HOLY WEDLOCK AKA MARRIAGE

Marriage or matrimony is a sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church believes in marriage that isn’t sacramental but valid and marriage that is a sacrament or Holy Matrimony. Only two baptised persons can contract matrimony. Jesus then refuses to help a baptised person married to an unbaptised person with the grace of the sacrament. How kind! How egalitarian!
 
The marriage rite makes a man and woman belong to each other for life. This contract is validated by them having sex at least once. A system that stresses that instead of how happy they can make each other is definitely unloving and degrading. Marriage is a sacrament in the Roman Catholic tradition which forbids us then to say such things about marriage!
 
If marriage is about love, then it is odd how it is finalised by an act of sex even if the partners turn to hate each other. And another couple who love each other infinitely who can't have sex never have a valid marriage. Sex may express love but it is not love.
 
The marriage is validated by sex meaning the man and woman virtually cohabit until they have sex. There is no real marriage until the sex.
 
Church teaching says the letters of the apostle Paul were written by God at the same time. Paul, who the Church says wrote the letters carrying his name in the New Testament, said that because the unmarried can spend more time serving God that marriage wasn’t recommended and was only for those who had strong sexual needs that could lead them to sin unless they got married (1 Corinthians 7). Doesn’t sound much of a sacrament to me! Paul may say this is his opinion but he says it is trustworthy in the Lord meaning God inspired this opinion! He wrote that the single woman or man is worried about the affairs of the Lord and how to be holy in body and spirit but the married woman or worries about worldly things and pleasing the spouse. He said he wished that all were like him and were unmarried celibates (1 Corinthians 7:7) and that it was best to refrain from marriage (v38). If marriage were a sacrament, it would bring people closer to God no matter about the world for the husband and wife find God in pleasing and helping each other.

In marriage the husband and wife are closer than mother and son. It follows then that since you can’t divorce your mother or make her cease to be your mother you have even less hope of really making your wife cease to be your wife. Marriage then implies that divorce is immoral and invalid and wrong. Marriage is anti-women for women suffer more from marriage than men do.
 
Christian marriage claims that the husband is the master and head of his wife (1 Corinthians 11:3) and this is the punishment God meted out to Eve and all her female descendants who would marry (Genesis 3:16). This implies that if divorce is allowed only the husband should seek divorce. It implies that the husband must treat the wife as a slave or servant and as his property. If he treats her as an equal then it could hardly be said that he is living up to his role as her punishment from God.
 
The New Testament says that divorce is absolutely wrong. Even when Paul says that a Christian convert can leave the spouse married in a pagan ceremony, he doesn’t let the convert marry again. He says in Romans 7 that the law of God is binding on you as long as you are alive like a woman cannot have another man in marriage until after her husband dies. To allow divorce would contradict his point.
 
Jesus in Matthew seems to say that divorce is only permitted when adultery has occurred. But all he says is that pornea is a separate case – he doesn’t say it is an exception but something he won’t discuss now. Pornea can mean adultery or fornication. He may be referring to invalid marriages as fornication and saying they are a separate case but that divorce is always always wrong. If Matthew really allowed divorce it would have to be eliminated as true scripture for the earliest sources say divorce is absolutely wrong. 
 
If divorce is intolerable despite all the suffering caused by being married to an unsuitable partner, isn't it obvious that separation must be intolerable too? Separation is treating the marriage as if it never happened. If you must keep acting married to your partner by refusing to take a new husband or wife is it not as bad to live away from that partner? Do you really think that remarrying after an amicable divorce is a bigger breach of marriage than one having an estranged spouse and living away from her or him?
 
The Catholic Church boasts that it forbids divorce. Not true. The Church declares that the marriage between two validly baptised people cannot be dissolved by any power. But if one of them turns out to be unbaptised then the divorce is permitted. The Church boasts that it protects marriage when it is really its doctrine it cares about - not marriage!
 
Marriage is not a union of lovers for the feeling of love can disappear and the partners start to love each other in another way.
 
Jesus' teaching has a lot of vicious implications. No wonder his apostles didn't like his teaching and said it was better not to marry at all.