In the Catholic Church, marriage is considered a forever commitment. This is based on the words of Lord Jebus (see for example Matthew 4:31-32). It’s srs bzns, as we see from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Divorce
2382 The Lord Jesus insisted on the original intention of the Creator who willed that marriage be indissoluble.173 He abrogates the accommodations that had slipped into the old Law.174
Between the baptized, “a ratified and consummated marriage cannot be dissolved by any human power or for any reason other than death.”1752383 The separation of spouses while maintaining the marriage bond can be legitimate in certain cases provided for by canon law.176
If civil divorce remains the only possible way of ensuring certain legal rights, the care of the children, or the protection of inheritance, it can be tolerated and does not constitute a moral offense.2384 Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. It claims to break the contract, to which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other till death. Divorce does injury to the covenant of salvation, of which sacramental marriage is the sign. Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture: the remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery:
If a husband, separated from his wife, approaches another woman, he is an adulterer because he makes that woman commit adultery, and the woman who lives with him is an adulteress, because she has drawn another’s husband to herself.177
2385 Divorce is immoral also because it introduces disorder into the family and into society. This disorder brings grave harm to the deserted spouse, to children traumatized by the separation of their parents and often torn between them, and because of its contagious effect which makes it truly a plague on society.
2386 It can happen that one of the spouses is the innocent victim of a divorce decreed by civil law; this spouse therefore has not contravened the moral law. There is a considerable difference between a spouse who has sincerely tried to be faithful to the sacrament of marriage and is unjustly abandoned, and one who through his own grave fault destroys a canonically valid marriage.
What do you do, then, when many marriages fail, as nearly half do in America? If you get a divorce, well, that’s immoral, even if the civil authorities allow it. And although it’s okay for Catholics to get divorced and live apart, it immediately becomes a “grave matter” (which can lead to a mortal sin that sends you to hell) if you get married again or even cohabit with anyone else.
Nobody ever said that Catholics aren’t inventive: they circumvented Jebus’s dictum by creating the device of annulments, in which the failed marriage is considered to have been invalid in the first place. You have to apply to your diocese for one of these after your civil divorce is final, and it often takes a long time, and can cost a bit of money, too. But you simply have to wait—and some applications are disapproved, meaning that you can never get married or cohabit again without going to hell.
The grounds for getting an annulment are standard; one site lists these:
- Most annulments are based on canon 1095, psychological reasons. These include a wide range of factors. Some of them may be misrepresentation or fraud (concealing the truth about capacity or desire to have children for example, or about an preexisting marriage, drug addiction, felony convictions, sexual preference or having reached the age of consent). [JAC note: Ratzi doesn’t like these grounds, and has urged churches to not use them too hastily.]
- Refusal or inability to consummate the marriage (inability or refusal to have sex)
- Bigamy, incest (being married to someone else, or close relatives)
- Duress (being forced or coerced into marriage against one’s will or serious external pressure, for example a pregnancy)
- Mental incapacity (considered unable to understand the nature and expectations of marriage)
- Lack of knowledge or understanding of the full implications of marriage as a life-long commitment in faithfulness and love, with priority to spouse and children.
- Psychological inability to live the marriage commitment as described above.
- Illegal “Form of Marriage” (ceremony was not performed according to Catholic canon law)
- One/both partners was under the influence of drugs, or addicted to a chemical substance.
The upshot: unhappy people stay married for fear of eternal damnation. Let’s face it, marriage goes against the natural grain of promiscuity, at least for men: the institution could be characterized in Dawkinsian terms as “rebellion against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” Throwing together a man and woman who haven’t cohabited (a sin!), and expecting them to live in harmony forever just isn’t a great idea.
The Catholic Church’s view of marriage, and its requirement that it control the path of marital dissolution and remarriage, is simply a way to enforce an outmoded dogma (as if it were ever “moded” in the first place!), and to control its members. It leads people to stay married when they are unhappy and should be divorced, and creates a doublethink whereby nearly all Jebus-approved marriages can be revisited upon application and considered non-approved. This “morality” clearly comes not from God but from man, and is actually immoral.
Its really funny how much of a sin it is, when you consider that Jesus says there is no marriage in heaven (presumably everyone is a sexless choir bot by then). Sure, you promise to live together to the end, but then its just over? Why is it so important for the living, but ignored by the dead? And then you get into Pascal’s Wager territory… would God really credit you with having a marriage that lasted until death if you were unhappy, unloving, and in general only followed the letter of the law, rather than the spirit?
It’s a good job we have the Catholic church telling us what is moral, because there is no way I’d have worked this out using only my intelligence.
Me neither…
Ray – excellent choice of graphics and equally excellent taste in music.
In Ireland the Catholic church fought tooth and nail for decades to keep divorce illegal, not just for Catholics but for non-Catholics alike. Divorce only became legal in 1995, with a tiny nationwide margin of just over 9000 votes in favor of legalization (50.28% for divorce and 49.72% against). The church pulled out all stops in its bid to keeps the countries laws in step with church rules, even flying a dying Mother Teresa over to campaign for a No vote.
That’s Catholic logic for you – fly in a foreign old lady who never married to campaign to deny even non-Catholics the right to divorce.
Didn’t she promote a “theology of suffering”, denying pain medication to seriously ill patients and accept money from questionable sources?
It’s striking how much misery this prohibition has inflicted on people. Before divorce became widely available, husbands (mainly) and wives simply deserted spouses, so-called “poor man’s divorce”. My great-grandfather went to work one day and just didn’t come home. He probably bigamously remarried somewhere else. After looking for him for 4 years, my great-grandmother drowned herself in despair. Is that a better system than one with divorce? Whenever people say that Jesus was a great moral teacher, I remind them that it was Jesus himself who condemned divorce and called the remarried adulterers.
Thanks for the first person reality check…
A couple of years ago a friend, who was marrying a devout Catholic lady, had to fill out the forms to have his previous marriage annulled, despite him 1) being a former Protestant, 2) having two kids from a 3) marriage of at least 10 years that the church wanted to pretend wasn’t real. It was about 20 pages of intrusive nonsense about his spiritual condition and such.
I told him that he should just put down that he didn’t believe in God anymore, because he didn’t. That would have settled the matter.
“Really? I should have thought of that.”
They got a Protestant preacher for hire to do the wedding, but a Catholic priest friend did some sort of blessing that satisfied her very devout family.
It was a great wedding anyway.
I was once called in as a witness to a Catholic anullment. They’d then been married for nigh on 25 years and had two children. The annullment was granted and the marriage deemed to have never taken place. Part of my role in this solemn farce was to testify that I didn’t think he was homosexual.
It’s just occurred to me that I could have made it quicker/easier for them if I’d said I thought he was….
Yeah, my friend didn’t really want a Catholic wedding — it was just something his bride-to-be and her family wanted. If he’d been honest up front, he would have been rejected for it straight away.
It’s only the “faithful” who need to jump through their church’s hoops.
I gather that’s what Newt Gingrich did.
Wonder if, in that passle of papers, he addressed bringing up divorce (serving divorce papers?) to his wife in her hospital bed?
I always wonder about the effect on the children when their parents’ marriage is declared invalid…
Staying in a “marriage gone wrong” leads to disorganized attachment and the internalization of abuse via vicarious repression.
Wait, that sounds like religion!
Conernging annulments: “These include a wide range of factors.”
Knowing someone who worked in a marriage tribunal and recommended cases, most annulments, if the person is serious about separating, are accepted, eventually.
People get divorced. And the church would rather grant an annulment than have the person leave the church and get a divorce anyway. All you have to do is argue that your spouse kept something about themselves from you at the time of marriage and find someone to vouch for you (doesn’t have to be the spouse). This could be something as serious as drug dependency, money problems or just a disagreeable side to their personality. The escape hatch is pretty huge.
This rings true. My Very Catholic Mother-In-Law was divorced after 20-some years of marriage. She was able to get an annulment. My father-in-law is a jackass sometimes, but he wasn’t an alcoholic, drug abuser, mentally ill (well, at least not diagnosed), etc.
It’s less important for the Church to actually prevent divorces than it is to say they are 100% consistent in their theology. One of many, many inventive circumventions created to “preserve” dogmatic purity when that dogma collides with reality.
I have a relative whose Catholic marriage was annuled on the grounds that her first husband’s army dogtags read “Religion: None”.
‘And the church would rather grant an annulment than have the person leave the church and get a divorce anyway.’
That’s all very well, but the Church takes its own sweet time about it and makes it absurdly difficult. Waiting for an annulment can last for a ridiculous length of time – years even. No doubt the long wait provides the hopeful petitioner with excellent instruction on who is boss; but in a secular society the Church is ultimately shooting itself in the foot. People will opt for a secular divorce because it is usually easier and quicker*.
*Except if you live in Ireland where you almost wish you lived in Saudi Arabia if you want to get a divorce.
More-so than any other bureaucracy? I’m sure the process varies greatly between diocese but on average, if I recall, they take about a year. Consider that in Maryland you have to be separated from your spouse for a year before the state allows for a divorce.
It very much depends on where you are. If you are in the States an annulment may only take plus/ minus couple of years (which is still stupidly long imo) but in other countries it is not unheard of for people to wait a good deal longer than that.
Consider that the whole Catholic annulment process is not legally binding in most places, but is merely a way to put faithful Catholics, who are getting or have already got a secular divorce, at the mercy of their religion at least on a emotional level. In short, it’s a power-trip, nothing more.
agreed
At its heart, as evidenced by the Commandment quoted above and countless other Biblical passages, Christian marriage has nothing whatsoever to do with two people expressing their love for and commitment to each other. It’s purely a matter of property law. The man owns the woman, pure and simple, the same way he owns his livestock.
All the Catholic prohibitions on divorce make perfect sense in the latter context and are equally unintelligible in the former.
Cheers,
b&
Arguable all marriage, of whatever faith (or even none at all) is a matter of property law. A couple can easily declare one’s love without requiring a formal legal structure around it — “marriage” as a social construct exists primarily as a way to demarcate certain legal obligations, especially those around property.
…except, in civil law, marriage is (at least theoretically) a matter of contract law demarcating the property rights of two equal individuals. In Christian law, marriage is a contract between the man and Jesus demarcating the man’s rights to his property — his property being the woman. Until relatively recently, the contract would have also included the woman’s first owner, her father.
Cheers,
b&
Is that in fact true historically? I thought that, for example, US civil marriage law pretty much treated women as property until about fifty years ago or so (for example, the notion of martial rape didn’t exist until relatively recently).
Even more important than that, marriage gives spouses decision-making rights for each other, and a lot of those rights are just assumed, by nature of the marital status. Having gay friends who have tried to get married as best they can has really given me a little more respect for the sorts of legal sweeties you get for being married, all for a small $50 fee.
“Legal sweeties”–nice:-)) And, as usual, Greta Christina has some to-the-point things to say about that:
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2010/11/why-.html
The prohibition doesn’t really make sense from a property conception. Why wouldn’t a man be able to decide he doesn’t want his property anymore? That’s closer to the Orthodox Jewish conception of divorce, which requires the consent of the husband. It’s become quite a problem where husbands won’t grant their wives a Get (a divorce document) and without it they can’t remarry in the Orthodox Jewish community. Shaming has been the only way to try to get husbands to sign the Get.
“It’s purely a matter of property law.”
Of course it is– the good bits are furthe”r down the page.
“Now in case a man seduces a virgin who is not engaged, and he actually lies down with her, he is to obtain her without fail as his wife for the purchase price. If her father flatly refuses to give her to him, he is to pay over the money at the rate of purchase money for virgins.” (Ex 22:16-17)
Pretty straightforward, actually.
Totally agree about the nonsensical nature of divorce as a sin, but not so much about “Let’s face it, marriage goes against the natural grain of promiscuity, at least for men.”
Promiscuity (a term I actually find somewhat anthropomorphic when it’s applied to non-humans, because it implies a kind of sluttiness) isn’t any more natural than monogamy, it just evolves under different circumstances. And multiple mating — by females as well as males — seems to be advantageous for a lot of species. But sticking with your mate can also be advantageous; do you think that snow geese or gibbons are going against the natural grain? If the young require a lot of care, mating with a lot of partners and deserting them won’t increase your fitness at all unless many or most of the other individuals help care for the offspring.
It’s true that many animals formerly thought to be monogamous now turn out to mate with multiple partners some of the time, but that doesn’t mean that “men are naturally promiscuous”.
(Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine, in case anyone couldn’t already tell.)
As I understand it, most humans are serially monogamous, with small-but-significant minorities practicing pretty much every other form of sexual relationship ever observed elsewhere in the animal kingdom that’s biologically compatible.
Cheers,
b&
Pure monogamy is pretty rare for any long-lived species, I think, and religious moralising is not going to change that much. We have conflicting reasons to be monogamous and to “stray” from that.
Men typically risk less at lot less by cheating, though, especially if the law favours men anyway (as it does in most countries).
“It just evolves under different circumstances”– agreed!
If you haven’t slept with your fiance(e), you don’t know them well enough to marry them.
(I think that applies to living together too: how will you find out in time if he throws wet towels on the bathroom floor?)
So you could get an annulment based on them having kept something about themselves from you, i.e., the nature of their sexual (or towel-throwing) personality.
Works great! Don’t sin by having sex, then you don’t have to sin by getting a divorce.
“If you haven’t slept with your fiance(e), you don’t know them well enough to marry them.”
Seconded. I would go so far as to say if you haven’t slept with your fiance(e), it is impossible to know if you love them (romantically).
Indeed.
I feel so, so very sorry for young newlyweds who have obeyed all the silly strictures of religion. They’re almost guaranteed to have made a mistake. And then they bring kids into it. Usually a lot. It’s sad.
By the time that my late wife and I legally tied the knot, we’d been living together for fifteen months and were pretty sure we’d worked out any problems we might encounter. We had a reception for friends and relatives, and by the end of the day were to exhausted to do anything but collapse. If our wedding night had been our first time for sex, it would have been very disappointing.
I must be the exception. My wife and I did even live in the same state before we got married. We met at a festival, exchanged letters and phone calls. Then went to see each other once every month or two and then tied the knot. Fourteen years and four kids later, we’re still quite happy, even though I left the Christian faith and she is very, very much a part of it. What can I say, we like each other!
I remember trying to figure out how to convey this sentiment to my kids when it became time to have some of ‘those talks…’
It’s amazing all the weight the Catholic Church puts into “Natural Law” (oddly enough, derived from the Stoics). They use it for their marriage rules and to keep women out of roles of any significance in the church or anything else that makes them feel ill at ease that teacher Jesus forgot to mention during class time.
“Natural law requires it” just sounds better than “because I said so”.
Natural Law is Aristotelian isn’t it? Aristotle thought everything had an end or purpose (he called it nature). The nature of sex is children (it’s not, but that’s why the church don’t like it), so no gay sex, or protected sex. The nature of marriage is bladdly bla bla…. It the law or nature of a thing according to them….
Genealogically, I suppose it goes back to Aristotle. It’s always struck me as a load of nonsense, but you can judge for yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/
I found out that a great-uncle (whom I never met – he died when I was four), Isaac Newton McCash, was a prominent minister, theologian and teacher in his day. He was head at a number of schools and served as the president of Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma, an institution affiliated with the Disciples of Christ denomination.
In 1905 he wrote and published abook titles “The Ten Plagues of Modern Egypt”, with a chapter devoted to each of what he saw as the ten greatest problems of his time. They are:
I. Divorce
II. Amusements
III. Municipal Misrule
IV. Corrupt Journalism
V. Lynching
VI. Social Impurity
VII. Our City Carnival
VIII. Murder – Self and Others
IX. Gambling
X. Intemperance
I wonder how many chapters great-uncle Isaac would have in a current revision of his book and what plagues he would list?
Oh, I do hope those aren’t in order of diminishing importance!
And I hope you have a copy of that–not everyone has such a legacy!
I have both of the books he wrote – the other one was published in 1912 and its title was “The Horizon of American Missions Abroad”. Apparently he was widely published in religious and educational journals, but only produced the two books. There is even a web page devoted to a brief biography at http://tinyurl.com/3comkyx, and he apparently rubbed elbows with members of congress.
“Isaac Newton McCash, 1861-1961.”
What a name, and what a life-span!
Insofar as Matthew 4:31-32 are nonexistent, I assume the OP means to refer to Matthew 5. The money quote: “but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (echoed in Matthew 19:9)
The obvious sore thumb is the exception for “unchastity.” It appears in no other Gospels, nor in Paul’s letters. I won’t go deeply into the theological twists offered to explain this; suffice to say that some are a bit ad hoc (Jesus was talking about incest).
Hmm…I would think that in that context, it would mean a woman who was not evidently a virgin on her wedding night.
Of course, this is where all of the tricks of the trade were plied to ensure adequate bleeding during the event. (Basically, a sachet filled with animal blood and inserted right before the act.)
Note, too, that the man cannot divorce the women … it says nothing about the other way around. Because, as Ben rightly points out upthread, women were considered property until very VERY recently.
I thought adultery was the opposite of childhood!
On the one hand, no divorce. On the other, no getting to know your partner before you get married.
There’s a problem here.
“at least for men”? I thought even hard-core ev-psychs gave up on that higamous hogamous crap ever since genetic testing made it clear that plenty of married women were bearing children that were biologically unrelated to their husbands.
And since humanity has lived primarily in patriarchal social arrangements for thousands of years, it hardly seems likely that marriage has been maintained for the benefit of women.
Exactly.
+ 2
Catho-chism in a nutshell:
“You can never, ever do what you want with who you want (including yourself) without express & highly conditional Pope-y permission, especially if it involves your heart, mind or doubleplus-especially your genitals which we now vicariously control as we’ve been railroaded into never using ours (because the Church can’t have employees leaving property to their heirs, oh no). Caveat: if & when some of us do use our genitals – most likely on the children we forced you to have on pain of eternal torment – it totally doesn’t count because it’s all the secularist gay atheists’ fault.
Now give me your fucking money.
Pope OUT.”
(*reduced to helpless gasps of laughter*)
Bravo!
When will we get to onanism?!
Oh sorry – that was when I was away!
I think I found a loophole.
You can’t get a divorce, but you can murder your spouse and go to confession and get forgiveness.