Posted on 08/04/2026 1:55:47 PM PDT by ebb tide
Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke has called on Catholics to defend the sacrament of marriage and the Christian family even at the cost of suffering. Preaching on July 25 at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wisconsin, the cardinal encouraged married couples to embrace their vocation as a path to holiness.
"The grace of Holy Matrimony is not an ideal to which only a few can aspire," he said, "but an objective reality, a supernatural gift, which leads husband and wife to seek each other's eternal salvation along the path of divine love."
The cardinal concluded: "Let us be ready for martyrdom, if not the red martyrdom of blood, certainly the white martyrdom of faithful witness to Our Lord in the face of indifference, ridicule, and persecution."
Cardinal Burke's appeal comes just two months before the Vatican's October meeting convened by Pope Leo XIV to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Amoris laetitia. In this exhortation, Pope Francis repeatedly uses the language of the "ideal" of marriage, criticizing what he calls a "far too abstract and almost artificial theological ideal of marriage," "this excessive idealization" (§36), and the "stereotype of the ideal family" (§57).
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My daughter after 22 years with her ex and three kids is recovering from a dreadful marriage and ugly divorce... We had to pay $9K for a lawyer for her. Half of all marriages end in divorce. He decided he preferred hookers and cocaine and porn and gambling and alcohol and drunk driving over living with his wife and kids... Marriage is hard. Do not tread into it lightly. She had planned to spend the rest of her life with him. We’re now giving her $4k a month plus we had to guy her a car, washer and dryer, dishwasher, roof repair, AC repair... She has gone through MOST of her retirement savings. Those drug addictions lead to so many so many bad things... I can’t give you a formula to a happy marriage. It is never easy. But her ex made it impossible. And he has followed the same exact outline of behaviors that all my divorced friends have put up with before their divorces. Most of them will never remarry. Seems like it always starts with drugs, alcohol, porn...
Before we got married 1973 we had pre marriage counseling with our Lutheran pastor. He once asked us how do you see your relationship with God? How much do you give in to each other in a Christian marriage? (Our daughter’s ex wasn’t a Christian) We said that we both give in 50% to each other. Pastor said, No, you both give in 100% to each other with God at the top position. I will never claim that we always do that, but I do remember that sentence every day. Now that we are much closer to 100 than to 40, 3/4 of our life is over, we realize we need each other now more than ever before... to take each other to the doctor, to the hospital, to the emergency room... etc. But our greatest joys... our 4 granddaughters!
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