THE AGE OF NO-FAULT DIVORCE, THE JEWELER'S SHOP, AND THE NEED FOR NATURAL MARRIAGE.

• Author: Orlandi, Marianna

"... because man will not endure in man forever and man will not suffice." (1) INTRODUCTION

"Captatio benevolentiae." Since the beginning of literature, we know of this rhetorical technique, meant to capture the benevolence of the audience. The next few lines, however, are far more than a rhetorical attempt: they are a confession and an important opening statement.

Before anyone reads the following pages on marriage, on divorce, and on what--I believe--St. John Paul II tried to tell us about them all with this little play, I would like to specify that I am neither a marriage specialist, a theologian, a social scientist, or a psychologist. Furthermore, I am not even married. Yet, I feel fully equipped to talk about these issues. I am a legal scholar who studied marriage, both in its Civil and Canon Law dimension, at Padua Law School. During the past few years, I explored its natural law tradition, working as a teaching assistant for Professor Robert P. George at Princeton. Currently, I work for a social science research institute whose core mission is to support and promote research on the status of the family and provide evidence for its beneficial effects on all its members, as well as on the broader culture. Nevertheless, the main reason I am compelled to talk about our current crisis in love and marriage is that I am a child of this generation: a child of divorce. I witnessed firsthand the truths and lies about marital love that this play uncovers, all of which our current culture is often unwilling to acknowledge. Yet, in this play, I see a way forward.

In this play, I glimpsed at a marriage that stands on solid ground. At the same time, I recognized the wounds and struggles that, being born and raised in a broken family, I carried with me well into my late thirties--wounds which, as my work with young students testifies to every day, are now very common.

Currently, the fear of getting married is omnipresent. It is often stronger in individuals who are themselves children of divorce--social scientists argue that they seem less likely to get and to stay married. (4) But as sociology and personal experience confirms, whatever happens in a community touches all its members. (5) If your neighbors get a divorce, your own child might come to doubt marital love as well. If your friends sign prenuptial agreements, you might be tempted to do the same. The laws that reshaped marriage and divorce played a pedagogic role in our lives and so did the legion of bad examples and narratives that populate culture and media.

Yet our current crisis of marriage has a much deeper root. It did not originate in the availability of divorce but preceded this "freedom." A wrong understanding of marriage and of marital love paved the way for and necessitated the enactment of laws that fail to do justice to the differences that pass between all sorts of amicable bonds and the institution of the natural family.

Thanks to Wojtyla's play, I felt better able to access the hearts of my own parents and was invited to wonder what it was that their marriage lacked. Shortly after finishing the work, I called my father and asked him a question about his love for my mother and about his decision to leave us. For once, my father, a lawyer and great orator, could not answer me. The Jeweler's Shop prompts us to look at and to question our realities and stories from a deeper perspective.

In this play, finally, St. John Paul II indicates some of the reasons we get marriage wrong, including in the more conservative circles, where willpower seems to be a substitute rather than a supporting structure for charity. The play's characters mirror the way society thinks about marriage--as a somewhat superfluous human endeavor, one which we may not need to live happy lives and thus can abandon whenever we do not find it fulfilling. My work at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture has given me the privileged chance to talk with young students who do not necessarily belong to the mainstream culture. These students believe in marriage, want to start a family, and are aware of the sacrifices that this will involve. Nevertheless, they are the product and heirs of what I call the "age of no-fault divorce," one in which marriage is no longer a foundation and a "natural" passage. It is instead a capstone. (6) Marriage comes--if ever--after one has been educated and settled down. It is an accessory, a cherry on top of a well finished cake that alone could already satisfy our hunger for love.

Marriage is now seen as a capstone and an "accident," I believe, for two main reasons. First, being born in the age of no-fault divorce, we assume that our marriages may not last forever, regardless of whom we marry. Divorce is free and available to all, regardless of the reason. As a result, no one wishes to invest a whole life on marriage, let alone ground one's entire future upon it. On a more profound level, since the '50s, what some have called the soulmate idea of marriage (7) became the aspirational model shared by conservatives and progressives alike, at least in the West. When thinking of marriage, most of us now think that there is such thing as the right one: another human being who could make us fully happy (be it because of our mutual feelings, or because of the spouses' shared religious beliefs). We believe we can and should wait until we find him/her or else we should remain unmarried. In other words, even before the introduction of no-fault divorce, our culture had already lost sight of our very nature: a relational and sexually complimentary anthropology that demands permanent and generative commitment.

I believe this little play suggests humans do not get married merely because we want to, but rather because we need to. The Jeweler's Shop speaks to the mistaken assumptions about marriage (e.g., that they are accidental, temporary, self-centered) (8) that are typical of our age and then illuminates the right way forward. With this play, Karol Wojtyla tells us all that divorce is an illusion, regardless of what the law allows or forbids, because nothing can ever be undone. He also shows us that our inevitably imperfect marriages are the sole way to find that real Love which we all hunger for. As a legal scholar, I suggest that the laws on marriage and divorce should change not so that families can be made stronger or children can be better off, but rather because the indissoluble nature of marriage as the union between a man and a woman is a reality that precedes the law. The current need for marriage, in its permanent dimension, is a demand of our anthropology, a request of our immortal and relational souls.

Precisely like every other fundamental right, the institution of marriage is neither a concession nor an entitlement, but the acknowledgment of a human reality. Yet differently from any other right, marriage is a reality--and a right--that perfects our individual selves. (9) What Wojtyla philosophically defends in "Love and Responsibility," and poetically tells us in this play (10) is that love and marriage, like every other right, must rest on the "personalistic principle," (11) according to which every "person is the kind of good which does not admit of use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end." (12) Marriage gives us the unique opportunity to live this principle in "its positive form" too, which as Wojtyla tells us, "confirms this: the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love." (13)

THE JEWELER'S SHOP: THE BACKGROUND

It was 1960 when The Jeweler's Shop first appeared in writing, published in the Polish Catholic monthly Znak ("The Sign"), under Karol Wojtyla's literary pseudonym Andrzej Jawien. (14) By this time, the author was already the auxiliary bishop of Krakow. This little-known play, however, was not a first in Wojtyla's literary career.

Long before becoming a Pope, and even before discerning a religious vocation, young Karol had a deep interest in letters and theater. (15) Since his childhood in Wadowice, he participated as a lead actor in school plays which he also helped direct. Later, as a student in Krakow, he was a member of three theater groups and eventually founded, with his friend Dr. Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, the Rhapsodic Theater. (16) Theater was a central outlet for Wojtyla's thoughts and meditations. By his early twenties, the future Pope had already composed three poetic dramas on biblical themes--David, Job, and Jeremiah--along with a Polish translation of Oedipus.

As the original title of The Jeweler's Shop equally reveals--"A Meditation on the Sacrament of Matrimony, Passing on Occasion into Drama,"--theatrical plays were integrated into Wojtyla's pastoral ministry, particularly through witnessing to that message of Love that is at the center of the Catholic faith. (17) What the subtitle may not convey--and where the sacramental reference might even be deceiving--is the quality of this theatrical work. (18) Anyone reading it will recognize that the Jeweler's Shop is far from a clumsy clerical attempt to do theater. The plot is simple yet rich and unexpected. The circumstances are ordinary and exceptional at once. The protagonists are convincingly real people, (19) as are their everyday thoughts, desires, and deepest fears. Their diversity, moreover, gives different readers a variety with which to identify. Of course, the author uses this play to speak of a Christian God too and the pivotal role that His absolute Love plays in marriage and human existence. (20) Yet, these stories speak of needs, desires, and fears that anyone may comprehend, regardless of religious background.

During the war, Wojtyla's theater performed underground and was a vehicle for the young man and his friends to fight the cultural battle against evil. For them, literature was a powerful weapon against the occupying power of Nazi Germany which prevented the...