English
EspañolEach person is unique, and so are their lives and the loving relationships they build. It is an injustice to judge and condemn a person as if he were an abstract entity, a generic assumption. Because they are a person, each person has the right to a “personalized” consideration of his life and circumstances.
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“The divorced who have entered a new union, for example, can find themselves in a variety of situations, which should not be pigeonholed or fit into overly rigid classifications leaving no room for a suitable personal and pastoral discernment.” (The Joy of Love, n.298)
Commentary
Angela and Alberto were thrilled to get married. They had two children. Then, ten years into their marriage, they began having problems when Alberto lost his job. Angela found work with a good salary. Alberto, meanwhile, took care of the housework and searched for a job. The interviews he got became less and less frequent. Angela asked him daily if he had contacted any company. She began to suspect that Alberto had assumed a comfortable position: “They will not hire me, I cannot do anything about that. Angela´s salary covers the household expenses, and I am fine with this arrangement.” The arguments began and became quite frequent until Alberto, entangled in an extramarital relationship, decided to leave the house. Angela continued working and raising her children with incredible difficulty. Five years passed, and Alberto filed for divorce and married another woman. Alberto believes that each relationship begins and ends and that you need a different partner for each stage of life. The company where Angela used to work bankrupted, and she was left unemployed. She has met a well-to-do, childless widower who asks her out. Angela has asked him to stop calling her, fearing that this relationship might create conflict with her two children. However, she needs financial and social support. She constantly wonders how it can be possible that she still feels married, although abandoned, while Alberto, her ex, sees himself and lives as a “bachelor.”
To discern is to individualize a case. And this case requires analyzing if Alberto was indeed and validly married. The following generalization and anonymity are not valid: “every woman abandoned by an adulterous husband, if she married by the Church, is indissolubly married” because Angela and Alberto´s actual situation requires to be examined in detail. Lest that consent, given at the wedding, be faulty and invalid. For, whoever, when marrying, does not do so with the express will to give himself and embrace his spouse completely, faithfully, and for life, but only until it no longer suits him or until he falls in love with another person, is not validly married.
