Amicable divorce? Is that even possible? The phrase circulates in modern society as a kind of anesthesia—softening the blow of what is, in reality, a tearing. Pull back the curtain, and you discover something few are willing to say aloud: when a marriage ends, something in the human person must shift down in order to endure it. A chamber of sacred memory is sealed. A promise once spoken with gravity becomes too painful to revisit. What is called "amicable" is often simply detachment for the sake of survival.
This quiet normalization of rupture is one of the defining features of our modern lives.
In the early 20th century, divorce in America was comparatively rare. In 1920, the national divorce rate stood at roughly 1.6 per 1,000 population—a fraction of what it would become by the late 1970s.¹ By 1960, nearly three-quarters of American adults were married.² Today, fewer than half are. Marriage rates continue to decline, especially in highly secularized urban centers. The legal revolution of no-fault divorce beginning in 1969 accelerated a cultural transformation already underway: marriage was being redefined from covenant to contract, from vocation to arrangement.³
It was precisely at this moment—November 22, 1981—that St. John Paul II issued Familiaris Consortio. The title is usually translated as "On the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World." But more literally, it means something deeper: the communion of the family.
Communion. Not convenience. Not compatibility. Not negotiated cohabitation.
Communion.
John Paul II was not responding merely to divorce statistics. He was responding to attitudinal shift. Modern culture had quietly adopted a false premise: marriage exists for personal fulfillment. If it ceases to fulfill, it may be exited. In this view, permanence is conditional upon self-satisfaction.
Scripture offers a radically different understanding. In Ephesians 5, St. Paul describes marriage as a profound mystery—mysterion mega—reflecting Christ's covenantal love for the Church. The husband is called to love "as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." This is not romantic sentiment. It is sacrificial permanence.
Recommended
Likewise, in Matthew 19, when questioned about divorce, Christ responds with a return to Genesis: "What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." The standard is not convenience but divine joining. The presumption is permanence.
John Paul II stands squarely within this biblical standard. Marriage, he argued, is not founded upon fluctuating emotional states or moments of crisis, but upon total self-gift. "The communion between God and His people finds its definitive fulfillment in Jesus Christ," he wrote, describing marriage as a participation in that irrevocable love. A contract protects interests; a covenant binds hearts. A contract can be dissolved when terms fail. A covenant endures because it is grounded in promise – "let your yes be yes."
This is not sentimentality. It is Christian living.
If marriage is communion, then it is a union of persons joined for something beyond themselves. It forms character. It disciplines desire. It binds two lives into a shared moral horizon. It is not a private emotional ecosystem. It is a sacred institution.
Which brings us to a second modern assumption: marriage is merely personal.
Historically, that is false.
Monogamous, lifelong marriage did not emerge naturally from instinct alone. It arose from a synthesis of Greco-Roman legal order and the Christian claim that fidelity mirrors divine faithfulness. The Christian revolution elevated marriage from social utility to sacred sign. The body was no longer merely biological; it was sacramental. Fidelity was no longer pragmatic; it was divine expression.
John Paul II understood that weakening marriage would not simply affect individual couples. It would destabilize culture itself. "The future of humanity passes by way of the family," he warned. This was not rhetoric. It was spiritual insight.
The family is the first school of permanence. It is where authority and mercy are first encountered together. It is where the word "forever" is meant to mean something holy.
Remove permanence, and you remove holiness.
Today, the reigning moral philosophy of the West is not covenantal but emotivist—the idea that moral claims are expressions of preference rather than truth. If commitment becomes subordinate to feeling, then feeling becomes sovereign. And what feeling cannot sustain, it abandons.
This is why the language of detachment has replaced the language of endurance. It is not uncommon to hear of people "moving on" as though vows were temporary scaffolding. Sometimes you hear the drivel "time heals all" or "wasn't meant to be." Yet what is rarely discussed publicly is the interior tearing. Something must be numbed in order to survive rupture. A sacred promise cannot be casually discarded without consequence to the self.
Even the prophet Malachi records the divine rebuke: "For I hate divorce, says the Lord." The severity of that language is striking—not because God delights in punishment, but because covenant is sacred. To rupture covenant is to wound something that was meant to reflect divine fidelity.
John Paul II foresaw this danger. He warned against "a mistaken theoretical and practical concept of the independence of the spouses in relation to each other." Independence sounds liberating. In practice, but becomes isolation sanctified by emotional distortion.
Marriage, in Christian understanding, is not of the world's transactional logic. It belongs to the Church because it participates in Christ's self-gift. It is sacred, not profane. It is covenantal, not contractual. It does not arise from appetite but from vows and is bound by clergy.
Every culture rests upon some cultic center. The word "cult" in its original sense refers to a shared act of worship. Remove that sacred center, and the outer forms dissolve. When society ceases to treat marriage as sacred, it does not merely change a lifestyle option; it alters the divine architecture of the valued itself.
The decline in marriage rates in the West is not simply a demographic shift. It is evidence of a philosophical migration a moral decline from virtue to self interest from love to fear and anger— from transcendence to preference, and from vow to volatility.
John Paul II did not propose nostalgia. He proposed conversion. The restoration of marriage requires a recovery of self-gift—of men and women willing to bind themselves not merely to each other, but to a promise before God.
Without the vows as vertical dimension, permanence becomes improbable.
And a civilization that loses permanence loses more than marriages. It loses continuity. It loses formation. It loses the grammar of fidelity.
The communion of the family was never meant to be easy. It was meant to be sacred.
And sacred things, once reduced to preference, do not long endure.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy Townhall’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member