Brief refresher on the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage: a valid marriage is a sacramental bond that continues until death, even if the wedding rings are removed and a civil divorce is obtained. Hence, an individual who divorces and civilly remarries cannot be validly remarried in the eyes of God, and the new relationship is “living in sin” in the same manner as for a cohabitating couple, because, as you’ll recall, having sex outside of marriage is a serious sin. However, in some instances, it may be the case that a couple that had been married civilly, and even had married in a Catholic church, was in hindsight never validly married at all, because one or the other never intended to make a lifelong commitment, or was too immature to do so, or from the start never intended to welcome children, or in some other way failed to tick the boxes of the requirements for a valid marriage. In such a case, an annulment process formally recognizes that the marriage was never valid and the individual is free to remarry, because, in effect, it’s not a re-marriage.
You with me?
Sure, I know that only a minority of readers are Catholic, let alone faithful Catholics. But let’s take the preceding as the starting point or we won’t get anywhere.
And what’s the “anywhere” where I hope to get? A fresh way of looking at the issue.
The trouble is, of course, that Catholics do get divorced. Should the church do more to help those of its members who are struggling with their marriages? Absolutely. Should there be some form of “Catholic marriage counseling” on offer, both for couples who can’t afford private-practice counselors, and to offer couples the assurance that the counselor believes in the sacrament of marriage (given that I’ve read that many counselors will now enter the counseling sessions with the attitude that the sessions are more about discernment whether to stay married or not)? But that won’t change the fact that people will divorce — for reasons both “good” and “bad.”
The response I’ve seen over and over again is, “well, they can get an annulment” — and in many cases that may indeed be true. Certainly reforms removing fees and complexity from the process are welcome, but it still cannot be the case that every marriage that breaks up was truly one that was never valid in the first place. Consider, after all, a couple considering divorce, and knowing that this “divorce always is caused by a never-sacramentally-valid marriage” school of thought is out there: how would this affect your decision-making?
I don’t have the theological terminology at hand, but this reminds me of the “once-saved, always-saved” doctrine of certain Protestants, who believe that every Christian who makes that profession of faith will always stay faithful; given examples of individuals who once were professing Christians and have fallen away, it’s my understanding that they explain this away as “well, they must not have really meant what they said in the first place.” There’s also the “I believe in Hell, but I don’t believe anyone is in Hell, because surely everyone either repented in the end or, due to impairment of some kind, isn’t responsible for their sin.”
Without being able to speak theologian-speak, this “every divorce was automatically due to the marriage having been invalid” (sorry for the clumsiness of that turn of phrase) fits in the same category — there’s probably even some defined label for this sort of error in belief, though I don’t know it.
So I’ll say one thing for the Cardinal Marx: he’s not willing to play the “just get an annulment” game. In his speech at the Synod, he recognizes that there are people who were validly married, but where one or the other party to the marriage, or both, left the marriage despite the firm intention not to, at the start of the marriage — and that it is a particular challenge for these people to obey church teaching. In some cases, they left the church for a time, remarried civilly, and now wish to return to the practice of the faith. In other cases, they may not have made a decision to remarry but feel punished by being unable to remarry.
Now, granted, Marx is pushing this while at the same time being happy excluding non-Church Tax-payers from communion, which seriously undermines his credibility. But this is what he says:
“we should seriously consider the possibility – based on each individual case and not in a generalizing way – to admit civilly divorced and remarried believers to the sacrament of Penance and Holy Communion.”
This should be permitted, he continued, “when the shared life in the canonically valid marriage definitively has failed and the marriage cannot be annulled, the liabilities from this marriage have been resolved, the fault for breaking up the marital lifebond was regretted and the sincere will exists to live the second civil marriage in faith and to educate children in the Faith.”
And here’s the problem: he identifies the “sin” in question as being that of having gotten divorced. His scenario seems to be, for instance, a man leaving his wife for a younger model, and later regretting his behavior. (Let’s be cynical — probably all the more relevant a scenario for Marx if the man in question has a generous income.) In this case, yes, the abandonment is a sin which should be repented of, and the “liabilities” — child support and alimony for the wronged first wife — should be met.
But that’s only half the story on the Catholic teaching on marriage. Jesus, after all, didn’t say, “whoever divorces his wife* treats her unjustly because he has an obligation to support her” in Matthew 5:32 (* Yes, there’s the bit that in a standard Protestant translation is “except for marital unfaithfulness” in a Catholic translation is “unless the marriage is unlawful” — that is, if the “wife” was really a concubine) and he didn’t say “whoever trades his wife in for a younger model is a real ****” — he said that doing so causes the wife to commit adultery, that is, when she remarries, as would have happened in Jewish practice, the new marriage wouldn’t be valid.
Marx further says, “The advice to refrain from sexual acts in the new relationship not only appears unrealistic to many . . . Should sexual acts in the second civil marriage without exception be judged as adultery? Irrespective of an appraisal of the concrete situation?” (See here for the original German.) Now, seems to me that scripture itself tells us that the answer is “yes” — but presumably Marx’s opinion is that the sinfulness is mitigated by the difficulty of the circumstances, in a “they can’t help it” sort of way, so that remarried individuals are to get a pass here. Marx has labelled this elsewhere as a matter of “pastoral care” somehow separate from theological doctrine about sin, but you can’t simply separate the two — sin is, after all, not a simple abstraction, but wholly a matter of how real people live their real lives.
Is there a Solomon-like way of solving this problem, of maintaining fidelity to church doctrine while at the same time pleasing those who are tired of that uncomfortable position of having to instruct the civilly re-married that they sinning by being remarried and compounding the sin by receiving communion, when they’d really rather just make everyone happy?
One thing that occurs to me is that, in any case of divorce, especially if it occurs many years after the fact, no one can truly reconstruct the mindset of both of the parties. Did you truly understand the commitment you were making? Even if so, did your partner, who turned out to be a no-good lout, genuinely intend to make that commitment, or did he or she, like so many “kids these days,” figure you’d just hope for the best? In some cases it’s clear, but in other cases hazier, and that haziness could perhaps warrant a solution that falls in-between, such as some guidelines for receiving only under certain circumstances (at Easter, say, or after individual confession, or perhaps after a specified time of refraining from sex, even if without the commitment to do so indefinitely), under the cautious yet benefit-of-the-doubt approach that “maybe you’re not sinning after all.”
And the other issue is this: a generation, or perhaps two or three ago, it wouldn’t have been a big deal to miss communion; there was, after all, the notion of the Easter Confession, and the obligation to receive communion at least once a year. Pre-Vatican II, it was, if not mandatory, at least far more expected that you’d only receive communion if you had just been to confession, and that regardless of whether you’d committed some mortal sin or another or just garden-variety venial sins — and in those circumstances a couple refraining from communion because they’re not validly married wouldn’t stick out, but would fit right in with all those who hadn’t been to confession, or had even just been to hungry in the morning for a proper Eucharistic fast back when it started at midnight, not an hour before receiving. The teaching was always — and, in principle, still is — that one could receive communion “spiritually” by being particularly prayerful during mass and considering the time of the distribution of communion as an opportunity for prayer and connection with Jesus even without physically receiving the host or the chalice. Now that’s gone; not only is there an expectation that one receives communion every time one attends mass, but this is emphasized in homilies.
Here’s another thought: I’ve only been to a Eucharistic adoration a small number of times, but last Holy Thursday stayed with my 12-year-old son for the exposition after mass ended. It made a huge impression on him. I don’t know how common a practice adoration was in pre-Vatican II times, but it seems to me that it’s (still? or now?) relatively rare for exposition to be a regular part of parish life, so that for almost all Catholics, the only way to experience the Eucharist is through receiving communion at mass. Perhaps Catholics have ironically created a problem by elevating the importance of receiving communion so far above other ways of connecting with Jesus.
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