Doctorate in Catholic Moral Theology, honoris causi, due to her perceptive and holy work. Not only is she for Ignatius Press the interviewer and biographer of the undeclared American saint Mother Benedict: Foundress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis, but she also turns the first hand tragedies of her own life into lessons in our Catholic moral theology, its practice, its compassionate evangelical essence and its pragmatic politics.

For instance upon the tragic loss of clse family members, she reinforces our Church's teachings against the death penalty in her profoundly moving work Choosing Mercy: A Mother of Murder Victims Pleads to End the Death Penalty, written with orthodox fervor in close line with numerous Vatican dogmatic statements and our own Catholic Bishop's The Culture of Life & the Penalty of Death. Within this book she provides a personal witness and prayerful reflection opposite that which we so often see upon the evening news of family members calling for a false and fanciful "closure" which by our Church and Our Lord can only be found within the mystery of forgiveness, and a courageous acceptance, and prayer for the compassionate grace of God. In her book, Bosco makes such teachings hard reality, and thus provides us all the strength to live in God's grace and compassionate Love, the strength to accept and to forgive and to love once again in peace. She with a mother's love and a mother's loss guides us gracefully and fearlessly back to God's infinite love, and peace, in spite of our profound personal pain unending within this mortal earth which will only found closure within the eternal and perfect Love of Heaven.

So within this courageously generous book as well, in which Bosco opens to our understanding her own heart and her own deepest loss and pain and pilgrimage towards redemption and life. She firmly guides us once more, sharing our own human weakness and guilt and fears, along the road through the stages of grief, in denial and anger and bargaining back to acceptance and forgiveness and to love, to life and even once more unbelieveably unto laughter.

Every Catholic minister and cleric must read this book. In our secular culture which promotes over one half of every marriage to fail, every Catholic must read this book. One half of that failed partnership in one half of every American marriage which fails might be without fault, might be the victim of deceit, of abuses we cannot imagine, might have done the very best they could within a very bad situation, praying for peace, believing in the sacredness of the matrimonial sacrament as an incarnate divine mystery, an outward sign of God's own Love, and yet it all fell apart and the center could not hold. This book teaches us how and why a divorce cannot allow us to drive the divorced from our midst as a pariah, but rather most deeply embrace the walking wounded within our faith comunity, our church, our strongest prayers and our love. We must not permit the perhaps sinful situation of divorce, which turned out in the very end to be the only possible fruit of a marriage gone bad, to be the staging ground for deeper sin and ultimate despair. A divorce is the time for our Church to show her deepest compassion for her abandoned children. Saint James writes we practice truest religion in comforting widows and orphans in their distress. The divorced are de facto widows, their children orphaned; let us provide every comfort we can in every way that we can as a proof of our Faith and our Following of Our Lord's example and commandments. How will it be upon the last day as we are led aside with the other goats as God says: "I was thirsty and you did not give me to drink; hungry and you did not feed me; ill and you did not visit me; imprisoned and you did not liberate me; was divorced and you did not pray with me nor share even a comforting cup of coffee with me."

Our Lord Jesus was loudly condemned by the righteous religious of His time for eating with those whom they considered prostitutes and other sinners. Now He certainly joins with those who most need Him amongst the lonesome community of those who have been divorced. We must do no less.

But that's just me. Bosco writes so much more beautifully, helping us to find when a Catholic marriage fails a time for growing in the Faith. This excellent, comprehensive if fairly brief treatise, published by Catholic Book Publishing/Resurrection Press, includes great reference materials to other Catholic resources, including the Reverend Father Raboir's Prayers for Catholics Experiencing Divorce and Father John Catoir's inspiring, reviving Joy: The Spirit's Gigantic Secret Behind the Church's Survival. Other resources suggested from Catholic Printing Houses include Ave Maria Press's Healing the Wounds of Divorce: A Spiritual Guide to Recovery and the Abbey Press's publication under a similar title written by Ruth and David Stipp. Bosco also suggests contacting the website of the North American Conference of Separated and Divorced Catholics.

I suggest strongly we all read her book, in order the better to understand, accept, forgive and love those members of our Faith who have suffered this epidemic of separation and divorce, and to embrace all as ever within our Church community. Let us be thankful for each day we each share one with the other, and let us Read this Book. We read here a courageous and faithful and dedicated Catholic witness, one which once more leads us all, everyone together, closer to our Faith. As in Choosing Mercy, Bosco does our Church, and all of us, a great and compassionate and illuminating service.

Highly recommended for ministers and the faithful, the fallen away who feel they find no place in the Kingdom and for the most carefully committed who feel that place is for them alone. We are all one family and must care for one another as commanded, as God cares for us. Each day we find wounded left along the road. Let us be that Good Samaritan for one another, and thus fulfill the will of God.