Do words matter? Do we shy away from using the word "adultery" for a reason? Fr. Robert J.
Landry thinks so. He notes that
His column is a useful read on the state of adultery in American society today. Read on below.. (HT: The Corner)
But our culture, and many of us as individuals, need to confront the real evil adultery head on. According to a recent Associated Press poll, 22 percent of married men and 14 percent of married women in America have committed adultery. Extrapolated, that means 19 million married men and 12 million married women — one out of every ten Americans — are guilty of what Senator Edwards did. Most of these cases never make the headlines, but the life-altering destruction wrought by their marital infidelity is enormous.
Adultery, like the marriage it violates, is never merely a private act, but has huge public consequences in terms of the broken and wounded marriages that flow from it, not to mention all those who suffer as a result, from the spouses to their grown children, to children conceived through adultery, to mutual friends and colleagues, as well as to society as a whole, which must pick up so many of the emotional, social and financial pieces left by its calamitous path.
Even if an adulterer is never caught, or even if his or her adultery remains “in the heart” as Jesus described in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:27-28), it still damages one’s marriage and family. Intentional and physical adulterers both place their own “needs” and “lusts” over the good of their family and the consequences of this selfishness — what Edwards called “egotism” and “narcissism” — wound almost every bond.
Because of the tremendous damage done by adultery, some societies still consider it a crime against the common good so serious that the adulterers can be executed. In the second-century Church, it was considered, alongside apostasy and murder, as one of the sins so evil that it could be forgiven only once in a lifetime, and only after years of penance.
While it is clearly good that most societies and the Church more liberally offer a chance of redemption for those who engage in adultery, at the same time we need to recover a sense of just how evil and damaging marital infidelity is. This issue transcends political parties, candidates, and particular faith traditions. Adultery is an enormous social scourge that not only candidates and Churches but all of us need to work to eliminate.