The divorce Bill and couples reconciling (2)

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott (The Sunday Times, October 31) wrote that “when a court grants divorce, it is not effectively undoing a marriage validly concluded in God’s eyes, but merely decriminalising an act that would otherwise have been bigamy”.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines divorce as “the legal end of a marriage”. Thus, ‘to grant a divorce’ means ‘to grant a legal end to a marriage’. Doesn’t this mean the same as ‘undoing a marriage’ and therefore, from a Christian point of view, undoing ‘what God has joined together’?

Moreover, if this can be said of a court that grants divorce, can’t it also be said of whoever empowers the court to act in this manner, such as the legislator, whether through a vote in parliament or through a vote in a referendum?

At times I wonder whether in this matter of divorce we are not exposing ourselves to a severe rebuke by Jesus similar to His reprimand to the Pharisees of His time for gradually bringing to nothing God’s Commandments in their pursuit of their man-made traditions.

In our case, it is not ‘traditions’ but such arguments as those concerning ‘the lesser evil’ and ‘the common good’.