‘So you cannot remove a diseased part of your union that you asked God to bless, but you can remove a diseased part of your body that God gave you.’
HAPPY birthday to a most valued friend from decades back, Atty. Ariel Salvadpr Hinal Magno. May you have many more to come!
On this day, April Fools we are told, I’d like to discuss an aspect of (Catholic) life that is so troubling and amusing to me at the same time. This has got to do with the commandment in Matthew that “what God has our together, no man must put asunder.”
Or something to that effect.
It is the commandment that has been used, for centuries, by Catholics all over the world in objecting to the idea of divorce. The reason is that when a man and a woman get married, it’s God who destined it. And since God destined it, no man — not even the two humans involved — has the right to break it.
Now I don’t know about you but I am not 100% sold on the idea that God destined each and every marriage because that would mean He has a hit-and-miss expertise when it comes to choosing couples for “till death do us part.” In reality, marriages are between two people who feel (at a certain time of their lives at least) that they’re meant for each other and cannot live without each other and then ask for God’s blessing. Though many times, after just a couple of nights — or a couple of decades — they realize that, ooops, they may have made a mistake and the person they could not live without years ago was someone they now could not live with. Meaning that what looked ideal in the beginning no longer is.
And now they’re stuck.
But I don’t think they should be, and I’d like to come face-to-face with anyone who insists that they should, due to the commandment given above.
You see, we all are happy to go against the logic of that commandment when we see fit.
And when I say we, I mean Catholics of all shapes and sizes from the Pope down to little old me. Again: the logic is when God puts together something, who are we to break it apart, yes? And if this logic applies to marriages between two people who chose each other, why shouldn’t it apply to something that God and only God unquestionably and truly put together?
Our bodies!
And so, every day, for centuries around the world, Catholics have seen nothing wrong in having diseased parts of their bodies excised and removed and sometimes even replaced by a similar part from someone else! The bodies that God and only God put together are bodies we tamper with — and see no issue doing it. Yet we didn’t choose our body parts and have God bless them, the way we choose a potential spouse and have God bless the union!
So a couple in a rotten marriage is told that they could not separate and just have to suck it in and suffer along because God put them together when, actually, He didn’t; He was just asked to bless the union.
But a person with a diseased kidney or lung or heart is allowed to take out that diseased part — even though it was clear that God and only God gave him that part.
So you cannot remove a diseased part of your union that you asked God to bless, but you can remove a diseased part of your body that God gave you.
I see the illogic there, the idiocy and hypocrisy even.
But I am not surprised because we are dealing here with an organization that happily put to death people who insisted that it was the earth that revolved around the sun.
If only God knew what idiocies were being said in His name!
