PopeWatch: Oh Great

I’ll read it when I’m finished gardening and crocheting and working on MG and playing w grandkids and cleaning grout around toilet.
And nothing is on TV and my eyes hurt too bad to reread Follett.
Then I’ll read it.

Reacting to Jesus’ pronouncement that remarriage after divorce is adultery, his disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Mt 19:10). From the first moment of its declaration, the teaching Jesus propounded as the will of God was deeply distressing, even to men of good will. Subsequent centuries have shown no slackening in the energy and ingenuity devoted to weakening or nullifying the force of this teaching, and as long as it is expedient to circumvent the doctrine, there will be attempts to explain away its scriptural anchoring. But the doctrine is given as absolute in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and even Paul goes out of his way to insist that, as a messenger of the teaching and not its author, he is not to blame for its rigor: “To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord” (1 Cor 7:10). There can be no serious doubt that the teaching is dominical.

Yet it is mistaken, or if not wholly mistaken seriously incomplete, to view Jesus as a disputant who championed the rigorist side of legal-moral controversy, and whose appeal was and is solely to the tough-minded. For he also promised a new and superabundant afflatus of grace, of divine help, so that no person however fragile should find it impossible to do God’s will. John the Baptist was arrested and killed because Herod Antipas, after divorcing Phasaelis, the daughter of the Nabataean prince Aretas, went on to marry Herodias, ex-wife of his own brother Philip, whereupon John denounced the union as unlawful. Jesus said of John, “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Mt 11:11). Under the old dispensation it may have required heroic moral and physical courage, as well as a love of godliness, to remain true in practice and conviction to God’s creative will in the matter of nuptial fidelity—but under the new covenant, even ho mikroteros, the least in the Kingdom, will be given the strength to stay faithful, and to do greater things besides.

From “Dominical Teaching on Divorce and
Remarriage: The Biblical Data” by Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J.

published in Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church

“When young people say ‘forever,’ who knows what they mean [by] ‘forever.’”
I thought marriage preparation aimed precisely to better instill this understanding. ..I thought most dioceses about the world already required such preparation. Perhaps I’m wrong.

Many pre Cana classes do not adequately prepare couples for marriage. Dioceses must do better.