“Faith in supernatural principles is now more than ever subject to humiliation.”

Defending the Truth About Marriage

By Tom Piatak

The Catholic Church is the only major institution that still teaches the truth about marriage: that it is an indissoluble, lifelong union between one man and one woman, open to the transmission of life. And one of the consequences of this truth is that divorced persons who have remarried while their spouse is alive may not receive Holy Communion. This is grounded in the clear words of Jesus Christ, who said, “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and the one who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery.”

This has also been part of the Tradition of the Church since the early centuries of Christianity, with St. Augustine writing that “it is unlawful for one who leaves her husband, even when she has been put away, to be married to another, as long as her husband lives” and St. Jerome writing that “A husband may be an adulterer or a sodomite, he may be stained with every crime and may have been left by his wife because of his sins; yet he is still her husband and, so long as he lives, she may not marry another.” 

The pertinence of this teaching to the present age is clear. We now know how damaging divorce is for children, even for the adult children of parents who undergo divorce. And we also know that the Church’s teaching remains efficacious: Catholics, at least in the United States, divorce at a lower rate than non-Catholics.

Yet, despite this, the Church has seen extensive debate over the past year over Cardinal Kasper’s proposal to admit remarried divorcees to Holy Communion. Kasper’s proposal has won widespread support among self-professed “progressives,” and it is not hard to see why: if the Church can overturn a teaching that is grounded in the clear words of Jesus Christ and in clear apostolic Tradition, there is no teaching of the Church that cannot be changed to suit the demands of this age, or of any age to come.

Ignatius Press’ book Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church is a valuable and timely defense of the truth about marriage. 

Contributors to the book include the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, as well as Cardinal Walter Brandmuller, Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, plus the book’s editor, Robert Dodaro, O.S.A., Patristics scholar John Rist, biblical scholar Paul Mankowski, S.J., and Archbishop Cyril Vasil, S.J., an expert on the Eastern Church. The book’s perspective is clear. As Fr. Dodaro explains in his excellent introduction, “The authors of this volume jointly contend that the New Testament presents Christ as unambiguously prohibiting divorce and remarriage on the basis of God’s original plan for marriage set out at Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 … civil marriage following divorce involves a form of adultery, and it makes reception of the Eucharist morally impossible (1 Cor 11:28), unless the couple practice sexual continence. These are not a series of rules made up by the Church; they constitute divine law, and the Church cannot change them.

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