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Good evening, Father Angelo Bellon,

does a person sin for his will to get together with a divorced one?

Greetings and thanks in advance.

Andrea

The Priest’s answer

Dear Andrea,

1. A will to be together with a divorced person is the same as the will to get into a status of permanent adultery.

The divorce obtained by the civil authority is irrelevant to God. The two remain constantly united in marriage with an indissoluble bond.

Jesus said:  “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate” (Mt 19:4-6).

2. Again, we read in the Gospel: ‘In the house the disciples again questioned him about this. He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” ‘ (Mk 10:10-12).

3. Even when the civil authority decrees a divorce, the bond of indissolubility remains.

On their wedding day, the two spouses somehow expropriated themselves. They no longer have any basis for a possible revocation.

They are one, now.

4. Thinking about getting together with a divorced person is just putting oneself into a status of permanent adultery.

That means there is an impediment to absolution in confession and to Holy Communion.

5. In Familiaris consortio, John Paul II wrote: ”the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist. Besides this, there is another special pastoral reason: if these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church’s teaching about the indissolubility of marriage” (FC 84).

6. The doctrine does not change, as understood in Amoris laetitia by Pope Francis: “while clearly stating the Church’s teaching” (AL 79).

After all, the doctrine of the Church is not his, but it is the teaching of his Master and Lord, indeed.

7. Again in Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis takes up the teaching of Benedict XVI, who “in his Encyclical Deus caritas est, returned to the topic of the truth of the love of man and woman, which is fully illuminated only in the love of the crucified Christ (cf. No. 2). He stressed that ‘marriage based on an exclusive and definitive love becomes an icon of the relationship between God and his people, and vice versa. God’s way of loving becomes the measure of human love’ (DCE11)” (AL 70).

8. This truth was already expressed in other terms by John Paul II: “Their belonging to each other is the real representation, by means of the sacramental sign, of the very relationship of Christ with the Church.

Spouses are therefore the permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross; they are for one another and for the children witnesses to the salvation in which the sacrament makes them sharers” (FC 13).

9. Man is called to sanctification, and this principle illuminates this whole topic.

For most people, sanctification comes through marriage.

Considering that target, “the indissolubility of marriage […] should not be viewed as a ‘yoke’ imposed on humanity, but as a ‘gift’ granted to those who are joined in marriage” (AL 62).

It is a gift for the present life, helping to overcome personal temptations and limits.

Above all, it is a gift for the future life, which one prepares for by conforming ever more to the faithful and exclusive love of God for man and of Jesus Christ for the Church.

Wishing you all good, I bless you

Father Angelo