Read the Catechism in a Year
Day 213 - The family as a "Church in Miniature"
What is the Church’s stance on people who are divorced and remarried?
She accepts them lovingly, following Jesus’ example. Anyone who divorces after being married in the Church and then during the lifetime of the spouse enters into a new union obviously contradicts Jesus’ clear demand for the indissolubility of marriage. The Church cannot abolish this demand. This retraction of fidelity is contrary to the Eucharist, in which it is precisely the irrevocable character of God’s love that the Church celebrates. That is why someone who lives in such a contradictory situation is not admitted to Holy Communion.
Far from treating all specific cases alike, Pope Benedict XVI speaks about “painful situations” and calls on pastors “to discern different situations carefully, in order to be able to offer appropriate spiritual guidance to the faithful involved” (Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum caritatis, 29).
What does it mean to say that the family is a “Church in miniature”?
What the Church is on a large scale, the family is on a small scale: an image of God’s love in human fellowship. Indeed, every marriage is perfected in openness to others, to the children that God sends, in mutual acceptance, in hospitality and being for others.
Nothing in the early Church fascinated people more about the “New Way” of the Christians than their “domestic churches”. Often someone “believed in the Lord, together with all his household; and many … believed and were baptized” (Acts 18:8). In an unbelieving world, islands of living faith were formed, places of prayer, mutual sharing, and cordial hospitality. Rome, Corinth, Antioch, the great cities of antiquity, were soon permeated with domestic churches that were like points of light. Even today families in which Christ is at home are the leaven that renews our society. (YOUCAT questions 270-271)
Dig Deeper: Corresponding CCC section (1650-1666) and other references here.
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