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Does the Catholic Church still teach that divorce is wrong, even sinful? And if so, why, especially given that so many Catholics are divorced? Leila Miller, author of Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak, explains what the Church teaches about divorce and why this teaching remains essential.
Cy Kellett:
Is divorce really that bad? Leila Miller, next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answer’s podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. And there appears to be an elephant in the room, that is in the room of our current cultural kind of predicament, and that elephant is divorce. There was a time when I think there was a general conversation about the breakdown of the family and the kind of abandonment of children and the negative consequences that that would have. It seems like our hearts have become a little hardened to that as the years have gone on and we haven’t solved that problem, and maybe there’s a sense of despair about it.
Cy Kellett:
But whether there is a sense of despair or not, we do have to acknowledge and continue to kind of challenge ourselves, our neighbors, our society, with the idea that if we continue to have such a high rate of failure in marriage, such a willingness to just accept divorce, even in cases where, though marriage is very difficult, it could be avoided, especially where children are present, we’re going to continue to have the kinds of problems we have in our society with isolation, loneliness, depression, addiction, violence, all those other things that, to be quite honest, are a consequence in many cases of the instability of families. Whether it’s the instability of one family or the instability of the many families in a town or in a city or across a whole society, it has consequences. Leila Miller is here to talk about what those consequences are.
Cy Kellett:
Leila Miller, thank you very much for being with us on Focus.
Leila Miller:
I’m so glad to be here, Cy. Thank you.
Cy Kellett:
You write on a wide variety of things, but I would guess chief among them is divorce. Is that right? Would you think that’s your primary area of…
Leila Miller:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Leila Miller:
About four or five years ago, that started to be the focus, kind of not really planned, but it worked out that way. As the Holy Spirit does, he kind of surprises you. So that’s been most of the focus of the last few years, yes.
Cy Kellett:
This is an area in which we Catholics, I would suppose, are more catechized than catechizing. We have taken the culture’s view rather than encouraging or helping the culture to take our view of marriage and divorce.
Leila Miller:
Right. I like to say that as Catholics, we are against divorce in theory, but not in practice. So we kind of know that we’re supposed to be against it and it’s bad, but when it comes down to it, especially when it’s our own suffering or our own family and friends, we tend to say, “Well, right, but this is the exception here or here or here.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. I see.
Leila Miller:
And so then when everybody’s doing that, it ends up being that we have almost the same amount of divorces as the secular culture.
Cy Kellett:
We do? Catholics have almost…
Leila Miller:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Leila Miller:
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Well, it’s disheartening, but one of the things we do here on Focus is we spend the time to get to the root of things, and the root here is what’s wrong with that? I mean, we have to start with why is that a problem? Because I don’t think people… Many people, I would say, would see the current situation regarding divorce as consistent with the general kind of humanizing and liberation of the past half century or so and wouldn’t see it as a negative. So why do we say it’s negative?
Leila Miller:
Right. And so the big challenge for Catholics always is to take ourselves out of whatever the current cultural sensibilities are, because whatever we’re in, whatever culture any era is in, that’s all we see. It’s all we know. It’s kind of like we’re swimming in it. So the challenge is always to say, “Okay, wait. I was born in this era. This is all I know. It seems comfortable to me the way we’re doing things.” But as Catholics, really, we have to take ourselves out of the present era and we have to say, “But what is the mind of the church on this issue?” Or, “What is the mind of Christ on this issue?”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Leila Miller:
We’re born into, most of us, an era of divorce, so it’s pretty common. Yeah, it was probably less common when I was a kid, in the ’70s or whatever, but now it’s just everywhere. It’s in the pews, everyone in the pews is divorced and remarried and all of that. But then we have to take a step back and say, “Okay, am I getting my complacency on this issue from Christ? I mean, is this how Christ wants me to think about it? Or am I getting this complacency because I’m living in this era?” And so we pick ourselves up, we take ourselves out of the present time and we think, “What is the mind of Christ on this issue? How has it always been before now?” And then we see a major difference, major difference, from the 1960s till now, and then everything that came before that was completely different.
Cy Kellett:
It seems to me, we have to communicate to people the why of it, though. And that’s what I’m trying to get at with you or I’d like to get at you is, well, okay. I mean, you can talk about how it was, but why? What is it about divorce? I mean, I suppose the base question that most people would say, “Well, who does it hurt really?” I mean, what’s the damage?
Leila Miller:
Yeah. And I wouldn’t have known how to answer that five years ago until I started talking to the adult children of divorce. And then I recognize that there are millions of walking wounded in this culture. And when we look at the culture and we realize we’re really going downhill in so many different ways. I mean, people are just disconnected and they’re depressed and they’re broken in so many ways. And families are obviously taking on many different shapes and forms and that’s not good for these kids in any number of ways. But then you realize, “Well, okay, if there’s a design for a child to be born into…” And we know this, we know that God designed marriage to be permanent in the garden. And we know that he designed that children would come into this union and that those children would have a natural right to have their married mom and dad and to be a raised in this intact family that gives security, education, the teaching of virtue. And it’s kind of this long haul process that happens when children come into a stable marriage.
Leila Miller:
And so you take that away from society or take that away from a child and you’ve pretty much shattered and blown to bits the foundation of a culture. So then you’ve got these kids who that’s all they know is a shattered foundation, and that times a million or times two million every year, whatever it is, and that is sort of the shredding of the fabric of a society. But we don’t recognize it because we don’t acknowledge that that’s part of what’s happening because we don’t talk about it. We don’t really talk about divorce being a bad thing anymore.
Cy Kellett:
Well, let me put it to you this way, though. We’ve had this divorce culture now for a couple of generations. If it were really harming society, then you would expect to see it in society. You would expect a society that would be angrier and more addicted, more sexualized.
Leila Miller:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Do you see evidence that we’re [crosstalk 00:07:30] seeing any of that?
Leila Miller:
Yeah, no, none at all.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, all right. I didn’t think so.
Leila Miller:
Right? None. No, none of this. No loneliness, no self-harm, no suicides going through the roof, no children who are depressed and anxious and adults who their lives are falling apart who can’t keep their own relationships together again and again and again. Addiction, like you said. No, none of that. And all these things are happening in our society, obviously they are, and we can’t quite put our finger on what is going on. And yet, and yet, and yet, we know as Catholics, we’ve said it a million times to each other and then outwardly and our popes have said it, as the family goes, so goes the world. We give lip service to this idea that the family is the foundation of every society, and we need healthy families to have a healthy society. So we know this, but it’s almost like we haven’t put the pieces together yet that all of these divorces are actually what we’re talking about. This is where you shatter the family. This is where the problem starts.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so here’s the thing, though. There may be some motivated reasoning in that, because if I say the family is this basic unit of society and its ill health means real damage to our society, that puts certain obligations on me. And this is something that we are… It almost seems that our society has said, “No, I’m just not accepting old-fashioned obligations.” We see ourselves as too enlightened for that.
Leila Miller:
Right. So the shift has come in an understanding that the goal of a human life used to be to be honorable, to be virtuous. Today it is to be “happy.” So once we made that shift and we said, “Well, we need to be comfortable. We need to be happy. We especially, especially need to be happy in our romance.” Adults have this right, this is what we say, to be in a romantic relationship that is fulfilling to us. This is our right. And so any children that maybe were a part of the first union before I got divorced or whatever happened there, they will understand that that is kind of the unwritten rule is that, well, the adults have a right to be happy. And so they go along with it. Well, I mean, there’s a million reasons why they have to go along with it, it’s not like they have a choice, but that is really the unspoken narrative of the culture and sometimes spoken narrative of the culture, but also the parents as well. So the kids can’t really push back on that.
Leila Miller:
But there was a shift that you would… Earlier, again, to be honorable and to be virtuous, well, what would you have to undergo? Well, you’d have to undergo certain amounts of suffering. You’d have to undergo the cross. You’d have to carry a cross through to holiness or wherever God was taking you with that cross. It was not seen as something to avoid at all costs. And then that shift happened and it’s like, “Absolutely not. We refuse the cross. We do not want the cross. We do not want to suffer.” And we have everybody cheerleading us on. We want to see everybody happy, don’t we? I mean, we just want to see everybody feel good and be happy because it makes us uncomfortable, too, to see someone struggling in a marriage, let’s say.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, so the message isn’t, “I see you struggling in your marriage. I’m your friend, and I’m here for you. And maybe it’ll take five years, maybe it’ll take 10 years for you to work through these things with your spouse, but I’m not going to abandon you.” Instead of that, it’s, “I’m here for you in that you deserve to be happy. And so let’s get you a divorce and we’ll all go to Cancun and celebrate, and then we’ll move on to the next one.”
Leila Miller:
100% correct, yes.
Cy Kellett:
It’s a kind of friendship that is in itself an assault on marriage. It’s not doing the things that-
Leila Miller:
It is. I often say it’s almost like the serpent whispering in someone’s ear. I mean, it sounds really good. Like, “I am taking your side. I am really… What? He said what to you? In what tone? You don’t deserve that.” You can almost hear that whisper of the serpent. It’s like, “What? You can get out of this. You can be happy.” And so that starts to feed… Of course, if somebody is wounded and feels put upon and feels upset about things and you’ve got friends who rally around and say, “You don’t deserve that, and God wouldn’t want you to suffer like that.” And so then you say, “Well, that’s right. He wouldn’t.” And then the apparatus comes in. Everybody’s okay with you getting out, leaving and starting again, because of course you need to be happy. You need to get it right, and you just didn’t this first time.
Cy Kellett:
And especially if you saw your parents do the same thing.
Leila Miller:
Absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
I mean, I do think, and I’m sure you’ve seen this phenomenon too. There are the children of divorce who are like, “I’m never doing that to my children.” And so they have almost an opposite reaction, which in many cases is heroic. They’re not going to do that to their children, and good for them. But probably the more common thing is, well, once you’ve been instructed or shown that divorce is a legitimate option, you reach a place that many marriages reach where this feels like death. This doesn’t feel like life, and you go, “Well, the natural next step is divorce.”
Leila Miller:
Right. And when your modeling has been conflict leads to permanent separation, and then you start to have conflict, of course, that’s the model that you’ve seen. You haven’t learned, you don’t have any tools to figure out how to stay and how to heal. And so, when I edited the book Primal Loss, it was 70 adult children of divorce giving me answers to eight questions. And there was a mix of that when I asked, what about when it comes to your own relationships? How has your parents’ divorce affected that? And it was a mix. You’d have the people who said, “I knew that I would never put my children through that pain. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy. I would never do that.” And they mean it. Some of them, however, then couldn’t follow through and actually stay in a marriage because they don’t have the tools and/or they married someone who left them because they chose unwisely because they didn’t have the tools, again, to figure out [crosstalk 00:13:55] what a healthy-
Cy Kellett:
To make the right choice.
Leila Miller:
Right. And then we have these other… This was actually astounding to me. There were several people who went into the marriage, their own marriages, knowing that they were not going to get divorced, but they were so insecure. Like, when I married Dean, I was very comfortable marrying him. It was like, “Yep, it’s for life, no big deal.” Because my parents had been married forever and it was not a source of angst for me whatsoever. But I didn’t realize that for the children of divorce, and they may not even consciously know that this is why they’re so anxiety ridden, but they’ll go into a marriage, and the underlying anxiety of, “When is he going to leave? When am I going to leave? When am I going to need to be a single mother?”
Leila Miller:
One woman said she would for the first 20 years of her marriage to a saint, she said, “My husband is a saint.” She would squirrel away money in her sock drawer because she’s like, “I’m going to be a single [crosstalk 00:14:48].”
Cy Kellett:
Because the day’s coming.
Leila Miller:
The day is coming. They don’t see it as possible that they could have a successful marriage and that this wouldn’t happen to them. But the anxiety that that produces, and in the men as well. There was one man that told me he just kept testing his wife all the time. “When is she going to leave me? How bad do I have to be before she’s going to just up and leave?” But the anxiety that it produced was so bad that a couple of them even said that they were suicidal at some points. And this was nothing that was happening externally. I mean, nothing in their marriage was going wrong. But they just interiorly could not deal with [crosstalk 00:15:21].
Cy Kellett:
All this was brought into the marriage.
Leila Miller:
… with just this reality of being married. So, we don’t fully understand how deeply a divorce, which is again against the natural order, it’s against the natural law, how that affects a child. Not just in the time that the divorce is happening, but then into the future years and into the future relationships. “It’s the gift that keeps on taking,” as one of them said.
Cy Kellett:
So the conventional wisdom, “Don’t stay together for the children because the children are just going to be unhappy,” that is just wrong.
Leila Miller:
It’s absolutely wrong. It’s absolutely wrong.
Cy Kellett:
But it’s promoted as wisdom. That’s the wisdom of the world.
Leila Miller:
It is, and here’s the irony is that secular social science actually falls in line with the Catholic Church on this issue. You have a mountain of evidence that shows that, except for the most extreme cases of abuse and danger, and of course, we can talk about that too. That can require physical separation, which is what the church allows in that condition. But the vast majority of divorces are low conflict marriages. And social science shows that the long-term effects on these kids is not good. So the idea that we shouldn’t stay together for the children, well, it also implies that a family doesn’t also belong to the children. I mean, it’s the children’s family that you’re taking away.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, Leila, what a point. What a wonderful point, yes.
Leila Miller:
So I always tell people-
Cy Kellett:
This is their possession too.
Leila Miller:
This is their right.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Leila Miller:
Exactly. But see, we’ve switched. Again, we’ve switched from the understanding of marriage from being that this is an institution ordained by God, or it’s a natural law institution that everybody can see in any culture, that brings forth children and that these children need the stabilizing force of their parents. We’ve changed that, that that was a right that children have, a natural right to their parents. We’ve switched it since the ’60s or so to that marriage is, it’s an adult situation. It’s about adult relationships and it’s about romance. And kids come in. Yeah, I have kids. Okay, that’s right. But it’s not really about them.
Leila Miller:
But that’s not true. I mean, it’s never been true. It’s always been about the kids. It’s always been the only reason that the state, for example, in any culture in any country has had a vested interest in promoting marriage. The state doesn’t have a vested interest in promoting a romance, there’s no reason for that, unless it’s a unique type of relationship that brings children into it and that’s what stabilizes society. So even marriage itself, we always used to know, it is entirely about the children. I mean, they’re involved in it. They’re as much at stake as the adults in there. So I tell people if they’re thinking of helping or convincing their friends that they could go ahead and get divorced, it’s like, “Well, you then will be instrumental, you know this, in the destruction of a child’s family.”
Cy Kellett:
That’s such a wonderful way to word it. It makes it so much clearer what’s really going on. It’s not just that the child is going to have two bedrooms now, instead of one bedroom, that at root is not what it is. Something that belongs to the child is being shattered.
Leila Miller:
Yes. It’s an injustice to the child.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Leila Miller:
And so one of the ways that people say, “Well, how can we help these poor children of divorce? There are millions and millions of them.” I have found that some of them who’ve, the parents may have been divorced decades earlier, and the children now are in their middle age. They have never been told by anyone, they’ve never heard the words, that what was done to you and what was done to your family was wrong. That it’s an injustice that was perpetuated upon you as a child and it should not have happened. What we do instead, and I think it’s because we want to trick ourselves into thinking everything’s going to be fine. We kind of do this with abortion too. “It’s all going to be fine. We’re just going to get this over with, and then we’re going to move on and everything’s going to be okay.” But it’ll catch up to everyone. Right?
Leila Miller:
So what we need to do, and this is very healing, is be the first person maybe that would tell someone, even in their thirties or forties or fifties, “This was wrong. It was an injustice. It shouldn’t have happened that way.” And the reason that the culture says it’s okay is because we want it to be okay. We really do. I mean, we don’t want to know what we’re really doing to these children. We don’t want to hear it. We don’t want to believe it. And so we make this narrative that is false, that is, “The kids are resilient. They’re going to be fine.” And then we move along.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Kids are resilient, but that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to do things that test their resilience.
Leila Miller:
There you go. There you go. Right, exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay. So if I may then, because we started with you talking about the mind of Christ, and I started by saying to you, we’re more catechized than catechizing as Catholics. To your mind, does the Catholic Church have a role to play in restoring marriage as a permanent institution in the wider society, but also restoring marriage to what it is supposed to be within the Christian community? I mean, maybe we can’t help. Maybe we can’t save society, but can we at least be the Catholic Church in which marriages are presumed to be permanent, and that presumption actually gives people the strength to live out their vocation of marriage?
Leila Miller:
Absolutely. And in fact, what most people don’t know, is that Canon law says just that, that marriage enjoys the favor of the law. We are to presume that these marriages are permanent. We are to presume that marriages are valid. I know, just because I’ve been in the laity for all my 54 years, I know that there’s kind of this little buzz out there that always, when someone starts to suffer, you always tell your friends, “Your marriage probably isn’t valid anyway.” You know?
Cy Kellett:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leila Miller:
And so we have a lot of this buzz going on where it’s like, “Well, you can probably get out of it.” That happens in the Catholic Church a lot. And in the wider culture, we as Catholics… Again, if I had my way, which I don’t, and I’m outspoken on this, of course, I’m a pretty outspoken person. But no fault divorce, I mean, I know we as a Catholic Church, we talk a lot about abortion, which we should, it’s genocide. It’s actually the murder of human beings, of innocent human beings. But the death of families through no fault divorce, which was introduced in the ’60s and then just spread throughout the whole country, I think we took it lying down. I don’t think there was any fight.
Cy Kellett:
We did, yeah. Right. I think that’s right. Yeah.
Leila Miller:
And we don’t talk about it at all now. We can still say, “Oh, abortion is wrong. We’re against it,” all that. But we never say, “No fault divorce in America is wrong. It is dead wrong. It should never have happened.” Some people would argue, and I might even argue, that it is the single most destructive thing we’ve ever done.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And after it was sold as… everywhere, it was sold as, “This will be a few marginal cases, this will make it easier. It’s never going to become this mainstream thing that everyone resorts to.”
Leila Miller:
Right, exactly. Yeah. And of course the exact opposite happened, which is the same thing with abortion, right? “Oh, well, we just need to make it legal [crosstalk 00:22:37] so that it’s not dangerous.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, a few hard cases around the edge.
Leila Miller:
Right. And it just exploded. Now everybody’s pretty much okay with it and we’ve gotten used to it. Again, we’re still giving it a little pushback, thank goodness, because I think it’s more that we can see that there is a dead body, that there is something that is more violent. But with no fault divorce, we just kind of quietly went along with it. We took it and we have ignored it, and it’s to devastating effect.
Leila Miller:
I mean, you cannot calculate… The catechism says it. Nobody ever goes to the catechism and reads the section on divorce. But if you read that section, it talks about the traumatic… It uses the words traumatic, the trauma that comes to children and the abandoned spouse. It talks about divorce as a contagion. It talks about divorce as a plague on society. It talks about the effects for generations. It talks about bringing disorder to society. All of these are catastrophic type terms and we never talk about it, never. I mean, I can’t tell you. I mean, like I said, I stumbled into this, but people don’t really want to talk about it.
Cy Kellett:
But it is hard to talk about. I mean, I’m not trying to make an excuse. I’m just trying to set a scenario for you and get your response to it. But it is hard to talk about because so many people have a complicated relationship to whatever you would say. I remember as a child, growing up in a very, very Catholic home and it being clearly taught, always, all the time, marriage is forever. You marry and you’re married. And this was supported by the priests and whatnot. But I can see today, well, the priest that starts to preach that way, he’s got to consider every child of divorce. How are they hearing this about their parents? Every person who’s divorced. The person who is the victim of divorce, because I think this is more common than we are willing to talk about, too, is the person who, “I didn’t want a divorce. I kept my end of the commitment.” So again, Leila, I’m not trying to make an excuse. I just feel like, well, how are you supposed to talk about it in this extremely charged atmosphere?
Leila Miller:
Right. It takes an incredible amount of courage today to talk about it. I always say there’s two virtues maybe most lacking in this culture today. One is chastity and the other is courage. Nobody wants to be the bad guy or the person who’s going to make someone feel bad. Again, I always go back to, and I’ve written on this, too, for Catholic Answers, actually, the similarities between the arguments for divorce and the arguments for abortion, they’re the same, they’re identical. So it is the same argument that is often used when people say, “Well, you can’t get up and preach about abortion because there could be someone in the congregation who… That would really hurt the woman who had an abortion. Maybe she’s even confessed it already, but it’s very painful. We don’t want to bring it up.”
Leila Miller:
I think it’s even more so with divorce because some of the best Catholics we know are divorced, annulled, remarried. Their children maybe have gone through a lot of pain during that process. And we don’t really want to go there, because maybe the situation is regularized and everything’s okay. Maybe there’s other people who they don’t have a regularized situation and they’re actually still in sin. And yet they’re our friends, they’re our family. They’re people that are contributing to the parish. They’re people on the parish council. I mean, it is fraught with danger to talk about it because [crosstalk 00:26:27].
Cy Kellett:
It is.
Leila Miller:
People are unhappy. They don’t want to hear it. But again, if we’re not going to talk about it, if we don’t talk about the unpopular truths, who are we? I mean, Christ made it really clear that it was going to be uncomfortable to speak the truth. I mean, as he was standing before Pilot, he said, “The reason I have come into the world was to testify to the truth.” And shortly thereafter, they crucified him. So, I mean, it’s not easy to speak the truth when it’s an unpopular truth. Again, in this particular era, it’s a very unpopular truth, so nobody wants to do it.
Cy Kellett:
No, right, right.
Leila Miller:
You have to find a way to do it in a gentle way. This was interesting. I had one lady who was abandoned, she and her five children. The husband was very Catholic. They had been married in a Catholic ceremony. It was very Catholic family. And he up and left for some other woman. And don’t get me wrong. This happens the other way too. More women now are leaving than men. But this was just this example. And she said, “When people say they don’t want to preach on it,” because they don’t want to disturb anyone, she said, “I want to tell those priests, my children and I already know the evil of divorce. We have lived it. We are living it every day with this pain. The idea of someone actually acknowledging that pain from the pulpit is actually soothing to us. It would be amazing to us to hear [crosstalk 00:28:02]”
Cy Kellett:
Someone validate our experience.
Leila Miller:
“… to have my children hear that this wasn’t how it’s supposed to be. Something went terribly wrong, and that this isn’t how God designed it. It’s not how it’s supposed to be.” So she was actually begging for a homily saying, “This is wrong. What happened was wrong.” So, it’s a mixed bag. You’re going to get people who don’t want to hear it, but there are people dying to hear it. There are some children, like I said, who are in their middle age now, who, if they just got one priest saying-
Cy Kellett:
“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
Leila Miller:
“I’m sorry that happened to you.” I heard one homily in my whole 54 years so far on divorce and the pain and the evil of divorce, and it was from my Bishop, Bishop Olmsted. One homily in 54 years, and I almost fell off my pew. I was 50 years old at the time. That’s how long it took to hear one. And it was astounding. It was absolutely astounding. And nothing he said was untrue and he’s a very gentle soul. And he was able to do a wonderful job with it. It might take some preparation, but it needs to be talked about.
Cy Kellett:
Some of the Catholic reluctance is also, I think, a lack of faith. I mean, we don’t actually believe… I mean, so many of us are trapped in a kind of bad catechesis in which the Eucharist isn’t really Eucharistic. Jesus is kind of the son of God but not quite the son of God. So, we do tend to say, “Well, sure Jesus taught that, but that doesn’t have to be…” We’ve made progress, in other words, since then. And so there’s a lack of understanding that you don’t progress beyond the word of God. You progress by internalizing the word of God.
Leila Miller:
That’s a really good point, because people do think, “Well, we’re kind of enlightened now. We believe this. Oh, sure, we believe this.” But do they really believe it? I mean, that’s the question. I often say, the people who say they’re believers, but then everything they do undermines what they say they believe. Are they really believers? I mean, we have to ask ourselves that too.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, sure.
Leila Miller:
I ask myself that all the time.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Leila Miller:
I’m like, “Wow, if I really believed this or that, then wouldn’t I act differently?” So I do think part of it is that we like what it sounds like, we like being against sin, against divorce, unless it personally affects us. Again, unless it affects us or our loved ones and it makes us feel uncomfortable or it makes us get to the point where we might lose friends or we might lose status in someone’s eyes, or we might be called a name, “You’re mean.” And then we run from that. We don’t want it.
Cy Kellett:
Well, let me ask you this about… Before we have to go, because we kept you a long time and I’m very grateful that you took the time for it. And I’ll let people know about where they can get your books before we end, Primal Loss being the first of your two divorce books, Impossible Marriages Redeemed, the more hopeful second of the books.
Leila Miller:
Yes, yes.
Cy Kellett:
But I have to say, it’s really disturbing and disheartening to hear that Catholics are divorcing at the same rate as the general population, because we actually do a thing called marriage preparation in the Catholic Church. Is that a total failure?
Leila Miller:
Okay. I have a unique perspective on marriage prep. It’s obviously important. We need to do it. All the previous generations before the last few decades, we didn’t have any marriage prep. It was done remotely through your parents and just the community and the support of the culture. We have really, really good marriage prep, for example, in my Phoenix diocese, really thorough. I know it because I was trained in doing it and I know it’s very thorough. I also know that as soon as suffering comes, and it does to every marriage, I have seen the same people who have gone through that marriage prep get divorced because there’s no tools. There’s no help for them. There’s very little help once the cross comes to stay in the marriage.
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Leila Miller:
So we need more of that end. I am all for good, good marriage prep. But when push comes to shove and the pain really hits and someone has an affair and someone starts to drink and someone is mean and someone loses a job, whatever, we have to find a way to help that couple at the crisis. And we’re not very good at that right now. I mean, there’s Retrouvaille, which is good, and people refer to Retrouvaille.
Cy Kellett:
It is.
Leila Miller:
But that is not a parish issue. It’s not going to help everyone. It’s a weekend and then there’s some follow-up, doesn’t always work. There’s got to be something else, again, this is opening a whole other can of worms, but there has to be something that when the actual pain is hitting and everybody wants you out of that pain and everybody’s telling you… And you’ve got no fault divorce, which will absolutely get you out a hundred percent of the time. And you’ve got ways to… hopefully you remarry in the church again and that’s open to you and everybody tells you about that. But where is the stop? “Stop, take divorce off the table and let’s get you some real help.” That is what every parish needs and what every priest knows how to do, and we don’t have that yet. So until that time, we’re kind of behind the eight ball.
Cy Kellett:
That’s very, very helpful. Thank you. Leila Miller, it’s been a great pleasure talking with you. Thank you.
Leila Miller:
Thanks, Cy, so much.
Cy Kellett:
And thank you for all your work too.
Leila Miller:
Thank you.
Cy Kellett:
Leila Miller is one of the authors of this book, she wrote it with our own Trent Horn, Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues. It’s a great book and we need books like this to help us as parents talk about, our little children, our middle-schoolers and our teens, about these difficult things so that maybe they’ll have a little bit of internal resistance to just going with the flow with society. And part of that resistance is teaching them, again, that despite all that has happened in our own families, in our own society, marriage really is the foundation of a happy life, a whole life, a healthy life, a full life. All of the social science points that way, but I think we know that even without the social science. The social science just gives us another level of certainty about the importance of marriage and the importance of living in a society that takes marriage to be a permanent union between a man and a woman for the welfare of children, for the raising of children, for the making of family.
Cy Kellett:
So I highly recommend this book to you, especially if you’ve got kids in the house, Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues. I want to thank Leila Miller for coming in and doing the interview with us. If you have any comments, if you maybe have a follow-up question, something you’d like us to explore further in the future, just send us an email, focus@catholic.com, focus@catholic.com.
Cy Kellett:
Also, if you are listening on any of the services where you get a podcast, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, please subscribe, that way you’ll be notified and also it helps us to grow the podcast. And if you give us a nice review there, maybe five star review, that, too, will help to grow the podcast. On YouTube, if you prefer to watch on YouTube, just go down there somewhere and like and subscribe. And if you want to support us, you can do that by going to givecatholic.com. Whatever amount you give, little note there that says, “This is for Catholic Answers Focus.” That’ll also help us to pay for this podcast. Again, thanks to Leila Miller. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.