Divorcees free to remarry... if they haven’t had sex, say Church leaders

DIVORCED Catholics should be able to remarry – as long as they have not had sex, senior cardinals said yesterday.

This would ensure that divorcees who marry again are contrite before they are allowed back into the Church.

But it is likely to add to the confusion felt by many divorced Catholics, who are excommunicated if they wed again without having had their original marriage annulled by the Church.

The proposal was put forward by 11 Catholic leaders in a backlash against Pope Francis’s attempt to give divorcees a fasttrack to forgiveness by making it cheaper and much quicker to get an annulment. The Pope announced his reforms this week, but conservative Catholics believe easing the way to annulments undermines the idea that marriage is for life, and say it encourages divorce.

Catholic doctrine does not recognise divorce, although the Church accommodates those who go through civil divorce on the grounds that a couple who part must settle on who will bring up their children and how their property should be divided.

This means people who have a civil divorce stay full members of the Church, which regards their marriage as intact. But they cannot remarry without an annulment – a Church ruling that the marriage was never valid in the first place.

The 11 dissident prelates say Roman Catholics who remarry should not have sex before the annulment of their first union.

The group is to put its arguments in a book being published by the same Jesuit tradition to which Francis himself belongs. They call for stern laws on marriage and annulment to remain, and for teaching on lifelong marriage to be strengthened.

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of Bologna, said easing the rules for divorced couples who remarry ‘is the mistaken pity of an incompetent or weak physician who contents himself with bandaging wounds without treating them’.