Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

tion towards a decrease in the divorce rate. In addition, there is the manifold harm that is inflicted
on the children of a divorce by their parents. In total, the catastrophe of divorce befell
over two million children in a single generation. That is not to say that earlier everything was
ideal and now everything is bad. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many princes
openly kept their mistresses with their own princely household. One can ask what is morally
worse: the coexistence at that time of relationships similar to marriage or the succession of
civil marriages today caused by the caesura of divorce. One must also consider that, with the
average life expectancy of seventy-two years, marriage today is exposed to a longer period of
trial than 150 years ago, since on the average people reached only their thirty-fifth year. The
length of marriage, which at the present amounts to an average of thirty -four years, corresponds
to the entire life expectancy of that time.
It would be disastrous if one were to capitulate before the behavior of a large part of the population
and, in a false sociologistic reaction, elevate the change of opinions and conditions to
the ultimate form. The Federal High Court of Germany designated as false a judicial decision
„for which social reality serves as a guiding principle without any standard of evaluation.
That results in a situation where the action of man does not have to conform itself to the
norm, but the action determines the content of the norm. In the end, that means a negation of
the norm.“ The precepts „that fundamentally order the coexistence of the sexes and their sexual
relationships and which thereby simultaneously establish and guarantee the proper order
of marriage and family (and in a remoter sense that of the nation also)“ are „norms of the
moral law“ and not merely „conventional rules delivered up to the changing caprice of social
groups.“ 58 For several years, of course, these principles have been rejected as obsolete, and
'liberalization' has been praised as progress. But the decay of marriage and family is far more
disastrous than the breakdown of the energy supply. In the United States, and increasingly in
Europe also, expensive surveys focusing on 'private life' are often conducted today, not only
to learn about opinions and factual behavior in the sexual realm, but also to establish through
the popularization of the survey results new moral norms of 'they think' and 'they do,' as it
were, based on sociologistic relativism. The Christian faith teaches that there is sin, i.e. a falling
away from the moral orders, and that the individual is deceived who claims to be without
sin (I In 1:8). From this point of view, it seems grotesque when it is announced as an amazing
novelty that many people, particularly in the sexual realm, do not adhere to moral norms, and
the attempt is even more grotesque to want to elevate the cross section of sinful behavior discovered
through a survey to a new norm of morality.
§ 9 Marriage as Institution
I. It would be an excessive demand to want to found the conjugal community of life and love
on personal affection alone. If it is not to be shattered, it must betaken up into that order
which we call the institution of marriage. Liberalistic individualism has since the end of the
eighteenth century begun to protest vehemently against the conviction, alive among all peoples
at all times, that marriage is an institution with an essential form withdrawn from man's
free disposal. In 1783, the Enlightenment 'Dictionnaire Philosophique' founded by Voltaire
called marriage „a simple civil contract“ that can be dissolved at any time „without there being
required any further motive than the insistent will of the two spouses.“ 59
The Decree of the French Revolution of September 20, 1792 also interprets marriage in an
individualistic way: an „indissoluble tie“ annihilates „individual freedom“; therefore every
spouse is entitled to having divorce pronounced by merely pointing to the lack of harmony
between personalities. For a long time people tried to dismiss the French-Revolutionary Law
58 BGHSt 6, 51, 53
59 C£ H Conrad, Die Grundlegung der modernen Zivilehe durch die Französische Revolution. in Zeitschrift der
Savignystiftung für Rechtsgeschichte 67 (1950):339.
57