Bottom line on top: the majority of self-identified Catholics simply don’t believe there’s anything wrong with divorcing and remarrying, in about the same proportion as they think that cohabitating is just fine, as well and, presumably, were they asked by Pew researchers, would have said that consensual nonmarital sex is OK.
Now, some of these folks are cultural Catholics who don’t really take the church’s moral teaching all too seriously in any case. But others can’t be so easily dismissed.
What do they think of Jesus’s words about remarriage being equivalent to adultery? I’m not sure, really. Do they think this is somehow a peculiar metaphor for “bad thing” and refer solely to “social-justice” issues, in a case where divorce means abandonment and a woman left without means?
I’ve read in the past proposals to think of the “adultery”, and thus the sin, as referring to the one-time event of the marriage ceremony itself, not the ongoing relationship. I saw this argued in an extended form a while back, and was reminded of it by a piece a facebook friend shared today, which says that we should hold remarried folk to any higher a standard than anyone else “who has sought forgiveness for past sins.”
But this doesn’t make sense if the sin is adultery specifically, and Jesus, of course, doesn’t say anything that suggests that the wedding event itself is the issue.
Perhaps their answer is along the lines of “the early church put words into Jesus’s mouth because they had their own agenda”?
Perhaps it’s more a matter of the modern tendency to rationalize sins into a “can’t be helped” non-sin? Cheat on an exam? Take your pick of justifications: everyone does it. The test-makers were in the wrong because the high-stakes test shouldn’t have been imposed anyway. Or: the student simply didn’t know any better, so shouldn’t be held responsible. With respect to the idea of asking a civilly-remarried couple to refrain from sex: it’s treated as a joke, almost an embarrassment to suggest it — and because that’s the case, because it’s just so preposterous to imagine this, the answer is to move this off the Sin List, or at least create a new list, Sins That Just Can’t Be Helped.
Or perhaps the list is this: Sins That Are On the Sin List for Purely Arbitrary Reasons and May Be Ignored in Real Life. Kind of like our approach to immigration: sure, working with false ID or off the books is a crime, but the government has pretty much stated they don’t care if it’s for the cause of allowing an illegal immigrant to get a job.
And, by the way, guess what else is on this list?
Non-marital sex, in general. (“Pre-marital” implies there’ll ultimately be a marriage, so I avoid that term.) How many of these Catholics who have divorced and remarried, had in the interim period not hesitated to have sex with a boyfriend/girlfriend, then go up to communion the next day? Oh, and, of course, contraception. Have you ever heard of someone refraining from communion for that reason?
I’m guessing that, in reality, most priests, most laypeople, however diligent, would hem and haw about “conscience” if asked point-blank whether a cohabitating couple should refrain from communion, and, even more so, a contracepting couple. But it’s remarriage that’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room, because some German bishops are speaking openly about it.
I don’t really have a point. And I have other topics on which I really intended to blog, and I have to finish up my lunch break and go back to setting up a valuation. And I expect that most of my readers would rather I finished up a more politically-minded draft post. But there it is.
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