Vespers – Orthodox divorce vs Catholic annulment: “Was the strange proposal on communion for the divorced and remarried, made at the just concluded Synod on Family, an ecumenical effort directed at reconciling the Orthodox and Catholic practices?” (I love the Catholic Church) I wonder if the strange proposal on communion for divorced and remarried Catholics has something to do with the ecumenism of Catholic-Orthodox union? Both churches acknowledge the sacred and binding character of Christian marriage, but they have different ways of dealing with the breakdown. In the Orthodox Church, when every effort exerted to save a marriage fails then the bishop may declare the marriage bond to be severed. Permission for another marriage may also be given, but there is a penitential character to the service. This certainly does not square with Mark 10:9 and Matthew 19:6 and is a retrogression from the exalted level of New Testament matrimonial grace to the level of Old Testament law, within which Moses, and not God, acknowledged the hardness of heart and permitted divorce. In the Catholic Church, of course, there is nothing like divorce in a valid Sacramental marriage; as Christ the head cannot be separated from His Mystical Body, the Church, so it is also impossible for man to be separated from his wife. Catholics and Orthodox find each others practices on the subject of divorce mutually ‘incomprehensible’. Was the strange proposal on communion for the divorced and remarried, made at the just concluded Synod on Family, an ecumenical effort directed at reconciling the Orthodox and Catholic practices? I wish to thank Stanford Espedal, a non-priestly theologian working informally in Catholic-Orthodox ecumenism, for his clarification on Orthodox divorce.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 23:13:40 +0000
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