Indissolubility of Marriage
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The World Wants to Believe in Unconditional Love
The Catholic Church doesn’t go around forcing lovers to buy each other diamonds. The Catholic Church isn’t the one demanding that lovers carve their initials in trees. Lovers do that on their own. Because the longing, the hope, and the need for unconditional love is indelibly stamped on the human soul.
Everyone wants to say, “I will love you forever.” And everyone wants to hear “I will love you forever.”
The Church is the one, and really, the only one, who says not just that our body’s longings are natural, but also that our soul’s longings are natural.
The reason that husband and wife are called to love one another unconditionally till death is because God loves us unconditionally to death. And we are made to love like God.
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Unconditional means no matter what
Unconditional means no matter what. Christian Marriage is indissoluble. Because it shares in God’s love, it shares in the permanence of God’s love. It’s unbreakable. Of course, even Christ’s apostles were shocked, really horrified, when Jesus said that breaking one marriage to begin another was simply not an option.
And we want to say this idea of Christian marriage is totally unrealistic. What if the other spouse is unfaithful? What if the other spouse is cruel? What if the other spouse neglects you? What if the other spouse wants you to leave?
Well, what you think is realistic when Jesus tells His disciples to pick up their crosses and follow Him. What you think is reasonable to put up with in a marriage when St. Paul says that the model of marriage is Christ laying down His life for His people. His people who were unfaithful, who were cruel, who rejected and ignored him, and who told Him, “Come down from the cross! We don’t want you to lay down your life for us. Leave us alone.”
There is nothing that we have to put up with in our marriages that is worse than what Christ endured out of love for us. So difficulties in a marriage is our chance to imitate our Master.
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Children
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says too that the good of children demands an “unbreakable bond” between the spouses (#1646). If I say to my children, “I will always love you. I will never abandon you” – how can they believe that promise if I break the exact same promise I made to their mother before God, the Church, and the world.
Children need to know they can count on something. Most importantly, they need to know they can count on your promise. If you have broken that promise – and not just broken it in a moment of weakness, but broken it permanently – the foundation of their whole world is ripped out from underneath them.
It’s time we stopped pretending that’s not devastating. It’s time we stopped pretending that that’s okay. It’s time we said what God said through the prophet Malachi “I hate divorce.” (Mal 2:16).
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Annulment / no divorce / Legal separation
Now sometimes, for instance, to safeguard the children’s physical safety, there must be a physical, and perhaps even legal separation between the husband and wife.
St. Paul allows a husband and wife to separate, but not to contract a new marriage. And there are many heroes, martyrs to marriage, who have been abandoned by their spouses, and are still living out the vows they made that day. Just because someone else breaks a promise, it doesn’t entitle us to do it.
Also, sometimes it turns out that what we thought was a marriage was actually a misunderstanding from the start. Someone wasn’t actually making a full vow, someone wasn’t free to get married in the first place. This is annulment, when, after investigating the facts surrounding the wedding day, the Church concludes that there was never a valid marriage at all. One of the spouses wasn’t capable of getting married.
That is not Catholic divorce. When people justify a divorce, they reference to the situation of the couple now. When the Church declares an annulment, she references the situation of the couple then, on the day of the wedding.
A real marriage, witnessed by God and by the Church – as Jesus Himself says, “What God has joined, let no one put asunder.”
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Perseverance and the Promise of Faith
St. Thomas Aquinas says that the greatest measure of courage is perseverance. In other words, when there doesn’t seem to be any way of making the situation better, but you refuse to abandon the good to which you’re committed.
Perseverance is how Christ saved us on the cross, simply hanging there, when He could have just left at any time.
This is the courage so many marriages require. When it feels like it will never get better. Things will never improve. This is our chance – and for some of us, the only chance – we’ll ever get to be brave. To live and love as Christ did, through the marriage, the sacrament, that will unite us to Him.