IT is no secret that divorce is an assault on faith and family, but shouldn’t the social ramifications of divorce be brought to light too? For “if one member suffer anything, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored all the members share its joy.” (1 Cor, 12:26).

Speak about family destruction and abandonment of our youth in a dehumanizing culture and no one seems to care. Personal matters become political ones. Impoverishment, exile, rootlessness, family members scattered far and wide, alcohol and drugs, crisis-making, poor health and extreme loneliness go unheeded.

The general populace in the world is not aware of the great harm that can inflict itself on vulnerable families that are being tossed about by forces over which they have no control, and the end result is the total annihilation of the family nucleus that is so important for the continuation of the freedom of the entire human race that is now under attack.

Exaggerated as this may sound, my very own family and others I am acquainted with are enduring this terrible decimation here and now.

The reason for this appears to be that we have not found a way to make better known the difficult situations that bring innocent people to the point of no return. Consequently, after decades of silence, people have grown accustomed to the calamity.

Broken families are no longer seen as the aberration. Families smashed by divorce have become the norm on any street.

Unemployment is what gets attention. Unemployment is what people see and hear about.
And jobs, the word goes around, are the cure for unemployment. More jobs, they say, have to be created.

The trouble with this, however, is that jobs, jobs alone, are no cure for the assault on the family. Worse still, if family destruction is reduced to a matter of unemployment, would job earnings then subsidize the wholesale workings of the divorce machine?

What is needed is family restoration. With the family nucleus long annihilated, we have suffered enough.

Children of divorce, pawns of professional politics, have suffered enough. Mothers and children, brothers and sisters, manipulated miles and miles apart have suffered enough.

Forthright communication and restoration of faith and family are needed to allow families under attack to plan and provide for our own as other families do. We are not dead yet.

If society is ever to find a way out of the all-out ruin, if the family is ever again to be the heart and soul of the society, shouldn’t broken families be restored to our Judeo-Christian traditions? For “was it not the weak things of the world that God chose to confound the strong?” (1 Cor, 1:27).

Rita Moore Daly
Garnerville, New York