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What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in Education?
Toppling Dominos
Anti-Christians don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of Secularism
"Don't Impose Your Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death Warrant?
Court Ordered Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
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"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for Catholics in this Election
Christians Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay Marriage
Whose Side are You on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
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Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way, Baby
The Incarnational Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them.  How Else Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality, and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well, Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong Side
"These are the Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few are Married
"...Prepare him for additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a Person?
The Point of a Point of View
Politically Correct, Morally Depraved
Population Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal if...
Get Rid of that Worthless Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues Prior to Voting

by Monsignor James C. Brunner

Faith Points

Generation-X’ers Smart in Every Way But One

The young adults of our day (the so-called generation-x) are probably the most technically savvy generation the world has seen. They know all about computers, the internet, possibly do their mathematics in hexadecimal, and can even unsnarl the binds that I create in my computer. But there is one area in which the x’ers are sometimes not very clever, and that is in the choice of a partner for marriage. Marriage failure is not a private tragedy, but causes distress between the couples, for their children and for society. The family is the basic brick of society and when these basic structures fail it is not long before society itself is on the verge of collapse. Persons who bear the emotional scars of marriage failures need sympathy and sometimes therapy and not cute or sarcastic remarks about their failure. Having said that, I have to say also that the tactics that they used to enter into the failed marriages are–how can I express it?–well, dumb.

I could recite alarming statistics about marriage failures, but no one needs them. Everyone knows that there are many more divorces in our day than at any time in the past. There are so many single parent families that they rather than nuclear families may become the norm. Why is that true? Why is this generation that is so good at negotiating the information superhighway responsible for so much wreckage on the marital highway? I think I have some answers. They are based on many years of experience with our diocesan tribunal where judges regularly diagnose marriage failures.

The first and foremost reason for marriage failures as seen at the tribunal is immaturity and irresponsibility tied to lack of good judgment and due discretion in the choice of a spouse. If a person is not emotionally mature and responsible he or she is going to make a mess of marriage. An alcoholic or a person high on drugs may be the life of the party, but he makes a poor marriage prospect. Lack of family funds for meeting bills or even buying groceries, because so much of it goes to alcohol or narcotics or because these substances lead to irregular or no employment becomes less and less entertaining as time goes on. Persons who do not have regular employment and demonstrate little inclination to earning their own way are poor marriage prospects, but that does not deter some from selecting them as lifetime partners. Persons may marry because they are pregnant. The stork may be good at delivery, but, in my experience, very poor in picking lifelong mates.

My tribunal experience in Texas (although the marriages were not all in this state) has filled my memory with something I call a chamber of spouse selection horrors. The cases are true–only the names have been withheld to protect the guilty. I remember a case where the boyfriend was so drunk that he repeatedly passed out on his fiancee’s family couch. Yet she married him and–surprise!!–he turned out to be a drunk in the marriage, and a nasty, surly one at that. Who would have thought it? An engaged lady told her future husband that she wanted to remain engaged, but liked going out with other men. After the marriage she continued to like it and did. How could anyone have known? During the courtship a couple broke up and made up a dozen or more times. They married and, guess what? They separated and reunited several times until one of the separations became the final one. A man got into a fight with his fiancee a few months prior to the marriage and he choked her, almost suffocating her. Instead of marching him to the police she marched him to the altar and, wonder of wonders, he filled her life with physical and psychological abuse. Everyone knew that these marriages were doomed from the start except the participants who did not find out until the day after the wedding. Let me ask you x’ers, how hard does the truck have to hit you before you notice that something is wrong?

Over and over at the tribunal we hear that the thing that did in the marriage was already apparent in the courtship. Lovers are capable of throwing off advice of parents, brothers and sisters, and good friends about the unsuitability of someone as a marriage partner. It makes one long for the days when parents arranged marriages. They could do no worse than the present marriage generation and, although they may not know the meaning of the World-Wide Web, they know what it takes to make a marriage work. Young adults would do well to listen to the advice of their parents especially if these parents have made a success of their own marriage.

Generation-x’ers know how to string wires together to make the universe an electronic neighborhood, but in the most meaningful interconnection of their lives some display as much intelligence as a speed bump. Until they learn to exercise more mature judgment and sound discretion in their marital choices x will mark the spot of their wrecked marriages. The scars from these wrecks will not last a lifetime but for generations.