Roman Catholics: Second Thoughts on Second Marriages

A devout Roman Catholic is abandoned by his wife. Unable to live a celibate life, he eventually remarries outside the church. He and his new wife live exemplary Christian lives and bring up their children in the Catholic faith. Nonetheless, they cannot receive the sacraments. According to church law, their marriage is invalid, and they are thus living in a state of mortal sin.

Such cases are common in an age of increasing divorce. In the current issue of Marriage magazine, an article by French Priest-Psychologist Ignace Lepp suggests that it is time for the church to do something about them. “Does our faithfulness to principles give us the right to ignore the suffering of our brethren?” asks Lepp, who died last month at 56, shortly before his article appeared. “Is it really in the interest of the church to exclude from the Christian community so many men and women involved in invalid marriages?”

Convenience for Kings. Lepp points out that many priests sympathetically but hypocritically give absolution and Communion to a divorced Catholic who lives with a mistress or girl friend; yet the moment the sinner tries to regularize the relationship by remarrying outside the church, he becomes a spiritual outcast. Lepp also argues that in its early years the church found it convenient to dissolve the marriages of powerful lords and kings. Church historians concede that such annulments were often granted on tenuous grounds, and that the current strict attitude to divorce did not begin to take shape until the 12th century. Lepp concludes that the church, even while holding fast to its belief in the sanctity of marriage, ought to be less rigoristic about divorced Catholics who wed a second time.

Some other Catholic theologians agree with Lepp’s proposal. In the same issue of Marriage, Benedictine Father Dennis Doherty, who specializes in moral theology, suggests that the church might find a way out of the dilemma by redefining what it means by a valid marriage. According to canon law, a marriage is valid if it has been properly witnessed and then consummated sexual ly. If some essential requisite in the sacrament is missing, the couple may later be able to gain an annulment, which means in effect that the marriage was null and void from the beginning.* Divorce and remarriage are out of the question, however.

Sacraments for Sinners. Doherty argues that “consummation” should be viewed not simply as the physical act of intercourse but as the spiritual union of two persons of which sex is the symbol. If it can be proved that this spiritual unity did not exist from the beginning, he says, the church might in certain cases be able to declare the marriage null and void. Still another approach is taken by three Dutch theologians, Fathers B. Peters, T. Beemer and C. van der Poel, writing in a recent issue of the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. They suggest that even if second marriages cannot be regularized, Catholics who otherwise display evidence of contrition and strong faith might be admitted to the sacraments.

Even as they push for a revision of Catholic marriage rules, the theologians concede that any change will be slow in coming. Faced with a possibly revolutionary decision involving the church’s stand on birth control, prudent Pope Paul VI is most unlikely to follow it up with an equally radical change in divorce law. More than once, he has expressed alarm at the mounting number of annulment cases clogging the Sacred Rota, the church’s final court of appeal on such problems.

* Most common grounds: impotence, refusal to have children, coercion of one of the partners into wedlock, close blood ties.