Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Apr 3, 1913

Divorce for Anybody Who Has the Price

THE Continent of March 13, 1913, is responsible for the following:—

In spite of all the honor it would do the Catholic Church to be really consistent in its professed opposition to divorce, the hierarchs at Rome can not resist the request of any rich Catholic who is tired of a former marriage for permission to marry again. And so the pretense of believing that marriage is a sacrament that only death can dissolve is repeatedly trampled on by the church's own highest leaders. Of course, nominal divorce is refused, but for any Catholic who has money an annulment of marriage can always be effected.

The shame of this duplicity has just been conspicuously shown again. American Catholic papers have lately been boasting that the inability of Count Boni de Castellane to get a divorce from his wife, Anna Gould, was a sign of the rigid honesty of the Vatican in regard to its antidivorce principles. Castellane, they said, has money and prestige, but he can not break the rule. But most unhappily for the editors who made this argument, the case which they chose as a test turns out the other way, and for some trivial reason or other—of course a Roman ecclesiastic can always find a reason for doing what he wants to—Count Boni's petition is granted, and while his former wife still lives, he is set free from his first marriage to contract another, as he doubtless intends.