Can My Wife Do This As Strict Catholic

[hurting]

Yes, but imminent danger to one’s child counts.

Let us be practical: No one in the Church, confronted by a woman who says she believes her spouse to pose a danger to her offspring, is going to tell the woman that she had no authority to interrupt the common conjugal life. A pastor is not going to do that and there is no ecclesiastic court that is going to deny her that–not in this era, when the Church is being so criticized for having failed her children by naively leaving them in the path of a sexual predators who all claimed to their bishop’s faces that they posed no threat, some of whom had psychiatrists assure the bishop they posed no threat! They would not take that chance. They have to risk offense against someone wrongly accused in order to protect a potential underage victim. It isn’t even a close call.

I do not dispute the notion that the right to separate on one’s own authority includes situations of abuse to children. In my estimation the bar is far lower for such separation in cases involving children because they are in fact, children and are in a markedly lesser, and in some cases, no position to protect themselves.

I think you may have misunderstood my earlier point. I believe most clergy would approve a separation requested by the mother in this instance regardless of what has happened with the abuse crisis in the Church. My issue is with the lesser instances of alleged abuse, which I assume are far greater in number than those involving indisputable instances of physical or sexual abuse. In those cases it is reasonable to expect that the Church would not abdicate - but I suspect that it has.

Lastly, I concur that one of the reason that the Church has abdicated this role is due to its being burned by its overreliance on the helping professions and ignorance of a very common sense approach that even a single instance of proven sexual abuse of a minor should have resulted in immediate and permanent defrocking of the offender.