Question 9.150

9.150 Certainly, but divorce is very widespread today. …

On the question of divorce, the Church’s teaching has been constant. Divorce and remarriage are an occasion of great scandal. Vatican Council II, in Gaudium et spes, calls divorce “a plague” (GS 47). Likewise, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that divorce is immoral because of the disorder it introduces into the family and society. This rupture always results in serious harm: to the spouse who is abandoned, to the children who are 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” (CCC 2385). “Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law. . . [and] 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” (CCC 2384). Christ’s words are forceful: “I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery” (Mt 19:9).

Saint Basil, in his Moralia 73, writes: “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.”

Of course, today there are many Catholics who resort to divorce according to the civil law and contract a new civil union. The Church, out of fidelity to the Word of Jesus Christ, upholds his position: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mk 10:11-12). It is not possible to recognize a new union as valid if the first marriage was. Divorced persons who have remarried civilly are in a situation that is objectively contrary to God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Eucharistic Communion as long as this situation persists. For the same reason, these men and women cannot exercise certain responsibilities in the Church. Reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance can be granted only to those who have repented of having violated the sign of Christ’s covenant and fidelity and are committed to living in complete continence (CCC 1650).

Some might argue that divorce is so common today that it no longer gives scandal. … According to that reasoning, we could therefore admit divorced and remarried persons to Holy Communion. In the opinion of these zealots of a strange sort of progress, no one would be shocked! This sort of argument is based on a misunderstanding of the very notion of scandal. It is not a psychological shock but, rather, an action that deliberately draws others into sin. In no case should a sinner tempt or pressure someone else to sin. Now the abundance of divorces and remarriages are sins that result in social situations and institutions that are contrary to God’s goodness.

The “sinful situations” that are thus created are the expression and the effect of personal sins. They induce others to commit evil in turn. Christ’s disciples find themselves in an increasingly difficult setting that weakens their faith, their attachment, and their fidelity to God’s teaching. The Church constantly exhorts them to resist and firmly to oppose the structures of sin. She reminds them that a married couple can be founded only on the relationship shared by one man and one woman. The overall plan for mankind cannot be carried out apart from the man-woman duality. Is this not the point where we must look constantly to Christ, the one who ultimately reveals man?

The Son of God alone reveals to man and to woman their true common nature, their true and equal dignity, by restoring to perfection the ties of reciprocal love, mutual aid, and complementarity that were inscribed in the depths of their being, from the beginning, by the Creator.

In Africa, too-even though some peoples practiced polygamy before the Christians arrived-in the pure ancestral tradition, monogamous and indissoluble marriage is the center of existence. It is not only the covenant of the husband and the wife but, at the same time, the covenant of their families and clans, sealed with the word that is given and the “blood” of the kola nut that is shared together. The kola nut, the seed of the kola tree, is the symbol of the definitive and indissoluble union of the matrimonial bond. It is made up of two parts that are firmly joined to each other. The future spouses divide it, and each one munches on his part. The master of ceremonies then asks the spouses to restore the kola nut to its initial state. The impossibility of doing so symbolizes the definitive bond of marriage. The couple, indissolubly constituted and associated to the families by the bonds of marriage, also becomes generational, so as to be registered in the immortal line of the preceding generations. Through their children and their children’s children, the parents continue to exist, thanks to a bond of solidarity that Christians call the communion of the living and the dead.