schönborn also said that when the synod participants formed small discussion groups some of them began by sharing their own family histories and discovered that many of them had direct experience in their own families of marriages that fail to conform to the ideal, which he termed "patchwork families". he said his own experience – his parents divorced when he was about 14 years old – made him thankful that the text "goes beyond the artificial, superficial, clear division between 'regular' and 'irregular', placing everyone under the common lens of the gospel, in accordance with the words of st. paul: 'god has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.'"