Divorce devastated Stephen Odiorne.
He once looked down upon the divorced as flawed people not smart enough to ace marriage. Then he became one of those so-called losers.
He realized he had been clueless. His wife had tried, many times, to talk to him. “I was too busy,” he laments, “trying to conquer the world.”
First he worked as a fighter pilot, trained by the Air Force Academy. Then he landed a job as a space engineer for Lockheed Martin, working on many NASA projects.
So, in addition to sending satellites to Mars, Odiorne suddenly was forced to rebuild his broken personal life.
As times changed, so have American Catholics. Once known for their low divorce rate, more Catholics than non-Catholics believe that divorce is morally acceptable, according to Gallup polls.
Earlier this year, the late Pope John Paul II criticized the soaring number of annulment requests. He ordered revision of a Vatican handbook, “The Dignity of Marriage,” to protect church teaching from corruption by marriage tribunals – especially those in the United States that grant the majority of annulments.
How this will affect Catholics like Stephen Odiorne remains to be seen.
He requested annulment papers more than 10 years ago but procrastinated over filling them out, because he did not want to share his private life with a church tribunal of strangers.
And then, after meeting the woman he plans to marry, he faced a tougher question. Could he risk his dreams of marital happiness by entrusting himself to the church, with its millennia of dogma?
“I don’t pay too much attention to the rules,” says the 50-year-old baby-boomer.
On the other hand, he can never forget that the disintegration of his marriage coincided with his total disconnect from the church. Because as his marriage fishtailed like a speeding car, it skidded right past St. Thomas More Catholic Church, where he had regularly worshipped with his wife and two daughters.
Suddenly, the family was too busy to attend Mass.
“Without it, I was lost,” says Odiorne, who’d considered becoming a priest, both before and after his marriage.
Following a brief hiatus, he realized it was time to return. When a co-worker suggested he visit Pax Christi, where a handful of parishioners met in a school gym, Odiorne decided to go.
He figured there wasn’t much left to lose.
But Odiorne feared being ostracized, judged as he had once judged others. Stigma lurks in some pockets of the church, because divorced Catholics without a formal annulment are considered still married by the church. Any relationship is considered extramarital.
But instead of being shunned, Odiorne received an invitation. Pax Christi’s lay director, Jeff Kelling, asked Odiorne if he would consider becoming an acolyte, a position of service that involves assisting the priest at Mass.
Odiorne hesitated. “Well, you know I’m divorced,” he said.
This, however, turned out to be a plus. Divorced acolytes leading the procession of priest and laity into Mass let people know that divorce didn’t mean ex-communication.
Odiorne remembers one Easter, during the three-day celebration of the death and resurrection of Christ, known as the Triduum. “I was feeling the pain of the divorce very profoundly,” he says about that period of fathomless grief.
“It helped on Good Friday service to just lay all that stuff on the cross, to have the support of my community, and to be able to wash the feet of others on Holy Thursday.”
Odiorne sought therapy and a recovery group, but it was several men at Pax Christi who provided the real breakthrough. They invited him to The Mankind Project, a nonprofit organization that helps men connect with their feelings to create lives of integrity.
“It helped me see the toxicity in my own family when I wasn’t connected to my feelings or dealing with the relational issues,” he says.
“I saw how that hurt my children and my former wife.”
Learning to approach people from a wounded place, and understand their pain, proved to be daunting stuff.
“As a fighter pilot, he was trained to be very objective and not let anything personal get involved,” says Mel Claytor, the leader of the Pax Christi men’s retreats.
“He learned to get in touch with a lot of things he’d just stuffed, and this growth helped communications in his personal relationships.”
Just as Easter Sunday follows Good Friday, one day after years of the pain Odiorne suddenly experienced a powerful urge to dance. He wanted to rhumba and cha-cha, tango and foxtrot – really swing, like those legendary ballroom kings.
Odiorne looked up some local classes and wound up at the wrong studio, where he met Linda Davis, the 41-year-old physician he plans to marry.
What excites him about Davis is that she excavated her inner life in personal-growth work just as he did, so they communicate easily and honestly.
Their spirituality meshes tighter than gears on a Mars rover. And they know how to have fun together, like when they traveled to Las Vegas in December for a ballroom-dancing competition.
The only thing that nagged Odiorne was the absence of an annulment.
Davis isn’t Catholic. Odiorne worried she might not want to wait a year, the average time in the Diocese of Colorado Springs, to see whether he is free to marry.
But even in this, they are united.
“It’s important to me that he go through the annulment process,” says Davis, who regularly attends Mass with her fiancé. “I just can’t imagine him not involved at Pax Christi.”
Because if Odiorne remarried without an annulment, he could face the difficult choice between sex and sacrament.
The church teaches that divorced Catholics must remain single and celibate or, if remarried without annulment outside the church, they can receive Holy Communion only if they do not have sex with their spouse.
Finally, 11 years after requesting those annulment papers, Odiorne dusted them off and put them in the mail. Now a diocesan tribunal will decide whether his former marriage was valid.
Witnesses, ideally those who knew the couple even before the marriage, will be called. Psychologists or social workers from the secular world may be asked their opinion on the information.
Most annulments are granted, so Odiorne isn’t too concerned. Anyway, it’s not a contest between love and faith.
“Choosing not to marry Linda is not an option,” he says.
But if the unthinkable happens and the church decides his first marriage was valid, Odiorne would plunge deep into struggle.
He would have to marry outside the church he loves, something he cannot conceive. He would be banned from taking the Eucharist for life.
“That’s the dilemma,” he says. “It’s not just around annulments. It’s around a lot of teachings that are issues for American Catholics, like celibacy, women as priests, birth control – all these things that are in the newspapers all the time.
“The reality is that individuals have to deal with them, and it’s a struggle.”
No matter what the tribunal decides, Odiorne intends to marry next spring.
WHAT CATHOLICS SAY
In 1968, about 338 annulments were granted. That
was before Vatican II relaxed annulment rules to include
reasons such as emotional
immaturity – which critics now argue is interpreted too generally.
In 2002, more than 56,000
requests for annulments were decided, and about 82 percent were granted.
Catholics in North America
received most of these:
67 percent. Europe had fewer
than 9,000, and other
continents were even lower.
From The Catholic News Service
and the book, “Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading The Fight
to Change The Church,” by Angela Bonavoglia