Saving marriage? It’s possible

“How much is your ring worth?”, ask the members of Sychar’s Community, in the belief that “every marriage can be saved”. The Community, established in Warsaw ten years ago, helps all those going through a marriage crisis. Many of them, despite the problems in married lives, the suffering caused and experienced, wish to abide to the spousal vow. Some fifty prayer and support centres in Poland draw inspiration to Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan in Jacob’s well, in the city called Sychar, along the road from Jerusalem to Damascus, whose charisma is summed up in the statement: “The grace of the sacrament of marriage that patch up the union of a man and a woman, even the most complex and jeopardized ones”. Hope and forgiveness. During their meetings the members of Sychar pray and speak of hope and forgiveness, of husbands who despite another union and other children wish to return to their wife, and despite adultery wish to restore their conjugal life. “Marriage is a gift of God that offers married couples the strength they need to rebuild their bond even in the most difficult situations”, since “nothing is impossible to God”, recall the lay and religious moderators of the Community, highlighting the validity of the words pronounced before the Lord. They spoke of cases of repentance on the part of their spouse who returned after a separation “thanks to a force that is greater than us”: personal experiences of faithfulness and love, crowned by unexpected recovered happiness. The bishops’ appeal. In a recent statement issued at the beginning of February, the Polish episcopacy denounced “the attempts” to break down “the functional and axiological unity of marriage, the family, maternity and parenthood”, which lead “to the destruction of the ideal of marriage and of the reality of the family”. The prelates condemned “non-lasting relations lacking mutual responsibility”, which lead “to loneliness, sense of emptiness and anguish” and they expressed their concern “for the serious weakening of Polish families”, confirmed by the tragic demographic situation, by the growing number of divorces and single-parent families. Divorces and separations. Nonetheless, despite recent statistics – 64% of marriages in Poland in 2014 were concluded in accordance with the Concordat- the number of divorces is increasing. Over the past years out of 10 thousand couples married every year there have been 74 divorces, while the number of separations ranges from 2 to 3 thousand each year. There are very few cases of reconciliation of broken families and the large majority of separations end with a divorce. Only 34% of divorced parents enjoy a regime of joint custody. This situation, accompanied by an increase in the age of motherhood and the drop in birth rates, is bound to cause the Polish population to fall below 34 million (12% less compared to 2013.) Almost 370 thousand children were born in Poland in 2013. It is expected that some 250 thousand will be born in 2050. The concept of freedom. “Everything is going through a crisis, even marriage”, said Dominican Fr Miroslaw Pilsniak, involved in the pastoral care of the family and in the movement “Spotkania Malzenskie” (conjugal encounters) who considers “the way of conceiving personal freedom as the only form of recognized freedom” to be the main cause of marriage crisis. The religious pointed out that during meetings with married couples only some of them proved “capable of building responsible conjugal relations”. While many of them ascribe greater importance to “the individual right to happiness” and if reality is different from the imaginary ideal for them it becomes “a limitation to individual freedom”. “Today – he added – what counts is what is superficial and narcissistic while the ties between people are considered a limitation to individual autonomy”. “Spotkania Malzenskie” is another community of approximately 500 families that organizes “weekends for couples” across Poland. The Sychar Community is based on cooperation between religious, priests and married couples that animate spiritual exercises and encounters, as underlined by Pilsniak, “thanks to the gift of openness to dialogue”.