33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Prv 31:10-13, 16-18, 20, 26, 28-31
Second Reading: 1 Thes 5:1-6
Gospel Reading: Mt 25:14-30

After the end of the world, which will come “like a thief in the night,” Jesus will “settle accounts” with us. “Then will the conduct of each one and the secrets of hearts be brought to light,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “Then will the culpable unbelief that counted the offer of God’s grace as nothing be condemned.”

The Last Judgment will lay bare “the truth of each man’s relationship with God.” Even “our attitude about our neighbour will disclose acceptance or refusal of grace and divine love.”

(God will judge “the nations” by their love of neighbour, Jesus said. However, “the nations” are those who do not know him. From us who do, more will be expected, as from the man who was given five talents.)

Now if there is any area in which Catholics today refuse God’s grace, it is perhaps in marriage. For example, many separated or divorced Catholics “seem to think it’s OK to be on the lookout” for a new mate, a woman wrote to me. They are all “what one would call good Catholics,” she said: “they go to Mass and receive Communion every Sunday, they are active in their parishes, etc.”

I understand what they “have gone through and are going through,” she wrote. “In my own case, I was the one who left, but no matter what, the circumstances, the pains, the agonies, and the stages are much the same: the sense of betrayal and injustice, the sense of failure, the anger and the self-pity, the incompleteness, the hurt when you see other happy couples together at church or in other places, the feeling that God has deserted you even though you’ve given 150 percent to husband and children and God.”

Gently, she said, she reminds her friends of what Jesus replied when he was asked whether a man might “divorce his wife for any reason whatever.”

“Because of your stubbornness Moses let you divorce your wives, but at the beginning it was not that way. I now say to you: whoever divorces his wife (lewd conduct is a separate case) and marries another commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (The Greek word translated as “lewd conduct” is porneia, which elsewhere in the Bible refers to incestuous marriages.)

Ever since, that is what the Catholic Church has taught. However, many of her friends “seem to feel that the Church’s teaching shouldn’t apply to them because they’ve done nothing wrong,” my correspondent wrote. “One of them says, ‘I’m not going to go through the bother of an annulment if I find a mate. Why should I? I didn’t do anything wrong. I was willing to stick with my vows!’”

First, this person misunderstands annulment. It is not a legal “bother” imposed by the Church; it is a petition asking the Church’s tribunal to determine whether there is enough evidence to declare an apparent marriage null and void, for some reason that existed at the time of the apparent marriage, although it was not evident.

Second, all these people misunderstand marriage. It is not a contract, which becomes null if one of the parties fails to deliver what he promised. Rather it is a covenant, imaging the covenant Jesus has made with his Church.

Just as Jesus never abandons us no matter how we offend him, but is always ready to take us back, so a wife must keep her marriage vows even if her husband abandons her, doing him “good, and not harm, all the days of her life.” (It goes without saying, this applies to men as well as women.)

It is difficult, but, with God’s grace, it is possible. By positively rejecting this grace, the Catechism says, “one already judges oneself, receives according to one’s works, and can even condemn oneself for all eternity by rejecting the Spirit of love.”