c. 1998 Religion News Service

WORCESTER, Mass. _ Barbara Roy is a devout, church-going Christian who doesn’t believe in divorce. She’s convinced God condemns divorce. And she’s been divorced three times.

Matrimonial failure has taken its toll. A real-estate broker and popular cable TV host in central Massachusetts, Roy makes self-effacing jokes about her marital record to beat potential critics to the punch. And though she’s raised seven children and dotes on her 10 grandchildren, she’s convinced she’s unfit to influence teen-age girls.

“I’m not a good role model,” she says.

Divorce is tough enough without the “burden of theological condemnation,” said Judith Hanlon-Swett, founder of Christian Singles, a 700-member fellowship of mostly evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics, which Roy attends in Worcester, Mass. It is one of a growing number of such groups throughout the nation. Many men and women in these fellowships say that when their marriages broke up, they felt they had failed God and their spouses had failed them.

While Islamic, Jewish and liberal Protestant groups permit divorce without condemnation, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that a true marriage ends only in death. So do evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, who cite biblical verses such as Matthew 19:9 _ “Whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery” _ to stress the permanence of matrimony.

Still, Catholics divorce at the same rate as the general population. And according to a study by the California-based Barna Research Group, born-again Christians and self-described Christian fundamentalists are more likely than non-Christians to go through divorce, leaving many believers to contemplate a life of solitude or sin.

Paul D’Angona considered such a life as he looked out from the pulpit of his idyllic New England church. He was a pastor who believed divorce was a sin, and his wife had announced she was leaving. “I felt like it wasn’t the right thing to be leading people and have such a disastrous relationship at home,” he said. “I resigned shortly thereafter.”

Roy was just 16 when she first married and 17 when she had her first child. Her husband began staying out all night Saturday and berating her for going to church Sunday. She stayed in the marriage for 10 years until she “realized that God wanted more for me and my children than the life I was leading.” When her next two marriages ended, each after more than a decade, she blamed herself for failing to listen to God’s calling in choosing a Christian mate.

Such self-condemnation, said D’Angona, is a devastating result of divorce among Christians. “Not only didn’t we get the life we wanted, we screwed up in God’s eyes.”

Some divorced Christians turn from the church, said Hanlon-Swett, a seminarian whose 23-year marriage ended six years ago. They leave the church because they feel like sinners or because their bitterness creates disenchantment with religion.

Yet others turn to priests and ministers, many of whom have become increasingly sensitive to the needs of the divorced.

As awareness of spousal abuse has increased, more clerics have been counseling parishioners against living with partners who harm them psychologically and physically. Some pastors even believe such abuse is a form of emotional abandonment, and that the Bible gives abandonment as grounds for divorce.

In churches, the general rule is that “the guilty party leaves the church,” said Hanlon-Swett. But even scorned spouses may receive cool receptions from congregations. Many churches do not allow divorced members to hold leadership positions, teach Sunday school, or even sing in the choir.

“You’re treated like a second-class Christian,” said Tom Whiteman, a Christian psychologist who founded the Philadelphia-based Fresh Start recovery program after his own divorce 18 years ago. Parishioners can forgive murder, he said, “but not divorce.”

Before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, said Sister Beth Butler of the Metropolitan (marriage) Tribunal of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Mobile, Ala., “divorced Catholics were very much looked down on based on the strong Catholic belief that … when you’re divorced, you’ve failed,” even if the marriage was abusive.

Today, divorced Catholics are welcome in most churches, and they may receive the Eucharist unless they remarry without getting their first marriages annulled. About 50,000 annulments are granted in the United States each year, according to the Canon Law Society of America in Washington, D.C. That’s about 90 percent of those sought after a preliminary screening.

Support groups try to help individuals make sense of breakups that may seem senseless. How can so-called believers behave so badly? And why can’t God help Christians keep their marriages intact?

D’Angona says he’s read everything he can find on divorce, and he still finds it tough to explain theologically. In the early days, “I would be home at night praying and shaking my fist at God,” he said. “`I’ve given you years of my life, and you can’t help me salvage my marriage?”’ Later, he came to believe divorce isn’t part of God’s plan, and human beings are responsible for ruining their relationships.

Some people, said Hanlon-Swett, make sense of divorce theologically by calling their ex-spouses sinners. It’s a way of keeping the faith and denying the responsibility she believes is a prerequisite for healing and healthier new partnerships.

Responsibility without self-flagellation, she stressed. If there’s a central tenet in support groups, it’s that divorce is wrong but God forgives.

“Divorce is not the unforgivable sin,” said Whiteman, who holds two-day workshops in churches meant to be followed by ongoing support groups. “God can still use you. Even if you are the guilty party, there is forgiveness.”

Hanlon-Swett agrees: “I had a 23-year marriage, and I screwed up and broke the sacrament. … But I’m not going to give the second half of my life to bitterness and beating myself up. I don’t want to make divorce easy or OK, but I want to be able to forgive and go on. That’s the balance I work with in Christian Singles. How do you accept the past and go on with grace?”

DEA END LIEBLICH