THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE CIVIL LAW OF DIVORCE: A THEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AND CRITIQUE OF THE TEACHING ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CIVIL LAW AND CHRISTIAN MORALITY

The study is an historical and systematic theological critique and evaluation of the Roman Catholic Church's moral teaching concerning civil divorce laws in the United States, precisely insofar as that teaching addresses the jurisprudential issue of the appropriate relation between the laws of civil society and Christian morality. The historical thrust of this study of American Catholic divorce jurisprudence, embracing the period from the mid-nineteenth century until the present, involves an examination and evaluation of a variety of Roman Catholic literature--episcopal statements and decrees, moral and canonical manuals, monographs, and theological/pastoral/canonical journal articles. The historical data fall into three categories: the more formal, theoretical jurisprudential evaluation of divorce laws; the American Catholic perspective on divorce reform measures; and the extensive casuistic literature regarding American Catholics (legislators, judges, spouses, lawyers) and their cooperation in the passage, implementation, and use of divorce laws. The systematic thrust of the study involves a critical analysis and evaluation of contemporary American Catholic jurisprudential thinking on the appropriate relation between civil law and morality as revealed in the Catholic literature on the two legal-moral issues of contraception and abortion during the 1960s and 1970s.; The study establishes that there was a significant shift in Catholic jurisprudential thinking about divorce in the early 1960s. Divorce laws could now be characterized as morally justifiable or jurisprudentially sound. This study further establishes that an even more radical rethinking in Catholic jurisprudence on the appropriate relation between law and morality occurred in the context of the contraception and abortion controversies. A new Catholic jurisprudence--based on a narrower criterion of the common good, an expanded criterion of individual civil liberty, and the preeminent importance of the pragmatic aspects of human-made law--was emerging in a Vatican II and post-Vatican II era. The study concludes by articulating the author's criteria for a contemporary Catholic jurisprudence regarding the relation between law and morality and the author's preferred jurisprudential option for a no-grounds divorce registration statute which goes beyond divorce laws based on traditional fault or contemporary no-fault grounds.