- "I charge you in the
presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the
dead, and by his appearing and his kingly power: proclaim the word; be
persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince,
reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching. For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine but, following their own desires and insatiable curiosity, will accumulate teachers and will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths"(2 Timothy 4: 1-4).
To a very large and tragic extent, we long ago - in practice - succumbed to
- treating marriage as though it were NOT indissoluble,
- separating the unitive and procreative dimensions of the marital act, and
- looking the other way from couples living in sin.
In the first chapter of Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church, editor Robert Dodaro, OSA, explains:
- "The essays in this volume represent the responses of five Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church and four other scholars to the book The Gospel of the Family, published earlier this year by Walter Cardinal Kasper....This book challenges the premiss that traditional Catholic doctrine and contemporary pastoral practice are in contradiction....The authors of this volume jointly contend that the New Testament presents Christ as unambiguously prohibiting divorce and remarriage on the basis of God's original plan for marriage set out at Genesis 1:27 and 2:24....God's mercy does not dispense us from following His commandments."
The Gospel of Indissolubility
In the fourth chapter of Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church, Archbishop Cyril Vasil rhetorically asks: "Is it thinkable to resolve the difficulties Christian marriages must confront in the contemporary world by lowering the demands of indissolubility? Will we have helped to cultivate the dignity of matrimony, or do we offer it only a placebo, as in the Old Testament, for the hardness of hearts?"Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church meticulously engages arguments favoring a de-emphasis on indissolubility, many of which are tantamount to citing historical anomalies as supposed proofs. As Cardinal Brandmuller wryly notes in the fifth chapter: "Tradition in the technical theological sense of the term is not an antiques fair where one can look for and acquire particular desired objects." He also reminds us of those who suffered martyrdom defending the unity and indissolubility of marriage, including St. John the Baptist, St. John Fisher, and St. Thomas More.
As per Cardinal Muller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the sixth chapter:
- "The comparison drawn by the
prophets between God’s covenant with Israel and the marriage bond includes not
only the ideal of monogamy, but also that of indissolubility. The prophet
Malachi expresses this clearly: 'Do not be faithless to the wife of your youth
... with whom you have made a covenant' (Mal 2:14-15)....
-
"[Jesus] distanced Himself explicitly from the Old
Testament practice of divorce, which Moses had permitted because men were 'so
hard of heart', and he pointed to God’s original will: 'from the beginning of
creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his
father and mother and ... the two shall become one flesh. What therefore God
has joined together let not man put asunder' (Mk 10:5-9; cf.
Mt 19:4-9; Lk 16:18). The Catholic Church has always based
its doctrine and practice upon these sayings of Jesus concerning the
indissolubility of marriage. The inner bond that joins the spouses to one
another was forged by God himself. It designates a reality that comes from God
and is therefore no longer at man’s disposal....
- "Christian marriage is
an effective sign of the covenant between Christ and the Church. Because it
designates and communicates the grace of this covenant, marriage between the
baptized is a sacrament....
- "In the Orthodox
Churches today, there are a great many grounds for divorce, which are mostly
justified in terms of oikonomia, or pastoral leniency in difficult
individual cases, and they open the path to a second or third marriage marked by
a penitential character. This practice cannot be reconciled with God’s will, as
expressed unambiguously in Jesus’ sayings about the indissolubility of
marriage. But it represents an ecumenical problem that is not to be
underestimated [Emphasis added].
- "In the West, the Gregorian reform countered these liberalizing tendencies and
gave fresh impetus to the original understanding of Scripture and the Fathers.
The Catholic Church defended the absolute indissolubility of marriage even at
the cost of great sacrifice and suffering. The schism of a 'Church of England'
detached from the Successor of Peter came about not because of doctrinal
differences, but because the Pope, out of obedience to the sayings of Jesus,
could not accommodate the demands of King Henry VIII for the dissolution of his
marriage....
-
"the ideal – built into the order of creation – of
faithfulness between one man and one woman has lost none of its fascination....Moreover, one must not forget the anthropological
value of indissoluble marriage: it withdraws the partners from caprice and from
the tyranny of feelings and moods. It helps them to survive personal
difficulties and to overcome painful experiences. Above all it protects the
children, who have most to suffer from marital breakdown [Emphasis added.]....
-
"The Church cannot respond to the
growing incomprehension of the sanctity of marriage by pragmatically
accommodating the supposedly inevitable, but only by trusting in 'the Spirit
which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God'
(1 Cor 2:12). Sacramental marriage is a testimony to the power of
grace, which changes man and prepares the whole Church for the holy city, the
new Jerusalem, the Church, which is prepared 'as a bride adorned for her
husband' (Rev 21:2). The Gospel of the sanctity of marriage is to be
proclaimed with prophetic candour [Emphasis added]. By adapting to the spirit of the age, a
weary prophet seeks his own salvation but not the salvation of the world in
Jesus Christ.....
- "It is frequently suggested that remarried divorcees should be allowed to
decide for themselves, according to their conscience, whether or not to present
themselves for holy communion. This argument, based on a problematical concept
of 'conscience', was rejected by a document of the CDF in 1994. Naturally, the
faithful must consider every time they attend Mass whether it is possible to
receive communion, and a grave unconfessed sin would always be an impediment [Emphasis added.].
At the same time they have the duty to form their conscience and to align it
with the truth. In so doing they listen also to the Church’s Magisterium, which
helps them 'not to swerve from the truth about the good of man, but rather,
especially in more difficult questions, to attain the truth with certainty and
to abide in it' (Veritatis Splendor, 64). If remarried divorcees are
subjectively convinced in their conscience that a previous marriage was invalid,
this must be proven objectively by the competent marriage tribunals [Emphasis added]....'If the prior marriage of two divorced
and remarried members of the faithful was valid, under no circumstances can
their new union be considered lawful, and therefore reception of the sacraments
is intrinsically impossible. The conscience of the individual is bound to this
norm without exception' (Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 'The Pastoral approach to
marriage must be founded on truth' L’Osservatore Romano, English
edition, 7 December 2011, p. 4)....
- "Jesus encountered the adulteress with great
compassion, but he said to her 'Go and do not sin again' (Jn 8:11).
God’s mercy does not dispense us from following his commandments or the rules of
the Church. Rather it supplies us with the grace and strength needed to fulfil
them, to pick ourselves up after a fall, and to live life in its fullness
according to the image of our heavenly Father....
- "Insofar as the parties make an effort to
understand the Church’s practice and to abstain from communion, they provide
their own testimony to the indissolubility of marriage."
In the eighth chapter, Cardinal De Paolis does not pull punches:
- "two people living together under the same roof without being married are openly violating the law of God as presented by the Church. Church law clarifies the conditions to be admitted to the sacraments, the verification of which is the responsibility of the faithful themselves. At the same time, sacred ministers are instructed as to when they are obliged to exclude the faithful from the Eucharist on account of scandal....
- "the sorrow for sins that is always necessary for forgiveness implies that, in addition to sorrow for having offended God (contrition), one undertakes and commits to go to confession with the firm resolution of not sinning again and avoiding the occasions of sin. These requirements are not met by the divorced and civilly remarried who practice cohabitation. These individuals cannot approach the Eucharist because they are in a permanent and objective state of grave sin, and they cannot obtain forgiveness because by definition they want to stay in a sinful situation and therefore do not demonstrate the true and necessary contrition to be admitted to the Eucharist. And if in spite of this they approach the Eucharist, the priest must refuse it to them whenever the conditions set out in canon 915 apply....
-
"If the status of serious opposition to the law of God and of the Church is known to the community, and an individual nevertheless dares to approach the Eucharist, he should not be admitted to Communion....
- "Faced with different life situations, such as those of the divorced and civilly remarried, we can and must say that we should not condemn, but help; however, we cannot limit ourselves simply to refraining from condemnation. We are called to assess the situation in the light of faith and of God’s plan for the good of the family, for the people involved. Otherwise, we run the risk of no longer being able to appreciate the law of God and of considering it almost as a bad thing. From a certain viewpoint, some may even argue that if the law of the indissolubility of marriage did not exist, we would be better off. These are aberrations which highlight the distortions in the way we think and reason."
- "Apart from the situation of a party who was simply not free to marry or who patently was incapable of consenting to marriage, most petitions of declaration of nullity of marriage involve complex acts of the intellect and will, which must be studied with requisite objectivity, lest a true marriage be falsely declared null....
- "The faithful can...be badly served by the ecclesiastical tribunal itself, if it is not correct and clear in its explanation of the Church’s teaching and the role of the tribunal, or if it does not actually live up to what it correctly explains its purpose to be, or if it, too, falls into a kind of pseudopastoral pragmatism. Saint John Paul II in his 1994 annual address to the Roman Rota warned precisely against the temptation to exploit the canonical process “in order to achieve what is perhaps a ‘practical’ goal, which might perhaps be considered ‘pastoral,’ but is to the detriment of truth and justice.”
"The saintly pontiff referred to his 1990 annual address to the Roman Rota, in which he had noted that those who approach the tribunal in order to clarify their situation in the Church have a right to the truth, declaring:
- [Ecclesiastical authority] thus takes note, on the one hand, of the great difficulties facing persons and families involved in unhappy conjugal living situations and recognizes their right to be objects of special pastoral concern. But it does not forget, on the other hand, that these people also have the right not to be deceived by a sentence of nullity which is in contrast to the existence of a true marriage. Such an unjust declaration of nullity would find no legitimate support in appealing to love or mercy, for love and mercy cannot put aside the demands of truth. A valid marriage, even one marked by serious difficulties, could not be considered invalid without doing violence to the truth and undermining thereby the only solid foundation which can support personal, marital and social life. A judge, therefore, must always be on guard against the risk of misplaced compassion, which would degenerate into sentimentality, itself only pastoral in appearance. The roads leading away from justice and truth end up in serving to distance people from God, thus yielding the opposite result from that which was sought in good faith.
"It must be clear to all that the judicial process, in fact, serves aptly and fully the ultimate goal, which is pastoral charity.
-
"It must also be observed that other members of Christ’s faithful, who clearly understand both the Church’s teaching and the function of the tribunal, can be disedified and even scandalized by superficial or erroneous explanations and by an incorrect modus operandi. Such is not infrequently the case among parties in a marriage nullity process who perceive the tribunal to be less than evenhanded, whether in its explanations or in its modus operandi. If a tribunal gives the impression that its main purpose is to enable those in failed marriages to remarry in the Church, then a party who has doubts about the alleged nullity of the marriage can feel that the tribunal itself considers the person an obstacle to be overcome....
-
"Here it must be noted that the common use of the ambiguous term 'annulment' in referring to the process for the declaration of the nullity of marriage can be misleading ....In general parlance, the constitutive meaning prevails. In other words, the term conveys the cancellation of a reality, not a declaration that the apparent reality in fact did not exist. 'Declaration of nullity' is the proper term to use....
-
" The Apostolic Signatura has received a number of observations from members of the faithful regarding the use of the term “former spouse” in reference to the other party in a marriage whose validity is contested. To them this expression indicates a prejudice against the validity of the marriage. Whatever the actual intentions of the person using such an expression, the observation is not frivolous. The matrimonial tribunal, for example, in its general explanations, should be careful not to use such ambiguous expressions. In reference to a particular case of nullity of marriage, it is correct and more respectful to use the name of the person in question, rather than referring prejudicially to 'the former spouse'.
-
"A similar difficulty arises when a tribunal...tries to acknowledge the existential reality or putative nature of the marriage in question...but uses ambiguous expressions in doing so. A clear distinction must be made between the existential experience and the validity of the marriage before the Church, and likewise between the validity of the union in civil law and its validity in canon law.
-
"Such well-meaning efforts even lead to erroneous explanations, such as....making too great a distinction between marriage as a natural reality created by God and a sacramental marriage. Saint John Paul II warned against this, for example, in his allocution to the Roman Rota in 2001, when he declared:
- When the Church teaches that marriage is a natural reality, she is proposing a truth evinced by reason for the good of the couple and of society, and confirmed by the revelation of Our Lord, who closely and explicitly relates the marital union to the 'beginning' (Mt 19:4-8) spoken of in the Book of Genesis: 'male and female He created them' (Gn 1:27), and 'the two shall become one flesh' (Gn 2:24). The fact, however, that the natural datum is authoritatively confirmed and raised by our Lord to a sacrament in no way justifies the tendency, unfortunately widespread today, to ideologize the idea of marriage—nature, essential properties and ends—by claiming a different valid conception for a believer or a non-believer, for a Catholic or a non-Catholic, as though the sacrament were a subsequent and extrinsic reality to the natural datum and not the natural datum itself evinced by reason, taken up and raised by Christ to a sign and means of salvation....
"This understanding of the marriage nullity process is not a new reality in the juridical life of the Church, but it has received renewed emphasis in the past seventy years, especially in the annual addresses [by the Holy Fathers] to the Roman Rota....This more recent emphasis in the papal Magisterium has been in part a response to the tendency of the modern age to relativize truth or even to deny its existence, a tendency that has had a negative influence even within the Church and her tribunals. Regarding law, in general, there has developed the notion that the law has no relation to objective truth but is constituted by whatever man, usually the judge, decides....
-
"While one cannot exclude the possibility that there are those who consciously and explicitly reject the Church’s doctrine on marriage and yet accept and exercise an office in a tribunal in a manner that betrays their oath of office, the more common difficulties found in this regard arise from an acritical acceptance of certain principles and practices that in effect betray or weaken what should be the common underlying purpose of all who participate in canonical trials, which is the search for the truth. Quite often such practices are based upon a mistaken idea of what it means to be 'pastoral', which has its source in the pervasive relativism in our culture. Such ways of operating can have serious repercussions not only for the individual decisions that touch the very first cell of the life of the Church and of society, but also for the public perception of the work of the tribunal and indeed of the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding marriage. As experience teaches, the world at large is not especially eager to accept what the Church has to say, especially when it is not reflected in the way that the Church lives" [emphasis added].
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