Letter: Marriage is not indissoluble

It is sad that Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia forbids the sacraments to Catholics who remarry without an annulment — with the exception for those who remarry “to live together as brother and sister,” as reported in your paper July 7.

The archbishop’s ban of sexual love almost guarantees failure of a marriage. As the documents of Vatican II say: “... where the intimacy of married life is broken off, it is not rare for its faithfulness to be imperiled and its quality of fruitfulness ruined.”

The archbishop’s ban follows from his belief that marriages are “indissoluble.” But “indissolubility” was not the practice in the first 1,100 years of church when thousands of bishops were married as well as some 39 popes.

Joseph Martos writes that in this period “there were no universal prohibitions against divorce ... Irish councils in the seventh century allowed husbands of unfaithful wives to remarry ... in 725 Boniface, Pope Gregory II’s missionary bishop to Germany, recognized desertion as grounds for divorce, as well as adultery.”

As most Catholics who remarry, I did so to receive the grace that flows from living in intimacy with another created in “God’s image and likeness”; to have two parents in our house for my kids; and to, as much as possible, reconcile with my first spouse. I receive the sacraments with a clear conscience.

This story was originally published July 20, 2016 at 1:53 PM with the headline "Letter: Marriage is not indissoluble."