Yes, You Can Leave: In Dialogue with a Twitter Traditionalist

I think it all started when Guadalupe Catholic Radio producer Adrian Fonseca announced that abused women ought not to run away.

You can see the context of those remarks here. Apparently victims are supposed to stay with abusers in order to show a meek and humble example, therefore converting their spouses’ souls.

The internet was rightly incensed at this. I’ve never seen such a unified effort in my life. Priests and laity, atheist former Catholics and liberal Catholics as well as some jaw-clenching traditionalists I didn’t think could be right about anything jumped into the fray, calling out Fonseca and hounding Guadalupe Catholic Radio to make a statement. Eventually, Fonseca blocked everyone involved in the backlash, leading to many silly jokes about why he wouldn’t stay and endure the abuse for our sanctification.

Many, many hecklers were quoting the canon law that states that a wife can flee and seek divorce without sinning if her husband is abusive, and they were right to do so. Personally I took a different tack and said I didn’t care whether there was a specific canon or not. Of course you can run away from being abused. God doesn’t want anyone to be hurt. If you don’t know whether there’s a rule that says you can leave an abusive situation, steal away to Jesus and think of something else later. Rules were made for people and not the reverse. I am a bad Catholic right now, but I am confident that any God worth serving would agree.

Then there were the people backing Fonseca up. Trolls, mostly anonymous, praised “acts of mortification” and explained that a marriage is not supposed to be happy but a struggle, for it is in the struggle that we find salvation. And then the worst commentator of all jumped in, explaining that a battered spouse would earn special merit from God if they stood their ground, even when given the opportunity to flee, and offered their torture to God for their spouse’s soul.

I pressed him on this. Did he really think that staying and soaking up the pain was a better choice than leaving? Yes, yes he did. Did this apply to all pain? Did he think that it was also better to suffer avoidable pain from sickness than to take medicine, in that case? Yes he did. Submitting yourself to pain on purpose in order to offer yourself as a human sacrifice was saintly.

I flashed back to my childhood in the Charismatic Renewal, with all that talk of victim souls and a sadistic God the Father who was pleased to be appeased by pain. And I reject, with all my soul, a god who likes pain. If God despises and deplores pain but found a way to redeem it and turn it into grace, that’s wonderful. But if God really wants people to immolate themselves in avoidable pain in order to turn away his wrath, that god is evil. Blaspheming that god would be an act of justice. Going to hell would be the right choice, if the god who likes pain governs Heaven. But I don’t think he does.

And then things took a turn for the worse. He posed a question. “Well then, which is worse. A spouse dying at the hands of an abuser but going to heaven for staying united to Christ, or the abuser going to hell?”

I blinked at my phone in shock.

He seemed to be saying that permitting your spouse to murder you was a higher path than resisting being murdered. That offering up your murder as a human sacrifice to the god who likes pain would make that god manipulate the abuser into repentance.

“Don’t you know that murder is a mortal sin?” I asked.

He did not reply.

This situation doesn’t exist in real life. In real life, victims of severe abuse most often have physical or psychological barriers to being able to escape. They have nowhere to hide, they have no money of their own, no one will believe them, they can’t find a way to take their children along and can only protect those children by staying put. Sometimes they fear hell because people like Adrian Fonseca were their catechists. Sometimes they’re just so psychologically beaten down that the thought of leaving, and the reprisals if they were caught, is too frightening to entertain. But as a hypothetical: if you really had the ability to leave and protect yourself with no impediment, and if you really believed your spouse was going to murder you, wouldn’t it be more virtuous to run away? If you run away, you stop the murder. You stop a mortal sin from being committed. You don’t stay and remain an occasion of sin for him to damn his soul hurting you, you leave and let him think about his bad choices. People that violent don’t often repent regardless, but it seems that leaving might be a much better way of helping him if that’s what you wanted to do.