August 6, 2012              Brian Lewis, Ballarat, Australia

INDISSOLUBILITY OF MARRIAGE

0ne of the most remarkable features of Vatican II's treatment of marriage is the emphasis placed on marital love. However, given the very personalist approach of the Council, this emphasis is not surprising.  

The Constitution on the Church in the World Today (Gaudium et Spes, n.49) makes a number of points about this truly human and divine love:

ñ  It involves the good of the whole person of the couple. 

ñ  It enriches all the expressions of body and mind with a unique dignity as fleshing  out and signifying the friendship distinctive of marrage.

ñ  It attracts special gifts: healing, grace, agape.

ñ  It leads the spouses to a free and mutual gift of themselves.

ñ  It is meant to grow and develop.

ñ  It is uniquely expressed and perfected through the marital act, which in a unique manner promotes the joy and richness of togetherness

ñ It thus expresses and promotes the mutual self-giving of the spouses.

ñ It remains steadfast in bright days or dark.  

The tragedy of marriage breakdown, which today has reached alarming proportions, is no doubt due to many reasons, but the research of Dr. Jack Dominian has shown that a major contributing factor is the inability of many couples to establish the sort of love relationship which the Council sees as one of the essential purposes of marriage. One or both spouses lack the personal qualities and maybe the verbal, sexual and other skills needed for the promise of the wedding day to be realised. As Vatican II says in the above document, 'this vocation demands notable virtue..... the constancy of love, largeheartedness and the spirit of sacrifice'. The challenge to grow in love is made more difficult to realise when other problems, like unemployment, poverty, substandard housing and conditions, social pressures to accept certain values and 'live up to the Joneses' complicate the issue. Sadly some just do not have the capacity to strengthen and develop their relationship in days bright or dark and make it work.  

The emphasis on marriage as a love relationship in the terms used by Vatican II throws light on the words of Jesus proclaiming the absolute indissolubility of marriage. He  was confronting a patriarchcal society, in which women's main role in marriage was to provide a male heir for their husbands and to ensure his inheritance remained in his family line, and in which divorce by the male was countenanced if the woman failed to live up to expectations. In such a context little encouragement for the growth of a loving personal relationship was possible. Questioned by the Pharisees about the situation, Jesus replied: 'Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female and that he said: This why a man must leave father and mother, and cling to his wife, and the two become one body? They are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide' (Mat.19:3-6; Mk.10:1-12).  

The words of Jesus were a strong challenge to the establishment's attitude to marriage and divorce and a defence of the dignity of women in face of their diminished status, which rendered difficult any mutual, harmonious and equal relationship intended by the Creator. There is general agreement today among scholars that these words of Jesus are gospel not law. Pope Benedict XVI, when he was professor of theology summed up the position in his book on the theology of marriage in 1972:

            Instead of entering into the casuistry of interpreting the law and adopting this position or that, Jesus goes back behind the law and interpretation to its origin, to what man (sic) really is and should be all about in the sight of God.... Because Jesus goes back behind the level of law to the origin, his saying should not itself be seen immediately and without further ado as law; it cannot be detached from the sphere of faith and discipleship.  

Jesus did not cast his teaching in the legal form of an authoritative statement about a bond that cannot be broken. Yet he did more than just set before us an ideal without any binding force. Rather, the saying of Jesus carries an obligation, a 'moral ought', obliging the disciples of Jesus fully and utterly to pursue a goal. It is a command, as Bernard Häring says, like the command to love one's enemies or the saying: 'Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful' (Lk.6:36). 'This kind of commandment indicates a direction, but also obliges one to commit oneself, to prepare oneself, to train oneself to reach the goal and to practise and love the corresponding modes of behaviour' (No Way Out? p.31).  

The early Church continued to uphold the teaching of Jesus about the absolute indissolubility of marriage, but at the same time strove to apply this teaching to particular situations with the compassion that Jesus himself had shown to those in difficulty. Well-known English moral theologian, Kevin Kelly, states that the exceptions permitting divorce found in the writings of Matthew and Paul reflect how early Christian communities tried to deal with new situations that arose in the course of their ministry in their communities, while remaining faithful to the prophetic message of Jesus. Problems arose, for instance, when one spouse embraced the Christian faith while the other did not. 'Paul insisted that this did not give the Christian partner an automatic right to divorce, even though he also wrote that divorce, and presumably remarriage too, was acceptable whenever difference of religious belief made it impossible to maintain peace in the home' (Kelly, Divorce and Remarriage, in Bernard Hoose (ed), Christian Ethics, p.253).  

Matthew and Mark both of course defend marriage against easy divorce. But Mark applies this to a Hellenistic world, while Matthew permits divorce to those of his community whose first marriage did not measure up to the demands of Jewish law. There is growing agreement among biblical scholars that Paul and Matthew give evidence of an exception to the absolute prohibition of divorce and show that in their particular Christian communities Jesus' teaching was adapted to particular circumstances. There is also growing consensus that these examples should have an important bearing on the life and practice of the Church today.  

The Church today seeks to carry on the pastoral aspect of Christ's ministry and the practical concern of Paul and Matthew through the work of its marriage tribunals, through its outreach to divorced persons and through the ministry of priests in the forum of conscience. Nevertheless the pastoral care of those often in desperate need continues to challenge the whole People of God. Further reflection, and appropriate action where called for, must remain a continuing challenge and an unfinished task. Kevin Kelly cites with approval the words of Catholic biblical scholar John R. Donahue:

           While bearing in its life the prophetic teaching of Christ, the Church must also present to the world that Christ who defended the innocent victims of different forms of oppression and who was ever present to sinners and tax collectors and whose offer of love was closer to the religiously marginal than to the pious and just. Any step backwards to a simple 'adamantine opposition' to divorce without adaptation of this opposition and the questioning of its application would not be faithful to the  New Testament.