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By losing “the sacred sense of marriage, we’ll end up by considering it merely as a private contract and consequently established at a person’s own discretion and dependent on personal choice, that may change and lead to breakdown”. This is the view of the Spanish Episcopal Conference after the government’s approval last week of a new law on rapid divorce. The reform, which now awaits ratification by Parliament and should enter into force by 2006, permits civil unions to be dissolved in only two months. The bishops say they are “deeply worried” by this provision that “very probably will cause more divorces and greater suffering”. In their view, “the law starts out not from a sound anthropological conception of marriage as a fundamental social institution, but from an individualistic ideology that reduces it to a mere private contract”. A conception of this type, they observe, “makes the indissolubility of marriage incomprehensible”: “A commitment for the whole of life would in practice be impossible and could even become insupportable. In this perspective, divorce is conceived as a right that includes an opt-out clause as a condition for contracting a marriage, in the event of its breakdown. This mentality introduces a structural instability into married life, that makes it incapable of coping with the crises and difficulties that will inevitably arise”. “As happens in the case of other sad realities of our society conclude the Spanish bishops the cultural mode of presenting divorce aims to conceal the suffering human, psychological and social caused by marriage breakdowns. With the refrain of ‘starting a new life’ perhaps with ‘another partner’ it is claimed that this suffering can be relieved by simplifying the technical problems (legal, economic), but without tackling the real anthropological and ethical problems”. In the opinion of Msgr. José Gea Escolano, bishop of Mondoñedo-Ferrol in Galicia, the new law “destroys the concept of family” and “facilitates marriages of convenience”. He urges that a distinction be drawn between “what is legal and what is moral”, because “not all laws are moral”. The bishop admits there are “situations to be resolved”, but says that “resolving them does not mean destroying the models that shape married life”. Msgr. José Gea asks whether making divorce easier is “progress” and thinks that “the law will favour the growth of children from broken homes”, bereft of points of reference. The bishop sees in this law a “somewhat dated anti-religious attitude” and he asks: “Those who are on the side of so-called progress: do they know where they want to go?” Bishop Gea, known in Spain for his writings on catechesis and the family, appeals to society and asks for discernment and “reactions to the reform of the law on divorce”, given that “the stability of marriage is at stake”. The Spanish Forum of the Family calls the reform “a total disdain for marriage”.
