Divorce

To achieve its full natural end, essential and secondary, marriage requires the permanent union of husband and wife. Therefore, permanence in marriage is a requirement of the natural law, at least in the secondary precepts of that law. And what is required by the natural law is required of all men without exception, Christian and pagan, Greek and Roman, Jew and Gentile.It is not just a requirement of church law that a man should cleaveto his wife in permanent and unbroken wedlock.

It sometimes happened in the Old Law, that a man put his wife away by “a bill of divorcement,” and that this exceptional act was sanctioned by Mosaic precept. But such a severance of the marriage bond is not possible when the marriage is also the sacrament of matrimony.

Our Lord himself tells us (Matt. 19:8) that the Mosaicpermission for divorcing a wife was granted on account of the hardness of the hearts of the people, and adds, “From the beginning it was not so.” It seems that this Mosaic permissionamounted to a dispensation from the marriage bond to prevent the terrible crime of wife-murder to which the people were prone.

Yet it is not clear that the Mosaic “bill of divorce” permitted the separated spouses to marry again.

But it is clear that a husband, having repudiated his wife by a “bill of divorce,” could never take her back again.

Doubtless, hatred of a wife, and whatever gave rise to that hatred, could be adduced as reasons for giving her the”bill of divorce,” but it seems that these reasons had value only because they could lead directly to wife-murder.

The causes of the severance of spouses were not given in detail in a Mosaic “bill of divorce,” but were expressed in a general way.