Remarriage – a better alternative to cohabitation and illegitimate children (3)

Pastoral contact with many married couples clearly indicates many unhappy marriages have resulted from people entering into them without giving serious consideration to all that would be required of them. This regrettably takes place in all sectors of society.

Marriage is not given to us to do all we want, and as James Mac Milian so aptly says, “sacrifice and self-sacrifice are not valued any more” these days.

Surely, a successful marriage does not begin with the wedding ceremony. Its solid basis is laid much earlier. Couples entering marriage, unprepared, or ill-prepared, are gradually doomed at best to endless frustration, and more often than not, total failure.

“The Christian view of marriage as a life-long commitment of love between husband and wife in fact articulates the deepest, most genuine instincts of people in love,” said the late Cardinal Basil Hume.

Divorce then, which legally brings marriage to an end, is incompatible with this Christian view of marriage. We cannot compromise on this issue, though sometimes separation is inevitable.

The learned cardinal further said: “Sometimes it is possible to determine that the conditions necessary for a true union never existed from the outset of the marriage. In these cases a declaration of nullity can be given. But these are exceptional cases and not the rule.”

One feels deeply grateful to Archbishop Paul Cremona and Gozo Bishop Mario Grech who, in their Pastoral Note (October 15, 2010) read in all churches on ‘Marriage and the Family’ stated that “as to divorce it is our attitude towards marriage that has to be changed, not marriage”.