The prophecy of the priest

Somewhere near Wisteria Lane

If you watched ABC sometime between 2004 and 2012, you’ll understand the header above. If not, don’t worry about it. Your parents are the target audience.

Let me tell you the story of an older couple I know. They are now in their 70s. When I first got to know them, they had been married for 16 years. I wasn’t aware of this until I’d learned later on, that they hadn’t had sex since their third year of marriage. Like I said, somewhere near Wisteria Lane…

The husband was an estranged man. He would go out of his way to take his teenage niece and her friends on day trips and vacations… without his wife. From what I understand, nothing sexual ever happened but this behavior was beyond strange and at the very least appears to be misdirected affection.

The wife, at first glance, was your standard American wife of the boomer generation. Monogamous. Chaste. Always watching TV when she wasn’t working — typically Real Housewives or 90 Day Fiancé. Good old Americana.

Until recently, I did not bat an eye — older couple, well to do — this is just the traditional way of life in suburbia. My wife and I had begun the process of pursuing a convalidation within the Catholic Church. We were told to live as brother and sister and that we are not actually married…you get the gist. You can probably feel me rolling my eyes as I type.

Anyway, we told this to the older couple. The wife immediately spoke out and said, “That’s what the priest told me! All sorts of crazy stuff. That my husband is an adulterer for not having gotten his previous marriage annulled… etc.”

Everything clicked. Thirty years later, this couple does live as brother and sister. The husband cheats emotionally with teenagers. The wife fantasizes about other people’s marriages. There is nothing Holy or Sacramental about their union.

Whether you call it emotional cheating or misdirected affection, their marriage has suffered for a long time. I am not here to condemn the two of them. Everybody has issues.

I’ve watched their pain for decades and I think there’s a lesson to be learned from it. This is not a wholesale endorsement of Catholic Sacramental marriage. Too many of those end in divorce and annulment as well.

There’s something going on here that needs more scrupulous attention.

Back in the days when we were young… like really young. I was probably in kindergarten.

Perhaps I should begin this story from what I understand as the beginning. It’s sometime in the mid-90s and the aforementioned wife is a beautiful 40-something-year-old woman visiting an incarcerated relative. A man from another cell calls out to her as she walks by. This man is completely awestruck by her. Within a relatively short time, could be a few months, could be a couple years, our middle-aged maiden marries this man inside the prison. Both of them were baptized Catholics. The chaplain, some type of Christian denomination, officiates. Little does anybody realize, while this man’s first wife has divorced him but he never sought an annulment… Who cares right?

As the years go by, the wife assumes guardianship of their niece due to family issues. She becomes something of a surrogate daughter to the man. A chance to do things right after his own daughters grew up and moved cross country — bearing grandchildren he wasn’t allowed to see.

The niece more or less grew up in their house. She got her motorcycle license shortly into early adulthood. Her uncle got his motorcycle license just a year or two before… time to rewind again.

He watched Sons of Anarchy with his wife — who was fawning over Jax Teller (played by Charlie Hunnam). In what appeared to be a foolish attempt to woo her again, he reinvented himself as a biker — when he was already well into his 60s… Coulda had a V8 — once again, that joke’s probably for your parents if you don’t understand.

Who doesn’t love spontaneity? 🤮

The man failed to impress his wife and, as mentioned, his niece eventually began riding. The old man and the young woman seemed to reconnect. At some point, he plans a trip to Sturgis…yes, that Sturgis. He does not take his wife. He takes his niece who at this point in the story is about 20. Not a Sunday drive down the highway. Sturgis. The Sturgis.

Let me rewind again for a minute, to when the girl is 15 or 16. She disappeared. So did her friend, a year older. After 6 hours and frantic family calls, the wife finds out that her husband took the two girls on a day trip across the state…to South Haven. For those of you unfamiliar, South Haven is a nice beach town on the southeastern coast of Lake Michigan. When the man gets back, he shows off pictures of the fun time they had. I understand that it’s the beach. People wear bathing suits. Most of the pictures are of two girls on the beach in bikinis. The math mathed but it always seemed weird to me. Full disclosure, these girls are now grown women and both vehemently deny that anything sexual happened.

I still find it difficult to believe he wasn’t operating on some level of hormonal drive, even if the man didn’t act on it. His wife, around this same time period, confessed to us that the two hadn’t been intimate in 17 years. He tussles her hair when telling her goodnight — apparently the whole biker thing was easier than a goodnight kiss?

When thinking of her status within the marriage, I often see her suffering much of what Hagar suffered with Abraham. Beautiful. Full wifely status at first. However, as time went on, she appears to have been discarded, just like poor Hagar. More of a retired concubine than a wife to grow old with. It’s heartbreaking.

This pain caused her to retreat into the TV. It was a genuine pain that needs to be acknowledged. However, the TV has not exactly been her saving grace. Instead, it’s her escape into other people’s marriages. To watch the most spoiled of the spoiled housewives and see how their lives are. It’s a direct reaction to her pain but it also helps perpetuate the pain.

Entropy? Divine Irony? Prophecy?

Now, think of her orders from the priest, decades earlier: “Live as brother and sister.” Get a convalidation. They chose not to live as brother and sister. They wrote off convalidation entirely. I don’t blame them. I think this is probably what 99% of Catholic laity do in this situation. Yet today, through either entropy or divine irony, the two live as brother and sister… with seemingly no pathway to a loving marriage in sight.

As I said, this is not a blind endorsement of Catholic Sacramental marriage theology. Annulments are far too prevalent for that. I myself, was born of a now annulled marriage. Something I still bleed from today. What I can say, however, is that these two people were baptized Catholics.

Whether they like it or not, at least according to the position of the Church, a marriage consecrated on the altar is their birthright. One of them was fortunate enough to receive such a Sacrament. The other was robbed of this and she’ll likely never receive it. It’s eerily ironic how things unfolded over the decades. It’s borderline prophetic given what they’d been told decades earlier. They were told what to do in order to reclaim this birthright. Somehow, in spite of dodging his advice, they are trapped in it — now having lived as brother and sister for over two decades.

I can’t say that the Church is always right about everything. What I can say is this: the Council of Trent added significant barriers for couples seeking Sacramental marriage. In many cases, these barriers come off as cruel, even archaic. At times, it feels like downright meddling. Men like the one in this story were disturbingly common before Trent. A man could marry a woman and build a family. Then, he could simply set up shop somewhere else and build a new one. When he’d get sick of the new one, he could use his prior marriage as an excuse to mistreat and disinherit his wife and children of the second marriage.

The barriers added by Trent created a prevention mechanism against behavior such as this. When the Church requires clerical witness before recognizing the union, the second marriage and second family becomes more difficult to create. Upon reentering the Church after decades away and a civil marriage of my own, these rules seemed like a major inconvenience. Perhaps the Church just wants a chance to shame me for living a secular life. However, as I look into the life of this old woman and her heartbreak, like I said, everything clicked. These “unnecessary and inconvenient” rules, could have saved this woman from decades of pain.