This “Question to be Answered” comes from the pen of a wag who was sitting in the presbytery recently after a hair cut in the local hairdressing salon - a wag from East Hunsbury not far out of Northampton on the long winding roade to Daventry.

How does one as a believing and practising christian cope with the remark of Churchill that "getting divorced and then remarrying is the triumph of hope over experience?" What does his remark mean for the theology of christian marriage and for the annulment industry?

This amusing and yet deeply troubled question came up during a conversation with a lady from the other side of the green villages that people our valleys and dales and hills between the parish and the old roman city of Lactodorum on the long old roman road to Roade. Churchill had made this remark, though he is more famous for his remarks about marriage to Lady Aster over dinner one evening, at the Asters's house, when in response to Lady Aster's disapproving and acerbic remarks about his cigar, "Mr Churchill if I were your wife, I would put poison in your soup", to which the unruffled and slightly superior Churchill said, "And Lady Aster, if I were your husband, I would drink it." An amusing vignette from the dinner times of the rich. So there is a jurisprudence of wit and wisdom from the Chartwell House of the Churchills. His remarks about divorce though are not really typical of the world of the time, except in regard to the sad case of Princess Margot and her Squadron Leader flying husband to be, Group Capt Peter Townsend. In that case the prime minister of the time came under enormous pressure from the bizarrely jocund but disapproving bishops of the anglican establishment who all frowned on divorcees as royal partners at this period. They wrecked that golden wedding. Many years later I would meet and befriend the issue of the eventual marriage of the Group Captain, himself a boy, soon then to become a catholic and then a Carmelite brother, now working in China hopefully, still alive, even if in Advent. But a nation without some provision in its laws for divorce soon finds that it founders on the rocks of public property problems, see Southern Ireland for many years between the years 1850 to 2000, and so divorce in real time has come to be more accepted and more lauded as a practical means of recovering from failed marriages. Olde worlde theologians used to frown upon divorce seeing it as a means of wrecking consent, but this was more a general matter of general theology at that time. Civil magistrates and judges simply have to make determinations about the break up of the family home and the retention of certain properties and the custody of the children and so on, in a shift away from tradition where in the past ecclesiastical judges retained this ministry. Civil divorce does not affect the catechesis katechein ministry and official theology of the christian wedding since the couples concerned are examined on their intentions on the day of their wedding, going forward. It is the intention that matters - "consensus facit matrimonium - consent makes the marriage", as Emperor Augustus stipulated for the larger empire of many nations. Either way, now that civil judges do most of this work, the time is nigh upon us when divorces are a welcome way of not only terminating a troubling wedding but also a good way of beginning the annulment process. Catholic tribunals will not handle an annulment request until the civil decree nisi and decree absolute are firmly produced by the warring couples in question. 

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