Müller on marriage and divorce

UPDATE: John Thavis has a post on Archbishop Müller's article on divorce ... Déjà vu on divorced and remarried Catholics?

Andrew Brown has a post, Remarried Catholics being allowed to take communion? It's like seeing the Greenland icecap melt, but even as he writes about the happy changes wrought‎ by Pope Francis, the Vatican nips that hope for change in the bud - Vatican official reaffirms teaching on divorced and remarried Catholics.

You can read the English translation of Archbishop Müller’s speech at the Vatican Radio ....here. Here's just a bit from the text ...

[T]he anthropological value of indissoluble marriage: it withdraws the partners from caprice and from the tyranny of feelings and moods. It helps them to survive personal difficulties and to overcome painful experiences. Above all it protects the children, who have most to suffer from marital breakdown .... Love is more than a feeling .....

Admittedly there are situations – as every pastor knows – in which marital cohabitation becomes for all intents and purposes impossible for compelling reasons, such as physical or psychological violence. In such hard cases, the Church has always permitted the spouses to separate and no longer live together. It must be remembered, though, that the marriage bond of a valid union remains intact in the sight of God, and the individual parties are not free to contract a new marriage, as long as the spouse is alive ....

If remarried divorcees are subjectively convinced in their conscience that a previous marriage was invalid, this must be proven objectively by the competent marriage tribunals ....

An objectively false appeal to mercy also runs the risk of trivializing the image of God, by implying that God cannot do other than forgive. The mystery of God includes not only his mercy but also his holiness and his justice. If one were to suppress these characteristics of God and refuse to take sin seriously, ultimately it would not even be possible to bring God’s mercy to man ...

So, Müller states that love isn't a feeling, that it is better for the children of bad marriages if their parents don't divorce, that the victims of domestic violence shouldn't be allowed to divorce, that people can't trust their consciences, and that God can't show mercy but must punish instead. In my opinion, he and the church are wrong about all this. And what is especially repellent is the way he conflates church teaching with what God wants.

As Andrew Brown writes in his post mentioned above ...

Everyone knows the official position [on divorce] is a pernicious nonsense .... Ever since the ban on artificial contraception was restated in 1967, the official Catholic teaching on sexual morality has overlaid and crushed the lived experience of the laity the way that the Greenland icecap forces the island beneath it into the sea. The situation is only possible because of the use of special magical language, where no words mean what they seem to. Such things as the description of homosexuality as an "objective moral evil" are tolerable only so long as "objective", "moral" and even "evil" are understood as theological terms of art, and theology is understood to have nothing to do with our human needs and understandings.