REACT: Catholic Canon Lawyer Explains Marriage Dissolution

Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church does *not* teach that all valid marriages are unable to be dissolved!  Canon lawyer Andrew Kong eloquently explains the three scenarios in which a marriage can be dissolved according to the teachings of the Catholic Church on the @TotusTuusApostolate podcast.  I express my disagreement where I find this teaching deviates from Scripture.

Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH9YRS7N/
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/divorceyourremarriage/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DivorceYourRemarriage
Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-7751594
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578367894327
Email: DivorceYourRemarriage@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Divorce Your Remarriage Podcast. I'm Chris Iverson. And in our last episode, we talked about Catholic annulments. That was the last episode. This episode, we're going to talk about Catholic divorce, which is different than an annulment. And yes, the Catholics do have divorce. They do have dissolution of marriages. So here's what the Catholic Church says. And this confuses a lot of people. They say all valid marriages are indissoluble. But it turns out that some marriages are more indissoluble than others. So there's two types of marriage bonds. So the sacramental marriage bond occurs when two properly baptized people get married. That's a sacramental bond. The sacramental bond, the Catholics would say, is totally, completely unable to be dissolved, indissoluble. The natural bond, they'll call it indissoluble, but in fact it can be dissolved. So this sounds a little confusing. And the reason for that is they make a distinction between intrinsically indissoluble and extrinsically indissoluble. And unless you get into that level of detail, if you just hear it's indissoluble, you think, oh, it can't be divorced, can't be dissolved, until you get to like that next level of intrinsically versus extrinsically and all of that. So, but the bottom line is the natural bond, marriage bond can be dissolved in some circumstances. And we're going to hear about that today and we're going to react to it. Um, now I think all valid marriages are indissoluble. Only death can end a marriage. Besides death, a marriage cannot be dissolved. So if somebody goes and gets gets married, and I don't, it doesn't matter to me if they're two atheists to get married or they're two Catholics or two Protestants, it doesn't matter. Two people, a man and a woman, get married. Once they're validly married, that marriage cannot end until one of them dies. So even if they go to the government and they get a certificate of divorce, they get a judgment from a court that says that the court's going to dissolve the marriage. Well, the court can say that if they want, but the marriage is not dissolved. They're actually still married in God's eyes. Matthew 19, 6, two people get married, God joins them together. They're married for life. In the same way you can't unsibling your sibling, you can't make your sibling to not be your family. They are your family. It's a fact. So in the same way you can't unsibling your sibling, you can't unspouse your spouse. So that's my view. To help us today on the subject, we're going to listen to Andrew Kong. Uh, he's a canon lawyer, and he'll explain the dissolubility of natural marriages. Uh, first, we're gonna hear him be introduced.

SPEAKER_02 2:44

Dear friends, welcome to another episode of the Toto Schools Podcast. Today's guest is a maniacum laude, graduate from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome with a licentiate in canon law. He has been appointed as the defender of the marriage bond for the Archdiocesan Ecclesiastical Tribunal by the Archbishop since 2014. Welcome, Andrew.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Hello, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

All right, we want to hear Andrew Kong give us a little bit of information about what is canon law.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

So, how were you define canon law? And can you briefly share about its historical development within the church?

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Well, it is a very long history. In fact, from uh from the very beginning of the church in X 15, when they had to decide on some issues concerning uh circumcision and diet in the practice in the early church, yeah. They had a council of Jerusalem in the X15. And already then uh they came to a decision, and the decision had to be uh so-called promulgated and to the other communities. And so uh that was really the beginning of canon law. It's like this is the church standard, this is how we were uh practice and and practice express our faith. And so that's uh a good example of how canon law was uh began in the church, and of course, through the history, through uh through the various councils of the church, uh canons were promulgated, laws were made. And these laws, some of them were defining doctrines, some of them were defining disciplines, how the church should be run, what should how to what the church believes, and through the uh centuries, so uh this body of law became known as canon law. Canon coming from the Greek word, okay, canon, which is uh standard, you know, what is the standard of the rules?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Yes. The Catholic view is Acts 15 is the first council, which it is. They established some canon laws, they would say, and the church continues to create new canon laws. It assumes that Acts 15 is binding because it's a council rather than it's binding because it's scripture. It assumes the power of infallibility to write morally uh perfect canon law is like handed down. They really, you know, believe in like apostolic authority is kind of passed down from the original apostles down to future generations, and yet we don't see any prescription for this at all in scripture, right? Uh you got the 12 disciples, Judas is taken out, and they fill that role then in Acts. And then are all of them handing down apostolic authority? Where are the 12 today that go back to the 12 at that point in time? Can they only hand down apostolic authority to one person? It just none of that is spelled out anywhere in the New Testament. It conflates positions of leadership in the church with inspiration of the Holy Spirit. What happened in Acts 15 was there was a disagreement. They got together and discussed it. They made some logical deductions, they arrived at a conclusion and they communicated this as their teaching. That's all that happened. And Acts 15 doesn't tell us that that going forward, if there are future counsels by church leaders who are not apostles, like, I don't know, 500 years later, that whatever those people said 500 years later must be true and binding and all of that. Like nothing in Acts 15 says that. And the other verses don't say that either. I am for statements of faith. I am for creeds and catechisms. I'm even for canon laws. I am just not for the proclamation that those are somehow like infallible. Uh now, one problem with holding them as infallible is that if you find a mistake in one of them, you can't really fix it without like turning yourself into a theological pretzel if it's a doctrinal mistake. So, and and being a human pretzel is, you know, it's great for the circus, it's not really great for the church. Let's skip ahead to where he talks about divorce in Catholic canon law.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

You know, there are many Catholics, right? I mean, through my conversations with them, they're actually quite confused about this whole idea of annulments and you know, divorce, because we've always thought that marriage is indissoluble, right? And so every time when the word divorce comes up, I think they don't understand the difference between a civil divorce, right? Which which still means that that marriage, right, is still intact, right? In the eyes of the church, right? It is still a valid marriage, and therefore the spouse who, you know, um finds another person would have committed adultery.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Yes, adultery because if they if he marries uh the person in a civil marriage, yeah, which is not recognized by the church, then he's basically a married man living or having cohabitating or having intercourse with a woman who is not his wife. That would be adultery. So uh in fact, Christ said it very clearly, he who divorces and marries another commits adultery. So it's not the church teaching that's strict. Christ is strict. It is he to say, so yes, uh actually the word divorce is not even in the church vocabulary. Yes, you know, we do we don't recognize civil divorce, but we we say that uh the matrimonial bond lives on, even though there's a civil divorce. And surprise, surprise, the church allows civil divorce because for the civil effects. Uh, for example, if it's if it's a if it's an abuse, assault case of a spousal abuse, you know, for the safety of the children and the safety of the spouse, uh, they have to live apart. You know, and and so and it's and also for the financial security of the spouses or the children, uh, only with a civil divorce can the civil authorities enforce the ruling that the other spouse maintain the children. So so it it's really in the interest of justice, you know, uh that uh the church allows divorce, civil divorce.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

So Andrew here is talking about civil divorce. He means divorce from the perspective of the government. And so in America, that would be going to like a divorce attorney and then getting a divorce legally with a judge and all that, as opposed to an ecclesiastical disillusion of a marriage, getting a divorce in the eyes of the Catholic Church. That's a separate like process. Uh, and governments typically allow disillusion of marriages in more circumstances than the Catholic Church would allow a disillusion of a marriage. So if somebody was validly married and then civilly divorced, they would be viewed as still married by the Catholic Church, so that if they remarried, the Catholic Church would see them as living in adultery. And that's because Jesus called remarriages adultery seven times in the New Testament. So I mostly agree with this. Uh, when people are married, they're married in the records of the government, uh, but they're also married in the eyes of God. And if they're divorced on earth, that doesn't make them divorced in God's eyes. So if they remarry from God's perspective, they're just living in adultery. Andrew talks about the church's perspective of the marriage, and I talk about it from God's viewpoint, but of course, Andrew thinks the church's view is aligned with God. So we're talking about the same kind of concept of earthly marriages, earthly marriage records versus like heaven's marriage records, so to speak. Where I disagree with Andrew is that civil divorce is kind of no big deal because the church doesn't recognize it. So uh Jesus in Matthew 5.32 said if a man divorces his wife, he makes his wife commit adultery. He's culpable for her getting remarried, which he's likely to do. So I don't think divorce is just like optional. Oh, like, oh, you got married, you got divorced, you know, whatever. That's just not our business. That's civil government stuff. We're not worried about that. No, I Jesus said you divorce, you're culpable for her likely a remarriage adultery. So even if someone does not uh remarry, divorcing itself is wrong. But then what about abuse, right? He talks about the abuse or safety kinds of situations. If there's a safety issue, a spouse and children have a right to retreat. So people should get to safety, call the police, talk to their church leaders. Uh that's physical separation, not divorce. A civil divorce is like an additional step of separation. Uh, and if that's necessary to secure a safety, then divorce is permissible as an additional step of like retreating from an unsafe uh environment. But the civil divorce does not end the marriage. They're still married because God joined them. Their spouse is still your spouse, even if they did something bad. So a remarriage after a divorce, even if the divorce was for safety, a remarriage would still be adultery.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Well, you know, since we're on the topic of marriage, um, can you briefly share with us what is the patrine as well as the polyme privileges?

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Okay, uh Pauline privilege uh is in scripture. It's where two persons marry, uh two pagans be non-baptized. A natural marriage, uh natural law marriage, they're not baptized, they're not Christians, and later on, one of them uh converts to be a Christian. Okay. All right, and so uh when the other party is not happy about it and has left, uh and so the the converted person wants to marry, uh uh uh want to marry in a church, so the new marriage will dissolve the uh earlier marriage.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

He said that the new marriage will dissolve the old marriage. So this is called the Pauline uh privilege, and they they premise this on an incorrect interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7. Their view only works if both spouses were unbelievers at the time of the marriage. They define that as unbaptized or improperly baptized individual. So it's not the evangelical view of believer, right? It's baptized or unbaptized. So they're talking about two unbaptized people. Let me make a note here. An improperly baptized person would be somebody who's not baptized, for example, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, not in the Trinity. But uh, that's pretty rare. So basically it's baptized or unbaptized. So first they're both unbelievers at the time of their marriage. Then, while married, one of them converts, the other one does not convert. The one who converts is divorced by their unbelieving spouse. It has to be the unbeliever who does the divorcing. Okay, so there's all these steps that have to happen in this order. And then the converted one then marries a baptized person. The marriage does two things. It divorces the prior marriage, it dissolves the prior marriage, and it starts a new marriage. It's a marriage disillusion and a creation of marriage all wrapped into one. That's their view. Okay, now the reason they think this is possible is because they think a marriage that includes one or two unbelievers is a lesser marriage. They think it's a natural bond, whereas one with two believers is a sacramental bond. So they got the two bonds thing going here. So since the natural bond is lesser, it can be dissolved in these circumstances. Now, I disagree with that. I would say that marriage is family. And we see that in Genesis 2, where Adam says of Eve, she is my bone and flesh. That's family language. You see that in the Old Testament, like for example, in Genesis 29, where Laban says of Jacob, are you not my bone and flesh? It's family language. So, and we also see it in Leviticus 18, it's assumed there because it makes relations between people who are related through marriage, it makes their relations to be incest there. Why? Because they're family, therefore their relations would be incest, even though they're only family through marriage, they're family. That's Leviticus 18. So when Jesus calls remarriage adultery, he doesn't say, except if you were both unbaptized and one of you converts, and the unbeliever divorces, and the believer marries baptized. He doesn't do any of that kind of stuff. That's nowhere even hinted of in Matthew 5, Matthew 19, Mark 10, Luke 16. Jesus' audience would not have thought that this is convoluted, all these steps is an exception. Jesus was speaking of all marriages in those passages. He roots his teaching in creation. That tells you he's talking about all marriages. He taught this to the Pharisees, and the Pharisees were unsaved. You can see that in Matthew chapter 19. So they get this from 1 Corinthians chapter 7 in verse 15, where Paul says that if an unbeliever divorces a believer, the believer is, quote, not enslaved. And they take that to mean they're able to remarry. But that's not what Paul means by the word not enslaved. If not enslaved in verse 15 meant not married, the first marriage uh wouldn't be dissolved at the remarriage of the with a believer, it would be dissolved immediately after the divorce. So they have a kind of textual problem there in 1 Corinthians 7.15. More to the point though, the word for enslaved there is uh duolo, which is different than the word used for the marriage bound. That's de-o, de o. You see that in the same chapter in verse 39, 1 Corinthians 7.39. So, in context though, what does not enslaved mean in verse 15? If it doesn't mean not married, if it doesn't mean free to be able to remarry, what does Paul mean then? Well, what he means can be can be discerned from verse 21. Just six verses later, Paul is using the same slavery concept and the same kind of to the married section of his chapter. And there clearly what it's talking about is if you have somebody who is like literally a slave and they're freed from that, they're now freed from this difficult relationship. They're freed from all these encumbrances. So now they're free to serve Christ, not free to get into another relationship. That's not the point of the analogy to slavery that he's making there. If you look at the beginning of 1 Corinthians chapter seven, the Corinthians who they wrote a letter to Paul, and Paul is responding. And in their letter, they wrote Paul something, and Paul quotes them, and they said it is good for a man not to touch a woman. And what they're talking about is they want celibacy. They think celibacy is required for the Christian life. And Paul says, hey, hold your horses. That's not the case. Celibacy is preferable, but it's not required to live the Christian life. So they're not looking for remarriage, they're looking for celibacy. They're trying to get out of marriage. So it contextually doesn't make any sense when you get down to verse 15 and interpreting Paul to say, congratulations, now you can get remarried. They don't want to be married in the first place. So the bottom line is in God's eyes, no valid marriage is ever dissolved except by death. Marriage is undivorceable. It is truly unable to be dissolved by the Catholic Church, by a civil government, by a pastor, by anybody. Impossible to dissolve a marriage except by death. Neither divorce nor remarriage nor bad conduct by either of both spouses is able to dissolve a valid marriage.

SPEAKER_02 18:14

How is this distinguished uh with the petrine, with the petrine privilege?

SPEAKER_01 18:18

The patrine privilege is it's a marriage between it can be a Catholic and a pagan. All right. So they already married married in the church. You know, uh, but it's not sacramental marriage because sacramental marriage only is when both are baptized. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

He's moved on to the petrine privilege. So the first one was the Pauline privilege, as in the Apostle Paul, and this one is the petrine privilege, as in the Apostle Peter. In the Pauline privilege, it's start the scenario started off where they're both unbelievers, then one converts and goes from there. In the petrine privilege, it's different because at the time of the marriage, one is a believer and the other one is an unbeliever.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

So they allow the dissolution of their matrimonial bond so that they can marry a Catholic in the church.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

So the idea is a baptized person marries an unbaptized person, uh, and and then they they got a civil divorce, and it looks like they're not going to reconcile, uh, and there's no ground for annulment. So the divorced believer would have to be single the rest of their life. So the petrium privilege means the church can dissolve that first marriage so that the believer can marry another believer. So now I disagree with this. Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verses 10 and 11, if people are divorced, they should remain single. Uh, seven times Jesus calls remarriage adultery. Twice Paul says people are bound to their marriage as long as they live. There is no exception for a remarriage after a church declares a marriage dissolved. Humans do not have the power to unjoin a marriage because it took God to join it.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

So it's like a privilege of being a Catholic of your faith.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

So who has the power to grant this privilege?

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Yeah, so strict the Pope, the uh this is called, I mean, it's it's not called the patrine, I mean uh privilege, but because it's the one is Pauline privilege because of Prompt Paul in scripture. So traditionally they used loosely use the word patrine, you know, say Paul and Peter, and so that's Peter's Peter's uh uh uh the privilege of the patrine doctrine to dissolve the marriage. So these are two cases of dissolution. Another case of dissolution is uh what you call ractum non-consummatum, uh-huh, but the marriage is uh between the even the baptized people. I mean, but they are married, rectified, but not consummated.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

I see.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah, so but that is not an easy thing to not not an easy task to prove in a non-consumation of marriage. But it can it can be proven if it's medical uh or if when it's medically demonstrated. Uh yes, yeah. And that is usually done in Rome only. The patron privilege and the uh dissolution ratum non consummatum is done in Rome.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

So the last possibility for Catholic dissolution of marriage is when they did not consumate uh the marriage. Now, now they don't think consummation is actually required for marriage. Uh, there's another canon that says that if a person tries to get married, but they've already been married, that they are not able to get remarried. And so an attempt to be remarried would be invalid. And it even says even if their first marriage was never consummated, they're still unable to get remarried. Married. And here he's talking about how they would dissolve a marriage because it wasn't consummated. So we have two different canons that signal to us that they believe somebody people are married, even if they haven't consummated the marriage yet. They haven't had sex yet. So I agree that marriage doesn't require sex. Sex is not a requirement for two people to actually uh go ahead and be married. And I have an episode covering that. But the easy passage to look to on that would be uh with uh Joseph and Mary. So in Matthew chapter one, verses 18 through 25, they were betrothed, if you look at the passage, and then Joseph takes Mary to be his wife. That's the marriage. He takes her to be his wife, uh, and then they have sex later on after Jesus is born. So marriage occurs at the taking step, and you see that like throughout scripture, and I address that in detail in my episode on that subject. So the disillusion for non-consummation to me is confusing. If they think consummation is required for a marriage, why not call it invalid if there was never consummated? And if they say it's valid, why would it be able to be dissolved? In a prior episode, uh, we talked about annulments, and one of the grounds for annulments is uh inability to have intercourse. So it's not sterility or inability to have children, but it's inability to have intercourse at all. So if somebody was like paraplegic, for example, they could not be married because they're unable to have have the marital act there. So I'm not really sure what exactly the scenario would be where somebody doesn't consummate and then they're going to uh go ahead and uh dissolve the marriage. So these two episodes were inspired by a friend who asked me on YouTube to make a couple of episodes on the Catholic view. If you have other issues or ideas you want me to cover, go ahead and put them in the comments. Make sure you like and subscribe and get my book, Divorce Your Remarriage. You can get that at Amazon. I have a link to it in the description below. Make sure you subscribe, and I'll see you guys next time.