Bishops OK marriage pastoral with many changes, some opposition (names provided)

I did not dispute that the non-dissolvability of marriage. Nor did I dispute that communion is for only those that have accepted Grace.

My contention was that it is possible to have accepted the grace of Christ and be divorced/remarried. Take, for instance — a man who divorces his wife, remarries, and then finds Salvation. He is forgiven for all previous transgressions (known and unknown) — including the adultery under the premise that the previous marriage was never dissolved.

The doctrine of Grace would seem to me to indicate a fresh start in this scenario (with the new marriage). Previous sins are washed away by the grace of Christ. He should therefore be able to participate in communion (in my opinion). This does not seem to contradict scripture.

SnakeDoc

Yes, Christ's teachings on the permanence of marriage apply to Christian marriages.

Paul discusses this in his First Letter to the Corinthians, verses 10-15:
"10 To the married, however, I give this instruction (not I, but the Lord): a wife should not separate from her husband
11 --and if she does separate she must either remain single or become reconciled to her husband--and a husband should not divorce his wife.
12 To the rest I say (not the Lord): if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she is willing to go on living with him, he should not divorce her;
13 and if any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he is willing to go on living with her, she should not divorce her husband.
14 For the unbelieving husband is made holy through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made holy through the brother. Otherwise your children would be unclean, whereas in fact they are holy.
15 If the unbeliever separates, however, let him separate. The brother or sister is not bound in such cases; God has called you to peace."

The right to divorce the non-Christian spouse is thus called the "Pauline privilege."

The divorced and remarried cannot take communion? How perfect does one need to be to qualify for communion?

One needs to be in a state of grace to receive Communion. It's not so much that those who are divorced and remarried are worse sinners than other people. Many times, of course, they might be committing far fewer sins than many others in the Communion line. The problem is that they cannot truly repent and confess their cohabitation while they are still married to their second (or beyond) spouse. Their sin is ongoing, in other words.

Unlike most other sins, where a person can repent and simply put the sins behind them with God's grace, the remarried, as long as they remain remarried, cannot "put the sin behind them." That is what keeps them from receiving the Eucharist. You may be interested to know that people who are divorced and living chastely without attempted remarriage are perfectly free to approach for the Eucharist, provided they are otherwise in a state of grace, of course.

If a person who has remarried wants to return to the Sacraments, he or she must first repudiate the remarriage. This, of course, is exceedingly difficult, on a number of levels. No one would argue otherwise, and the Church and its members certainly should pray for and lift up such souls. All the same, the Church cannot water-down the doctrines it considers to be Christ-breathed for the sake of any human convenience, sentimentality or wordly "mercy" as they are commonly understood. My heart certainly goes out to people caught up in this sort of jam, but, in the end, they are where they are due to their own choices. Many other people should absent themselves from Communion too, until such time as they sincerely repent and seek to avoid their sins in the future. Until they do, they are equally caught in a jam of their own making. But it is certainly easier to give-up theft or drug use or talebearing or whatever else, than it is to go through the social wringer - not to mention the emotional wringer! - of having to repudiate a second marriage often undertaken in good faith and in ignorance of the true nature of things.

We are all sinners, but some sins are easier to put behind us than others, or, at least, aren't anywhere near as publicly known as these second marriage situations. Neighbors know a lot, and the scandal they take - a sin in itself, if used to smear the couple in any way - seeing a remarried couple receiving Communion is probably less than even seeing a known former prostitute or drug pusher going up the line. If they repented, they are done with their sin. Until the divorced and remarried couple ceases to live together, anyone familiar with their circumstances knows that they cannot have truly repented of the remarriage. Therefore, they should not be receiving Communion. It is outwardly an act of manifest, ongoing hypocrisy, a source of potential scandal among the other faithful (leading them to the sin of taking scandal even while it is itself a sin of giving scandal), and, under the circumstances, is hardly condusive to good spiritual health.

It sure can be hard living a Christian witness in a modern world which calculates so much societal practice to be directed against the will of Christ, isn't it? It's a shame how this sort of unfortunate business has become so prominent a problem in our own day. The only true solutions available are not easy or especially palatable, but we are still called to "go through the narrow gate."

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