| Marriage | faith | decision | crisis | divorce | loopholes | Jesus' opinion |
Marriage and faith
Many young couples hesitate to proceed with this final commitment, knowing that marriage is exposed to unforeseen developments. But we cannot plan, secure and test everything to the last detail. Sometimes, we have to make a decision, because we cannot leave things forever revocable. Having been together for some time, many couples decide to get married, especially with the prospect of raising a family, in order to put their relationship into a firm and legally protected framework.
The celebration in the church reinforces the consciousness of finally and forever belonging together. Should a crisis emerge, the fact of a church wedding can give an important support. Many older and experienced married couples confirm this. It is true that marital difficulties cannot simply be resolved by faith and prayer. But faith in the God of love and reconciliation gives us confidence in the possibility of lifelong faithfulness. This faith helps the spouses to accept each other, forgive and allow and dare a new beginning should they disappoint each other and fail.
This shows how important it is not to put the religious life into a file after the wedding day, but to continuously care for it together.
Divorce
Jesus voiced the opinion that divorce is essentially directed against love. "What God has joined together, let not man put asunder" (Matthew 19, 6). The Church derives the insolubility of a validly concluded marriage from this sentence. She does not intend to bind and force people to hold on to the past. Rather, the thought of insolubility reinforces the endeavor to exhaust all possibilities of living in marital community. Divorce shows that a couple has stopped looking to the future together and trying to find each other always anew. Therefore, Jesus radically opposes people continuously looking for new circumstances under which a married couple might eventually be divorced. Jesus demands of us free decisions for a faithfulness which excludes loopholes right from the start. The aim of this exigency is not only to avoid marriage breakup but to influence the partnership in such a way that divorce becomes out of the question.
Reality, however, proves that even with a Christian marriage, breakup and the entailing separation of partners cannot always be avoided. Separation is often the lesser of two evils. In such cases the Church permits partners to live separately from each other and get a civil divorce because of the civil law conse- quences. But this does not change the legal view of the Church regarding the continuity of the marriage concluded before the altar.
Sometimes, it is said that a married couple was "divorced" by the Pope. In reality the Pope made a declaration of invalidity which has nothing to do with divorce. In this case, it is established through proceedings before the matrimonial court of the Church that a valid marriage was not concluded in the first place.