502. What are the offenses against the dignity of marriage? (part 2 continuation)
(Comp 502 repetition) These are: adultery, divorce, polygamy, incest, free unions
(cohabitation, concubinage), and sexual acts before or outside of marriage.
“In brief”
(CCC 2400) Adultery, divorce, polygamy, and free union are
grave offenses against the dignity of marriage. (CCC 1661)
The sacrament of Matrimony signifies the union of Christ and the Church. It
gives spouses the grace to love each other with the love with which Christ has
loved his Church; the grace of the sacrament thus perfects the human love of
the spouses, strengthens their indissoluble unity, and sanctifies them on the
way to eternal life (cf. Council of Trent: DS 1799).
To deepen and
explain
(CCC 2383) The separation
of spouses while maintaining the marriage bond can be legitimate in certain
cases provided for by canon law (Cf. CIC, cann. 1151-1155). If civil divorce
remains the only possible way of ensuring certain legal rights, the care of the
children, or the protection of inheritance, it can be tolerated and does not
constitute a moral offense. (CCC 2384) Divorce
is a grave offense against the natural law. It claims to break the contract, to
which the spouses freely consented, to live with each other till death. Divorce
does injury to the covenant of salvation, of which sacramental marriage is the
sign. Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to
the gravity of the rupture: the remarried spouse is then in a situation of
public and permanent adultery: If a husband, separated from his wife,
approaches another woman, he is an adulterer because he makes that woman commit
adultery, and the woman who lives with him is an adulteress, because she has
drawn another's husband to herself (St. Basil, Moralia 73, 1: PG 31, 849-852).
Reflection
(CCC 2385) Divorce is immoral also because it introduces
disorder into the family and into society. This disorder brings grave harm to
the deserted spouse, to children traumatized by the separation of their parents
and often torn between them, and because of its contagious effect which makes
it truly a plague on society. (CCC 2386) It can happen that one of the spouses
is the innocent victim of a divorce decreed by civil law; this spouse therefore
has not contravened the moral law. There is a considerable difference between a
spouse who has sincerely tried to be faithful to the sacrament of marriage and
is unjustly abandoned, and one who through his own grave fault destroys a
canonically valid marriage (Cf. FC 84). [IT CONTINUES]
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