Who "remarries" them? If they are Catholic, aren't they required to get married by the Catholic Church, which now bars them from marriage? If "civil" marriage is not a factor in what the church recognizes or fails to recognize, except when convenient and expedient, why involve the RCC at all?
And the very fact of rules being ignored and the process being abused is the heart of my argument. If you make a rule, and then allow widespread violations of the rule, it isn't really, effectively, a "rule" anymore, is it?
The bottom line of my thesis is that our culture has infested biblical institutions today to the point where these institutions are hardly recognizable from the world. No one is exempt from this verdict, not even the Catholic Church, "official rules" nowithstanding.
That’s why I put “remarried” in quotation marks. These kind of people got “remarried” civilly or in another denomination. Often they were not practicing Catholics when they divorced and “remarried.” No, they cannot have “remarried” in the Church, sacramentally. In the eyes of the Church they are still married to the original spouses. So they are living in adultery. If they remain living together and abstain from sex, they may receive Communion. But if they are active sexually,they are in adultery and even if they were to confess this as a sin, they cannot be absolved as long as they still live together sexually because you can’t be absolve of a sin you intend to commit again.
So they can benefit from the Sacrifice of the Mass but not receive Communion.
For those who were lapsed when their marriages broke up and they “remarried” but who later had a conversion and now attend Mass, this is a painful thing.
The rules are winked at and ignored by many but not by all. The teaching remains Church teaching and some pastors teach it. The Catholic Church has not simply thrown in the towel.
You made assertions about us before you really knew much about the whole complex of practices, laws, principles.
You might be somewhat pleasantly surprised to learn more about it all.
And on abuses—well, it’s far better to have abused rules but still to have the rules than to simply throw in the towel, as everyone else has done. Orthodox do require the divorced and remarried person to receive Communion, if they have confessed the serious sin and are contrite—at least that is my understanding, subject to correction.
The principle that abuse does not remove the goodness of the use is lost on most Protestants. It underlies the crucial mistake of the Reformation.
We’ve come through a period of great abuses and scandal and sins by Catholics. It isn’t the first and won’t be the last.
But the Catholic Church today is the only Christian group that still even has a coherent teaching on the relationship of procreation and marriage and sex. The separation of procreation and sex, made practicable by widespread contraception, which was accepted by Protestants without even much consideration of the issue,is the root of our divorce and homosexuality problem.
Catholics are often confused and messed up on these issues but no one can say that we don’t have a clear teaching on it—John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae. And it may surprise you to know that the younger generation is increasingly aware of them and embracing them.
There are, sadly, a lot of marginal Catholics who have, in part through malfeasance of bishops and catechism, sloughed off and are CINOs. This has always been a problem but it’s an abuse, not the use. And the purifying persecution headed our way will clarify matters. You will wake up some day to see that the Catholic teaching on sexuality, marriage, and procreation will be a beacon in the trial by fire that the remnant of believing Protestants and Catholics will undergo.
Don’t knock what you don’t yet understand. Inform yourself about Catholic marriage and sexuality teachings and then, if you still find them wanting, start knocking.
But it’s clear you don’t yet know much about them.