Purify Your Bride

The problem is we have forgotten what being Catholic is all about. The central point of being Catholic is having Jesus as Lord of your life. If He is not Lord of you life then everything about the faith is a lie. The sacraments are not just meaningless. They are a desecration. Prayers that are powerful when believers say them become vain repetition. Nothing about the faith makes sense if you don’t surrender to Jesus and try to become like Him in every way.

So what does that have to do with remarriage? Well, Jesus says remarriage is impossible. Now if you have been married once and are planning to marry again then you are saying remarriage is possible. That means your view of marriage is not the same as Jesus’ view of marriage. If Jesus is Lord of your life then you will see this as a problem. My thinking is out of sync with God’s thinking. My thinking needs to change. If you do that. If you change your view of marriage to make it line up with Jesus’ view then you will see your first marriage as no marriage at all. It was part of an impoverished mindset that made marriage co-exist with multiple partners. So it makes sense to seek a declaration of nullity around that marriage.

But what about the case where the person has not changed their thinking on marriage? That person needs to wrestle with the question: Is Jesus Lord of my life? If the answer is Yes then changing your thinking on marriage is required. You cannot claim Jesus as Lord and continue to differ with Him dramatically in such an important area of life. You need allow Jesus to transform your thinking or you need to admit the answer is really No. That Jesus is really not Lord of my life.

If you end up realizing that you have not really made Jesus Lord that is a major blessing. It means you can stop pretending you are OK with God and face the face that you are on the wrong road. But it is an ugly truth that people don’t want to face. They have been telling themselves they are good Catholics. Many times the church plays along. There are unwritten rules not to challenge people with the hard teachings of Jesus. Stepping up to those challenges is precisely what makes Catholicism worth while. But to many priests don’t get that. They let people play games with the faith and don’t call them on it.

Remarriage is one time in life when it becomes obvious. It becomes hard to pretend to be Catholic while living the life of an atheist. But people still do it. They have to lie and say they were not serious about their first marriage. They have to do something. They end up blaming the church for the problem. They are right but not in the way they think. They church is at fault because they allowed the Lordship of Jesus to be moved out of the center. They allowed people to see Catholicism as possible without that Lordship being recognized.

So people say the church’s policy on annulments is silly. That people should not have to stop going to the Eucharist just because they are in their second marriage. The truth is they should not have been going before that. They are not serious about the faith. That seems very harsh. It isn’t really. The church has bent over backwards not to judge them. But the remarriage has forced them to judge themselves in a public way. Better to know that there is a problem before it is too late.

Even then, many Catholics who are trying to be compassionate end up just being offensive. They end up bad mouthing the church. Partly it is because they want to be liked. They want to be nice. They want to keep everyone in the church. Jesus didn’t do that. He wanted people to count the cost and if they were not willing to pay it to leave. You are either all in for Jesus or you just walk away.