r”by Standerinfamilycourt

They prophesied by Baal and led My people Israel astray.
“Also among the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing:
The committing of adultery and walking in falsehood;
And they strengthen the hands of evildoers,
So that no one has turned back from his wickedness.
Jeremiah 23:13-14

Effective today, December 1, 2015, Pope Francis has determined that it will be cost-free and streamlined for a covenant-breaking Catholic to unilaterally obtain a denial that God supernaturally joined them with their covenant husband or wife as an inseparable  one-flesh entity.   A single bishop can now decide that even vows made decades earlier in a Catholic church wedding were “not sacramental” and did not create an indissoluble covenant, due to various “impediments”,  usually a taking the form, in most U.S. dioceses, of a perjurous retroactive claim of “lack of consent”.    Imagine a cleric lacking the awe, reverence and holy fear of God, instead finding the temerity to inform the Most High of the effectiveness of His Own supernatural act and covenant participation, while bearing false witness before and about the Omniscient and Omnipresent One in the process.
God help them!

The true witness of Jesus Christ is this:  ‘…For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall be — the two — for one flesh?  so that they are no more two, but one flesh; what therefore God did join together, let NO MAN put asunder.’   
(Matt. 19:5-6)

According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops,

A valid Catholic marriage results from five elements:
(1) the spouses are free to marry
(2) they freely exchange their consent
(3) in consenting to marry, they have the intention to marry for life, to be faithful to one another and be open to children
(4) they intend the good of each other
(5) their consent is given in the presence of two witnesses and before a properly authorized Church minister. Exceptions to the last requirement must be approved by church authority.

Rationalization:
“And the church also recognizes—with the same love of justice and desire for mercy as Jesus—that imperfect people enter into what are called “attempted marriages”. Despite their good intent, their best efforts, and maybe a very long time, something vital was missing or in the way that prevented the union from ever being able to rise to the level of a sacrament.”

Same mercy as Jesus?   Would that be mercy and justice toward the rejected covenant family, or futile “mercy” toward the one who wants a decree of Church permission to ignore Jesus’ thrice-stated definition of adultery (creating a hellbound offense if not repented by termination of the immoral relationship, according to 1 Cor. 6:9-10 and Gal. 5:19-21)?   What was    Jesus’ definition of the ongoing state of adultery?      Did He not say it was the attempt to legalize and sanctify an unlawful union to one who has a living estranged spouse, and therefore, an undissolved covenant in God’s sight–not any man’s faulty, fleshly sight, including that of a hireling shepherd?

The Lord Jesus said:

“…and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Matt. 5:32

“…and he who did marry her that hath been put away, doth commit adultery.” Matt. 19:9b  (YLT)

“Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”   Luke 16:18

The Protestant Church, of course, would be all about trying to find several “biblical exceptions” for blanket application (whereas there are none stated above by Jesus) to counter the unpalatable, allegedly “unmerciful” marriage law of Christ.   The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, pretends to respect Christ’s commandment by not finding per se exceptions, but instead by paying meaningful lip service, in a manner as recently articulated by Fr. Peter Daly:

“It is pretty clear from the Gospels that Jesus did not approve of divorce and remarriage.  He says it amounts to adultery, which is pretty strong language, especially coming from Jesus.  But if we are his followers, we have to at least try to deal with his teaching.   Our annulment process is an attempt to take his teaching seriously and still allow people a second (or third) chance…..The problem with the process in the Roman Catholic church is that it takes what ought to be a pastoral matter and turns it into a legal one.”     –  National Catholic Register, January 13, 2014

In what way, exactly, is the Roman Catholic annulment process taking the teaching of Jesus “seriously”, Fr. Daly?    And… “rise to the level of a sacrament”?    Does the performance of the human participants in covenant with God make the covenant a sacrament, or is it a sacrament precisely due to God becoming a party to that covenant?     When Jesus, in that upper room on the night when He was betrayed,  as He took up the bread and the cup, reciting verbatim the words of the traditional Hebrew betrothal ceremony, did He hold out standards for His disciples’ participation to “rise to the level of a sacrament” that evening?    Do  the Catholic Fathers have that same expectation of those receiving Eucharist, that some element of their performance “rise to the level of a sacrament”?    Was it not Jesus who took up the basin and washed the disciples’ feet in that last supper ceremony?   Did John the Baptizer offer to examine the “sacramental validity” of Herod’s and Herodias’ respective covenant marriages before putting his head on the literal  execution block, in bluntly warning them “it is not lawful for you to have her”  ?

Pastoral matter, Fr. Daly?   What about the more urgent pastoral matter of snatching people from the fire?   Is it not more urgent to warn people to get out of unlawful adulterous unions, warning them away from hell?    Is their temporal happiness really more important than their souls or their inheritance in the kingdom of God?

The usual purpose of committing the unspeakable abomination against one’s covenant family, of denying that the covenant marriage ever validly existed, is usually undertaken to gain (purported) sacramental status in a church ceremony for a subsequent and conflicting union that Jesus made crystal clear was continuously adulterous–by even the ready admission of the Roman Catholic Church.    But Who is it that judges whether He created a one-flesh entity?  And Who is it that determines whether He will replicate the same between two adulterers?   Is it even plausibly the Bishop?   From Whom does the claimed sacrament flow?    What man will dare desecrate His sacred symbol of holy matrimony, which the Holy Spirit has woven through scripture from Genesis to Revelation, and hope to stand upright before a Jealous God?

Did the apostles, Peter or Paul, ever “onboard” the sinners along with their sin in any of the churches?

“You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead, so that the one who had done this deed would be removed from your midst.

“For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present. In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus,  I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

“Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough?  Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed.  Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

 ^“I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people;  I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.   But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one.   For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?   But those who are outside, God judges.   Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.”    1 Corinthians 5

It appears that Paul was decidedly “unmerciful” when it came to the sanctity and utter indissolubility of holy matrimony!    Almost as “unmerciful” as his Lord and Savior.

 Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the ante-Nicene church fathers is aware that the 1st through 4th century early church, then the Roman Catholic Church, grew and developed for centuries without any apparent need for sanctioned marriage annulment — in an epoch that knew little else than arranged marriages. 

Indeed, the words of St. Ignatius (A.D. 100) should give strong pause to the contemporary fathers of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as every shepherd of the universal church of Jesus Christ:

“Do not be in error, my brethren.  Those that corrupt families shall not inherit the kingdom of God.   If, then, those who do this as respects the flesh have suffered death, how much more shall this be the case with any one who corrupts by wicked doctrine the faith of God, for which Jesus Christ was crucified!  Such a one becoming defiled in this way shall go away into everlasting fire, and so shall every one that hearkens unto him.”

According to The Original Catholic Encyclopedia, the codification of provisions for declaring a sacramental marriage “null” first emerged in the mid-12th century under the papacies of Alexander III and Innocent III, after some bishops had been allowing remarriage on an ad hoc basis.    This development led to a period in history where a succession of pontiffs in the 14th and 15th centuries were themselves far from celibate, and many lived profoundly immoral lives before and during their papacies.   Earlier codifications from the Roman era dealing with marriage and breach of marital sanctity, such as Julia et Papia and Codex Theodosius do not mention any provision for seeking a declaration of nullity even though Theodosius promoted unilateral divorce in the 5th century.    There is nothing scriptural on which to base the heinous practice that was formally adopted in the 12th century (while ironically also formally adopting requirements that clergy must take a vow of celibacy), and both practices were a clear departure from earlier authority that held more faithfully to the teachings of Christ and the Apostles.

The sharply rising incidence of “nullity” in the 20th and 21st centuries also seems to be tied primarily to Western nations with easy, unilateral divorce.   It is certainly notable in those countries that arranged marriages among Catholics, where consent might legitimately be called into question, are virtually nonexistent.   According to Robert H. Vasoli, author of “What God Has Joined Together – The Annulment Crisis in American Catholicism” ( Oxford University Press, 1998), approximately one-third of the average 60,000 annulments per year are granted because one spouse was a non-Catholic, with the bulk of the remainder being granted on claims of lack of consent, usually due to a purported “lack of emotional maturity” to sustain a viable marriage (conflicting evidence of longevity being deemed “irrelevant” for this purpose).

In this, they join the rogue family law courts in adjudicating a  fiction that a marriage that was obviously healthy for 3 or 4 decades is suddenly “irreconcilable”, even worse, wasn’t “viable” from the beginning due to the requisite lack of “emotional maturity” on the part of one of the spouses.    (Emotional maturity that was ample on the wedding day might more likely have taken flight in the fear of losing a late-life adulterous relationship.)

Citing the “rubber stamp” predilections of the U.S. tribunals (which on average grant 3 annulments for every 1 annulment granted anywhere in the rest of the world despite representing only 6% of the world’s Roman Catholic population), on page 7,  former Notre Dame sociology / criminology professor, Dr. Vasoli  asserts,  “A salient premise that undergirds the system, one seldom stated for public consumption, is captured succinctly in an anonymous tribunalist’s comment, ‘There is no marriage which given a little time for investigation, we cannot declare invalid.’  ”     Is there overwhelming evidence that this staggering number of “invalid” marriages (as in some cases retroactively determined some 30 years after the wedding) being driven by anything other than our immoral unilateral divorce laws ?   According to this author, the result has been a tidal wave:  in 1968, the American church granted fewer than 600 annulments; today it hands out more than 60,000 a year.

More recently, two Catholic writers independently reported on the September, 2015 announcement by Pope Francis authorizing local bishops to remove barriers to annulment on demand, countering the Vatican’s claim that what outsiders accurately saw as the most comprehensive changes in annulment policy in some 300 years were merely an “administrative improvement”.    John Zmirak  wrote in Stream Magazine, September 11, 2015:

“…But liberal priests and bishops did not view annulments as what they are — rare, exceptional events that recognize an injustice, such as a girl who was married by force.   Instead, many bishops, especially in America, began to hand out annulments to almost anyone who asked, on spurious psychological grounds such as “emotional immaturity.” In my own Catholic high school, the quarters that once housed Christian Brothers (who all cleared out after Vatican II) were turned into an annulment tribunal with the highest “success” rate in the world. Some 99 percent of marriages examined in that tribunal turned out to have been invalid….That means one of two things: a) We Americans are very good at faking annulments of perfectly valid marriages, so that couples can contract second, adulterous marriages with a clear conscience; or b) We are very bad at performing valid marriages….

Zmirak continues, “Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI ….saw the American annulment rate as an international scandal, and tried to tighten the rules from Rome, making it harder for local bishops to accommodate the divorce culture, and giving some support for those spouses who didn’t want their marriages (sometimes of 20 or 30 years, with multiple children) declared in retrospect null and void. An abandoned Kennedy wife, Sheila Rauch Kennedy, famously fought her powerful husband’s annulment petition — and when she lost had the bad manners to write a book exposing what a farce the procedure had become.

“Pope Francis has apparently reversed most of the reforms that the previous two popes imposed, and made annulments easier, quicker and cheaper. That surely will mean that they will become more common.”

 

Writing in Crux, September 8, 2015,   John L. Allen Jr.  suggests a very sinister political calculus by this Jesuit pontiff:

“All along, reform in the annulment process seemed the most obvious compromise measure, a way of giving both camps at least part of what they wanted. Those opposed to revising the Communion ban could take comfort that the Church was not softening its stand on divorce, while progressives would be pleased that the Church was at least trying to show greater compassion and outreach.”

We would suggest that the only “compromise” was to what remained of the integrity of Catholic families.   The result allows “the faithful” to continue to live in sanctioned adultery with the Church’s unobstructed blessing  — disregarding the commandment of Christ entirely, along with the eternal consequences awaiting unrepentant adulterers, instead of counseling those adulterers to terminate the relationship in order to take communion in a worthy manner (1 Cor. 11:27-32),  not to “eat and drink judgment to himself if he does not judge the body [of Christ] rightly”,  and to recover their forfeited inheritance in the kingdom of God.   For all of Pope Francis’ profession of “mercy” and “compassion”,  His Holiness’ failure to see beyond the temporal,  mirrors that of most Protestant leaders, and turns both of those concepts on their head considering the eternal costs of condoning the sin.
 

We know that there is no scriptural precedent to justify men retroactively declaring a consummated marriage “null”, and in fact no recognition in the courthouse of the Most High of man’s repudiation of the consummated marriage of our youth, as declared by the Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 19:6 and Mark 10:9, where He asserts that man is given no authority to unjoin what God’s hand has joined.    We also know that for the first ten centuries of Christendom, there was no provision for marriage nullity, either written about or taught until it was legislated by a medieval pope.    This begs the question, on what basis was this supported?    Contemporary Catholics point to translations of Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9 where the “for fornication (Greek “porneia”) exceptive clause”  is  rendered “except for unlawful marriage”.    However, this is not the case in the Catholic Douay-Reims 1899 version nor the Catholic Revised Standard Version where the exception reads “for unchastity“.   Tellingly, the first time an exception for “unlawful marriage” occurs is in a version introduced in 1970 called New American Bible Revised.

Speaking of  fornication or unchastity, “logou  porneas”   certainly does not translate as “unlawful marriage”!

Protestants can hardly afford to cluck about the time-honored sport of bible translation vandalism undertaken to accommodate the Sexual Revolution, wherein Westcott & Hort in the 1880’s transformed “porneia” (unchastity, whoredom, fornication) into adultery via the revisionist rendering “general sexual immorality”,  while completely jettisoning the remarriage-damning last phrase of Matthew 19:9, “whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”    Indeed, we now have not only the Queen James Version, but also the 2011 New International Version coming out with homosexual-practice-friendly retranslated renderings.    Comparison with Greek interlinear text tools, as illustrated above, is becoming compulsory to the accurate bible study of the 21st century “Berean” because of this.

Baal was the pagan god of the worship of sexuality, to whom child sacrifices were made.    Jeremiah’s prophecy is being unmistakably fulfilled in our time in both the Catholic and Protestant Churches as a result of the systematic destruction of the  sanctity of marriage in both the Church and Western society:

They prophesied by Baal and led My people Israel astray.
“Also among the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing:
The committing of adultery and walking in falsehood;
And they strengthen the hands of evildoers,
So that no one has turned back from his wickedness.

How long until judgment on our land and the American church is complete by the Lord’s hand?    Jesus repeatedly asked, what would He find on the earth when He returned, perhaps already knowing.   

I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book;  and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book.
Revelation 22:18-19

 SIFC:  For a deeper study into the biblical meaning and significance of the supernatural one-flesh joining, and God’s exclusive participation in the covenant of holy matrimony, including why (despite a pastor’s participation) this is never replicated where one or both of the partners has a living, estranged covenant spouse, please click here.

 

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall  |  Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

www.standerinfamilycourt.com