This divorce attorney promotes marriage

Maryangela Layman Roman interviews Kelly Dodd as another of the "People of Faith" series in our Catholic Herald.

"In the hundreds of divorces I’ve done, I’ve probably seen one that would be morally justified," she said ...

"Most of the divorces I see boil down to one single, common denominator, and it is selfishness usually bred from an unrealistic expectation of marriage which leads to an unrealistic expectation of divorce," she added.

Fr. Thomas Suriano disputed this in a letter published in the March 1, 2007 issue (print only).

Simply put, that is nowhere near my experience in these situations in my 42 years as a busy priest.

My experience is usually something like this: a spouse or spouses who try and try and try again--often against all hope and with plenty of prayer and counseling included--to make the marriage work and who do so unselfishly and at great personal cost. Frequently others close to them recognize before they do that this marriage cannot last. Finally, amid great pain, feelings of failure, and profound sadness, one of them files for divorce.

Important: some of those individuals have felt new trauma to read their heart-breaking efforts described in the manner quoted above.

Let's call in a tie-breaker, perhaps You, Sir.

Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

Fr. Suriano's parish is St. Patrick's in Whitewater. He's got me wondering how many more unstated exceptions there are when its Mission Statement says its people "represent Christ to the world" and "proclaim the word".