Book Review: "Betrayed Without a Kiss"

After I posted the cover of John Clark's Betrayed Without a Kiss: Defending Marriage after Years of Failed Leadership in the Church, I contacted the author. He had the publisher send me a review copy--I offered particularly to comment on his treatment of Henry VIII's Great Matter of the validity of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and its aftermath, but of course I read the entire book. 

In the first chapter, Clark sets up the Biblical basis of Catholic Church teaching on the purposes and sacramental nature of marriage with readings from Genesis (Adam and Eve), Tobit (Tobias and Sarah), and the St. John's Gospel (Wedding Feast of Cana).

The book is often historical in theme and treatment, looking at historical events in the Church, the world, and the United States: not only Henry VIII's marital machinations (Chapter 2), but the Lutheran demotion of Marriage from a Sacrament to a civil contract, to be overseen by the State and the Catholic response at the Council of Trent; contrasting the Anglican change-of-mind on contraception at Lambeth in 1930 (reversing statements in 1908 and 1920) with Pope Pius XI's re-iteration of Catholic doctrine on the purposes of marriage and why contraception was not allowed in Casti Connubii in the same year. (Chapter 3)

Clark also looks at two social and moral trends in the past and their influences on the present: one that generally affects men more than women (pornography; through Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy), and one that influences women more than men (feminism, via Simone Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, and Betty Friedan). Both, he says, contribute to a view that marriage and family are either not necessary to human satisfaction (pornography) or is detrimental to human fulfillment (feminism): they condition men and women to seek happiness outside of marriage and family. (Chapter 4)

Then he turns to the crisis of confidence within in the Church in Chapter 5, noting the dissident reaction to Humanae Vitae, which as Clark points out, was merely the reaffirmation of Pope Pius XI's re-iteration of Catholic doctrine on the purposes of marriage noted above. In Chapter 6, he looks again, historically, at a trend in the granting of decrees of nullity notably in the USA on the basis of a defect of consent, which Pope St. John Paul II deplored in several addresses to the Roman Rota (pages 159-163). Finally, in Chapter 7, he looks at more recent history: the controversial apostolic exhortation Pope Francis issued in 2016, Amoris Laetitia, and footnote 351 in chapter 8. In his discussion of that document and Cardinal Walter Kasper's efforts at the Synod on the Family to argue for allowing Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried, Clark cites Archbishop Samuel Aquila's article "Did Thomas More and John Fisher Die for Nothing?"

In the next three chapters, about pre-Cana programs (Chapter 8), how the Church can help married couples and families (Chapter 9), and how the married laity can help themselves, Clark offers different recommendations. As I read these chapters, I noted the anecdotal nature of some of these situations. He writes about priests not always being involved in pre-Cana programs, and that may be true in some dioceses, but I know not all. He also comments on the need for free education in Catholic schools, and I wondered if Clark was aware of dioceses, like the Wichita diocese I live in, that have instituted a Stewardship program through which families don't pay tuition, but make contributions to their parish according to their income for their children to attend the parish school--it's not free, but it's fair. (We also have the St. Katherine Drexel Fund to further assist with parish and high school education.)

Throughout these chapters, Clark writes with both clarity and charity about what he sees affecting the sacrament and marriages inside and outside of the Church. He particularly focuses on the anomalous situation of couples seeking an annulment having to first obtain a civil divorce in contrast to the statements of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 2384. He persuaded me that is a strange condition (please see pages 168-172).

But to the heart of the reason I wanted to read and review the book:

Regarding Clark's analysis of Henry VIII's marital issues and the martyrs they produced in Chapter 2, "Letting No Man Put Asunder: When Catholics Defended Marriage to the Death": the issue of the validity of Henry and Catherine of Aragon's sacramental marriage was much bound up in issues of the authority of the pope to issue a dispensation to allow Henry to marry his brother's widow. 

Henry, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Cromwell, and others set up a conflict between Bible verses (laws regarding Levirate marriage in the Old Testament) and Papal authority. They also consulted William of Occam's arguments about the limits of Papal authority versus the monarch's authority in his own kingdom. Thus the overlap between the two issues: the validity of the marriage and papal authority.

Clark is correct to distinguish between St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More in their different public reactions and statements re: Henry's efforts. Fisher, as a bishop and successor of the Apostles, stood up against Henry's efforts in Convocation and before the king. More made his opinion, based on study of the Scriptures and the Councils of the Church, known privately to Henry VIII, but he did not speak of it publicly. Henry VIII knew it and yet appointed More his Chancellor after Cardinal Wolsey's death anyway, thus Thomas Cromwell took the lead on the matter of Henry and Catherine's marriage.

While Clark is also correct to emphasize the brave stand of the protomartyr Carthusians of the Charterhouse of London, I wish he could have found room to mention the Observant Franciscans, both the non-martyrs and martyrs, who stood up against Henry VIII's plans from beginning. Father William Peto famously preached before Henry and Anne Boleyn in the Greenwich chapel; he and Father Henry Elston were threatened with martyrdom but were not dissuaded. Blessed John Forrest was burned to dead, hung in chains above a fire kindled with the statues of saints. Henry VIII just as brutally suppressed the Observant Franciscan Order as he did the Carthusians, and there are a few Venerated martyrs of that order: Anthony Brookby, Thomas Cort, and Thomas Belchiam.

And most of all, three of Catherine of Aragon's counselors and chaplains--who might be considered The Defenders of the Bond--were hanged, drawn, and quartered after long imprisonment on July 30, 1540:

Thomas Abell, Richard Fetherston, and Edward Powell had all been chaplains and defenders of Queen Catherine of Aragon--very learned men; graduates of the University of Oxford. Thomas Abell had written Invicta veritas. An answere, That by no manner of law, it may be lawfull for the most noble King of England, King Henry the eight to be divorced from the queens grace, his lawfull and very wife. B.L. in 1532 and had also been implicated in the Nun of Kent cause célèbre. Richard Fetherston had also written against Henry's divorce of Catherine in Contra divortium Henrici et Catharinae, Liber unus although no copy of the text survives. He also tutored the Princess Mary. Henry VIII had favored Edward Powell for his works against Lutheran doctrines in earlier days, but then Powell ran afoul of Henry's changing policies and desires to cast aside Catherine of Aragon.

Along with Fisher and More and the Carthusian and Briggitine (Richard Reynolds) protomartyrs (and John Forest), they were beatified by Pope Leo XIII on December 29, 1886--on Saint Thomas of Canterbury's feast day. So I wish these brave men could have been highlighted. 

Otherwise I thought this chapter was a good overview of Henry VIII's Great Matter and what those many years meant for the Sacrament of Marriage and the Church in England and beyond.

I appreciate TAN sending me the review copy; written by a married layman and father, it is a substantial example of how the laity can respond to issues in the Church combining practical experience and knowledge of doctrine, both sacramental and moral. That reminds me, of course, of Saint John Henry Newman's description of the laity (from The Present Position of Catholics in England): 

What I desiderate in Catholics is the gift of bringing out what their religion is. I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism . . .

The book has an excellent bibliography; no index.