“You made a very odd reply to me yesterday on the subject of marriage.”
Um, you said that shacking up was the same as being married. No, it’s not. I said there is zero evidence for, (and your own source showed), that there is plenty of evidence against the fact that Karen was married prior to her marriage with Rick.
“I find it a convoluted moral strategy to say that because Rick Santorum’s wife ONLY LIVED with an old dude for 6 years but never married him, she is somehow more fit to marry than someone who had a previous marriage.”
Yes, that’s because living together isn’t the same as marriage.
“This seems like serious nit-picking to me”
Hardly, not unless you believe that shacking up is the same as being married. As I said, the Catholic church sees marriage as a sacrament, that, like Baptism, you can’t get remarried, just like you can’t get rebaptised.
This is different from how protestants see marriage. It’s important to understand this.
Well, I never used the distasteful term, shacking up, for one thing.
And, by the way, I think you are a little unbalanced.
You are implying that it is more moral to live with someone than to marry them.
That’s really odd. Really.
"Exacly what is the sacrament of marriage? It "is an inseparable bond between a man and a woman, created by human contract and ratified by divine grace. The nature of the covenant requires that the two participants be one man and one woman" and "that they be free to marry." In the Catholic Church, "it is consent that creates marriage. Consent consists in a human act by which the partners mutually give themselves to each other. Consent must be a free act of the will of the consenting parties, free of coercion or grave external error. If freedom is lacking, the consent is invalid." Interestingly, "it is the spouses who are understood to confer marriage on each other. The spouses, as ministers of grace, naturally confer upon each other the sacrament of matrimony."
"Now, back to the union of God and man. Let's think about some of the constiuent components of marriage: freedom to consent to an inseparable bond, absent any coercion; mutual surrender; male (God) and female (the soul); the parties freely choose to confer marriage upon each other, not one upon the other; and the parties become vehicles of grace for one another, through which the regenerative upper waters flow into the world, transforming water into good wine and sour wine into the upper waters of eternal life and love. ...."
So ask yourselves, would such a contract between two individuals not be ratified by divine grace, unless it was performed in front of a "priest" or "preacher" to make it "so"??
Be careful.