A Reflection for Friday of the Nineteenth Week in Bizarre Time
“Due to hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the start it was not so. I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the wedding is illegal) and marries one other commits adultery.” (Mt 19:3-12)
Various years ago I had the chance to work with Margaret Farley, R.S.M., on two books: One was a revised 2013 version of her 1986 classic Personal Commitments, the opposite a 2015 collection of essays, Changing the Questions: Explorations in Christian Ethics. Sister Farley’s renown as an ethicist is well-deserved, and I learned much about proper discernment and authentic Christian living from these books in addition to her 2008 classic, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. (The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was not so keen on that one.)
Among the many topics she covered in all three was how one can understand situations during which an apparently unbreakable covenant had change into unsustainable, with the apparent example being marriage. Jesus doesn’t leave much wiggle room in today’s Gospel for such situations—ya dance with the one which brung ya, he seems to say—and yet, Farley contends, a coherent ethics of marriage based in natural law suggests exceptions. What about an abusive marriage, whether physical or emotional? What a couple of marriage entered into under false pretenses? Why would God doom anyone to a loveless or endangered existence because, well, them’s the principles?
Matthew offers something of an out in today’s Gospel by the use of a parenthetical: “(unless the wedding is illegal).” In Catholic practice that typically means proving the wedding never took place sacramentally because an impediment existed that rendered it null from the start. In line with your local diocesan annulment tribunal, those impediments can be quite few in number; in accordance with Pope Francis, though, they may be slightly common. He said in 2016 that “the good majority of sacramental marriages are null,” a quote that was later toned down within the official Vatican transcript but that raised quite a couple of eyebrows on the time.
Can we hold one another up in holiness if we proof-text the Gospel to convict ourselves and our neighbors?
In “Amoris Laetitia,” Pope Francis upholds the standard Catholic understanding of marriage but additionally counsels discernment; just because the Pharisees attempt to do to Jesus in today’s Gospel, we are able to unfairly put others to the test once we take “an attitude that will solve the whole lot by applying general rules or deriving undue conclusions from particular theological considerations.”
Can we hold one another up in holiness if we proof-text the Gospel to convict ourselves and our neighbors? Pope Francis recognized “the necessity for continued open discussion of a lot of doctrinal, moral, spiritual, and pastoral questions” around marriage, divorce and remarriage. That is largely because our adherence to natural law requires that we process the concrete realities during which we exist. And all of us interact every day with people in every station in life: married, divorced, widowed, single, in religious life and more.
God and the church give each of us many helps along the way in which, including the gift of discernment and the continuing reception of God’s grace, in determining our proper state in life—the one we each take “for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.” That could be a way more profound task than that of dwelling on what’s lawful—and I believe Jesus, Pope Francis and Margaret Farley would agree.