{"id":7623,"date":"2004-03-26T10:30:24","date_gmt":"2004-03-26T10:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/pain_all_round.html"},"modified":"2004-03-26T10:30:24","modified_gmt":"2004-03-26T10:30:24","slug":"pain_all_round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/pain_all_round.html","title":{"rendered":"Pain all round"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greg Popcak helpfully comments on the situation of a couple who seemed to be doing everything right possibly getting divorced.<\/a><\/p>\n

In my capacity as a Catholic marriage counselor who has done over 10,000 hours of exclusively Catholic counseling since 1999 with a very seriously Catholic population, I can tell you that outward signs of piety speak little to what is in a person’s heart. You would be shocked to know the kinds of things daily communicants, fifteen-decade a day, Eucharistically devoted people are capable of. Just trust me on that one. People–even pious people–are broken people. Sin affects us all. Public piety, and outward compliance with the rituals, guidelines, and requirements of the faith can be an expression of a rightly ordered heart (indeed, a rightly ordered heart must give God his due through such expressions), but we have only to look to scripture and see Jesus’ condemnation of the Phasisees to recognize that there can often be a very dramatic difference between how one looks and how one’s heart is ordered…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and, this, which is very important:<\/p>\n

\n4. Stop putting your faith in people. Even pious people are just people. They will never fail to disappoint you. Only God deserves your admiration and devotion. Only Jesus is your hero. Accept no substitutes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I post this, not because I want anyone to take an undue interest in someone’s personal life, but because it seems to fit the discussion brewing here over the past week. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greg Popcak helpfully comments on the situation of a couple who seemed to be doing everything right possibly getting divorced. In my capacity as a Catholic marriage counselor who has done over 10,000 hours of exclusively Catholic counseling since 1999 with a very seriously Catholic population, I can tell you that outward signs of piety…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPain all round - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/pain_all_round.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pain all round - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Greg Popcak helpfully comments on the situation of a couple who seemed to be doing everything right possibly getting divorced. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}