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Dear Father,

my name is …, I am writing because I would ask you a question about my situation.

I am 39 years old and I civilly married my wife who is 27. We both come from two failed marriages, by which I had three children and my current wife had a son. Together with her we had four more children.

Both my wife and I applied for nullity of our previous marriages. My wife obtained it, but I did not. In my case, there was no “simulation of consent” with my ex-wife. That is true, because my ex-wife and I met on a journey of faith, we pondered the idea of a Christian marriage and we had a chaste engagement arriving at the wedding as virgins. Even after marriage we lived a chaste and open-to-life marriage that brought us three children. Then, after 7 years my wife and I could not experience intimacy for a while, and I felt an attraction for my current wife. So, I started dating my current wife who was already divorced. It started as a friendship, but then a strong feeling arose. We never had sex during this clandestine affair, waiting to experience intimacy only when our bond was officially consolidated by marriage. I left my ex, we separated and then divorced and I began the procedure to annul the sacramental marriage.

Throughout this period, I never had sex with my current wife and we did not live together. Then came the ecclesiastical court ruling and, while my current wife’s marriage was annulled, mine was not.

At this point I could have gone back with my ex-wife, but I did not feel like that because I was happier with my current wife. We married civilly and have 4 children.

The parish priest found out about my choice, and he forbade me from receiving communion. He told me that I had two options to approach communion: either to leave my current wife and rejoin my ex-wife, or to leave my current wife and live alone.

I made the decision to stay with my current wife and not receive communion.

But I do not understand…. I am condemned not to take Communion because I remarried but, as a fact, I am living in a Christian marriage, while there are couples in my parish who married in Church and make no secret that they use contraceptives. They can take Communion, but I cannot: why?

The Priest’s answer

Dear,

1. your current cohabitation is not a marriage before God.

Your true marriage is the one you celebrated in Church, with the sacramental form, with the woman whom you later separated from.

2. At your marital consent formulated before God, you expropriated yourself and totally gave yourself to your wife, and your wife did the same for you.

So, since that moment you became one as God said from the dawn of creation, and as Our Lord recalled with very strong words: “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate” (Mt 19:6).

3. Since you gave yourself completely, there is no basis left in you to possibly revoke the donation.

Since that moment, you began to eternally belong to your wife.

So, outside of that true marriage, any other form of cohabitation of yours is adulterous cohabitation.

4. About that, Jesus continued His teaching over marriage by saying: “I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery” (Mt 19:9).

5. As your sacramental marriage remains valid, since your civil marriage you started living in status of permanent adultery.

6. You say that because of this situation you are condemned not to receive Communion.

To tell the truth, you have effectively excluded yourself from the possibility of receiving Holy Communion by your own behavior.

The Eucharist is given to receive strength to keep the commitments made on the wedding day, and to be a visible sign of the ever-faithful love of God for man and of Jesus Christ for the Church by one’s own behavior.

7. This is the path for sanctification proper to spouses.

But you abandoned that path, you failed to fulfill your promise of loyalty through good times and bad.

8. It is an act of charity towards you what your parish priest told you, because a Communion taken in such a state is not true Communion with Our Lord.

This is why Holy Scripture warns: “Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are ill and infirm, and a considerable number are dying” (1Cor 11:27-30).

9. In this regard, in the encyclical about the Eucharist, the holy Pope John Paul II reported a sentence by St. John Chrysostom which is a kind of commentary about the statement of St. Paul in 1Cor 11:30: “I too raise my voice, I beseech, beg and implore that no one draw near to this sacred table with a sullied and corrupt conscience. Such an act, in fact, can never be called ‘communion’, not even were we to touch the Lord’s body a thousand times over, but ‘condemnation’, ‘torment’ and ‘increase of punishment’” (Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 36).

10. About your last statement: “I am condemned not to take Communion because I have remarried but, as a fact, I am living in a Christian marriage, while there are couples in my parish who married in Church and make no secret that they use contraceptives. They can take Communion, but I cannot: why?”.

Unfortunately, it must be recognized that, while maintaining your religious faith and practice (and I give you credit for this), you are not living in a Christian marriage, but in an adulterous cohabitation.

This is an objective fact, there, for all to see, and it would generate confusion or scandal if you could receive Holy Communion publicly.

On the contrary, the contraceptive practice of other Christian couples is not a clear fact, verifiable by everyone. It is a hidden sin.

Then, they will have to answer afore God because of the sin that certainly aggravates their situation, that is the fact they receive Holy Communion anyway without preceding it by confession.

11. John Paul II in Familiaris consortio declared that “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).

12. To be able to receive Holy Communion, the only possibility is through the condition recalled by John Paul II in the same magisterial document: “Reconciliation in the sacrament of Penance which would open the way to the Eucharist, can only be granted to those who, repenting of having broken the sign of the Covenant and of fidelity to Christ, are sincerely ready to undertake a way of life that is no longer in contradiction to the indissolubility of marriage. This means, in practice, that when, for serious reasons, such as for example the children’s upbringing, a man and a woman cannot satisfy the obligation to separate, they “take on themselves the duty to live in complete continence, that is, by abstinence from the acts proper to married couples” (FC 84). 

On September 14th, 1994, in a Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith added: “as long as they respect the obligation to avoid giving scandal” (nr. 4). That is, in this case one cannot publicly receive Holy Communion where one is known as a divorced and remarried person.

Wishing you all the best, I bless you.

Father Angelo