Good morning, metmom. It’s always good to have you in the discussion.
I welcome you to express your own convictions, but I would caution you against proclaiming, with such confidence, about matters for which your knowledge and experience have not equipped you -— as when you write erroneously about Catholic doctrines.
First, you imply, slyly, that a Catholic annulment is the same as divorce. It is not. It involves an inquiry as to whether there were binding sacramental marriage bonds to begin with. Ab initio. If there were, then the bonds are held to continue til death. That’s true even if the disappointed petitioner is a powerful and wealthy man who wants a new woman, e.g. a certain 16th century king of England.
Second, you announce that Catholic doctrine states that Holy Communion is necessary for salvation. This false, unheard-of, and I can’t imagine where you’ve gotten this. It can’t gave come with your degree.
Never having received Communion, abstaining from Communion, or even being barred from Communion, does not damn anybody to hell. Please jot that down in your Catholicism notebook.
What will damn a person to hell, however, is knowing, deliberate, and unrepented mortal sin.
Adultery is one of the biggies. Right there in the Decalogue. Adulterers do not enter the Kingdom of God. Right there in the Epistles of St. Paul. And people who divorce and remarry are committing adultery. Right there in the Gospels, the very words of the Word of God, four times. And the word He used was adultery, *moicheia*.
Please jot that down, too. We may come back to it.
The most astonishing this is the assumption, in your final paragraph, that people only get married for sex. Sometimes people get involved in a second “marriage” after divorce, because they want to create a new father-mother family for the sake of the kids.
In such a case, the Catholic Church says, by way of accommodation, that, as a sort of legal fiction, they may maintain the second invalid civil marriage to strengthen the stability of their new household for the sake of the kids. But they must abstain from sex because sex with somebody other than your vowed first-and-only spouse is adultery.
Adultery is still defined as having sex with somebody other than the spouse to whom you joined yourself til death, by vow, with God as your witness.
At least, that’s how Jesus defines it.
Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.
That's what this controversy is about.