Day 311: Adultery and Divorce

The Lord Jesus insisted on the original intention of the Creator, who willed that marriage be indissoluble. He abrogates the accommodations that had slipped into the old Law. Between the baptized, "a ratified and consummated marriage cannot be dissolved by any human power or for any reason other than death." CCC 2382

In today's reading, the Catechism discusses adultery and divorce. I've mostly commented on the first before, but I did find the part stating that the prophets of the Old Covenant saw "it as an image of the sin of idolatry" (CCC 2380) to be interesting, citing Hos 2:7, Jer 5:7 & 13:27 from Scripture. These are about Israel breaking faith with God, but it's quite telling that such language of marital infidelity is used to describe it. God is portrayed as the angry, spurned husband, while Israel is the flighty, unfaithful wife. For the divinely inspired authors to write this, it's easy to see just how gravely sinful actual adultery was considered.

Divorce is the other matter addressed by the Catechism today. The discourse between Jesus and the Pharisees in Matt 19:1-12 about this seems clear enough: men and women who marry are "no longer two but one" and "what therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." When the Pharisees raised why Moses allowed divorce, Jesus shot them down by saying, "from the beginning it was not so," and anyone who does divorce and remarry, commits adultery. Kind of hard to argue with that, and it's no surprise that from this, the Church teaches that doing this is gravely sinful. It is curious though, that Jesus gave what some have viewed as an exception of adultery and the Pauline privilege in 1 Cor 7:10-15.

Divorce not only rips couples and families apart, with children caught in between, but it can have an extremely negative impact on society as a whole. Think of the children being raised in single-mother households, especially the boys without a father around to help raise them. We've seen famous cases, like that of Henry VIII, leading to England's violent break from the Church. Marriage can be difficult at times, but divorce can be far more problematic and is rightly considered sinful in my view.