by Gabriel S. Sanchez, J.D.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, though having remained in a state of schism for nearly a millennium, still holds on to much which can instruct and inspire Roman Catholics. As I wrote in the January-February issue of this magazine, Orthodoxy’s liturgical ethos should inspire traditional Catholics to go the extra mile with respect to restoring Rome’s own liturgical patrimony. With respect to certain moral matters, specifically marriage and the family, there is, lamentably, no light coming from the Orthodox East.

Instead of keeping fast to Christ’s admonition that “[w]hat God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt. 19:6), the Orthodox Church, through the application of oikonomia (a vague principle of canonical flexibility which will be discussed further below), allows its members to contract second and third marriages even where the first spouse is still living. This laxity has had an unfortunate spillover effect into the current intra-Catholic debate over the future of the Church’s practice with respect to giving Communion to those faithful who divorce and remarry without having their first sacramental union annulled. Catholic bishops, priests, and laity who advocate for a more “flexible” or, as they say, “pastoral” approach to illicitly remarried Catholics routinely cite the Orthodox as their model with nary a glance to the confused and inconsistent nature of that communion’s approach to the sacrament of marriage.

Before delving further into that confusion, it would be helpful to get some grasp on the theological and practical differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy with regard to marriage. While the Catholic Church recognizes that the baptized Christians to be married minister the sacrament to each other with a bishop, priest, deacon, or, in exceptional and limited circumstances, another individual witnessing the union, the Orthodox place a premium on the priest serving as the minister of the sacrament. In general this means that the Orthodox reject the sacramental status of any marriage performed outside of its walls, including instances where an Orthodox Christian marries a Catholic before a Catholic priest. In Orthodoxy, a Catholic can be married to an Orthodox Christian so long as the service is ministered by an Orthodox cleric and both parties agree to baptize and rear their children in the Orthodox Church.

This contrasts with the Catholic under­standing, which contemplates not only the sacramental status of a marriage between two baptized non-Catholic Christians, but also the elevation of purely natural marriages between non-Christians when they receive Trinitarian baptism and, hopefully, are united in full to the Catholic Church. Orthodoxy, which is today plagued by a shaky understanding of natural law, has, at best, an inadequate view of natural marriages and the rights and duties that attend to them. Indeed, for the Orthodox, there is no full understanding of marriage except for those performed by its priests according to its rites. This would seem, at first blush, to indicate a more exacting standard for not only what constitutes a marriage, but also a deeper appreciation for its indissolubility as well. Sadly, that is not the case.

Following a tendentious reading of Matthew 19:9, the Orthodox, along with Protestants, believe Christ left a loophole in His instruction on marriage’s indissolubility in cases of adultery—a proposition explicitly condemned by Canon 7 of the 24th Session of the Council of Trent. But in reality the Orthodox go even further, arguing that “adultery” does not mean sexual relations outside of the marriage bond only, but any married person’s disordered attachment to worldly things to the exclusion of their spouse: pornography, alcohol, narcotics, gambling, etc.

Although true adultery is typically at the center of marriage dissolution within Orthodoxy, it is important here to recall the open-endedness of the aforementioned principle of oikonomia, which, according to Orthodox canon law, is “the suspension of the absolute and strict application of canon and church regulations in the governing and life of the church” that “only takes place through the official church authorities and is only applicable for a particular case.” In other words, the practice of oikonomia does not set precedents that have to be adhered to in later cases, a point which, on the one hand, safeguards the integrity of Orthodox doctrine and canon law while, on the other, leaving a wide spectrum of discretion to local priests and bishops on how to address a range of issues, including divorce. Is an Orthodox marriage dissolved on the basis of a single act of adultery or multiple acts sustained over a particular period of time? What if the unfaithful spouse repents and the other refuses to accept it? What if no physical adultery is present at all but rather an addiction to Internet pornography that could, in theory, be treated through a mixture of pastoral counseling and professional help? There are no set criteria in place, only particularized judgments that can be informed by a myriad of subjective factors. The end result of this canonical flexibility is a de facto shift in Orthodoxy away from a belief in the indissolubility of marriage to one that still favors marriage’s permanence, albeit with a rider of ad hoc exceptions to the rule.

Aside from staging a general defense that the principle of oikonomia, even when applied to marriage, is rooted in Scripture as an image of God’s love and kindness toward human weakness (a contestable point), the Orthodox often attempt to deflect criticism of permitting second and third marriages on the grounds that the ceremony for these unions is penitential in character and lacks certain elements found in the first-marriage rite, such as the crowning of the couple (one of the “high points” of the Slavo-Byzantine Rite wedding ceremony). Though the Eucharist is not celebrated at these second and third wedding ceremonies, both spouses are allowed to receive Communion at any Divine Liturgy (Mass) from thenceforth so long as they are adequately prepared and not in a state of (any other) serious sin. The fact that the couple lives together and continues in conjugal relations despite the fact that one, if not both, still have living first spouses is, for the Orthodox, a nonissue.

In the context of Orthodoxy in America, which is comprised of more than a half-dozen overlapping jurisdictions that trace their establishment and/or governance back to various Eastern European and Middle Eastern mother churches, the penitential rite for second and third marriages is rarely celebrated at all. In instances where a formerly married Christian, Catholic or otherwise, converts to the Orthodox Church, it is commonplace for bishops and priests to ignore the convert’s first union (or unions) on the ground that it wasn’t “sacramental,” thus paving the way for the individual to receive the full non-penitential marriage rite. And even many lifelong Orthodox Christians who have had their first Orthodox marriages ecclesiastically dissolved can have the requirement for a penitential marriage rite waived by their local bishop on the basis of—you guessed it—oikonomia.

The Orthodox Church’s muddled approach to marriage does not end there, however. On the grave moral matter of contraception, Orthodoxy blinks. In the original 1963 edition to his popular explication of Orthodoxy, simply entitled The Orthodox Church, Bishop Kallistos Ware stated unequivocally that “[a]rtificial methods of birth control are forbidden in the Orthodox Church.” Less than two decades later, in the 1984 edition, Ware noted that the Orthodox had “recently begun to adopt a less strict position” on contraception before confessing in the 1993 printing that while “[i]n the past birth control was in general strongly condemned...a less strict view is coming to prevail” since “[m]any Orthodox theologians and spiritual fathers consider that the responsible use of contraception within marriage is not in itself sinful.” For the Orthodox, “the question of how many children a couple should have, and at what intervals, is best decided by the partners themselves, according to the guidance of their own consciences.”

This is not a surprising development, partic­ularly in the West, which lacks a united Orthodox governing body with the power to teach authoritatively on matters of faith and morals. In practice, each jurisdiction—Greek, Russian, Romanian, etc.—is an island unto itself, and more often than not, the “magisterium” each individual Orthodox Christian experiences is the interpretation and views of his local parish priest. If one priest speaks out against contraception or counsels a couple under his pastoral care not to be too wilful with respect to having children, there’s always another Orthodox cleric in the parish across town who may be inclined to offer the exact opposite answer. For Roman Catholics who have already been led into scandal by imprudent, if not flat-out heretical, statements on contraception and family life from wayward bishops and priests, the indefectible teaching of Holy Mother Church provides a life boat of doctrinal surety that many of their estranged brethren in the Orthodox East desperately lack.

Outlining the problems that currently beset the Orthodox Church’s approach to marriage should not be an occasion for triumphalism from Catholics, including traditional Catholics who continue to defend the Church’s official teachings. The centuries of Catholic-Orthodox division have allowed the smoke of Satan to more easily infiltrate both confessions. Catholicism continues to witness to the indissolubility of marriage and the impermissibility of contraception in the face of ignorance and dissent while the Orthodox, strong in liturgy and deep in spirituality, have lost full sight of the truth. Only when Catholics and Orthodox are again one Church, united fully in faith and morals while being nourished by legitimate liturgical, theological, and spiritual diversity, is this difficultly likely to be overcome. Until then, the light of truth, in this instance at least, shines exclusively from the West.

Gabriel Sanchez is an attorney and independent researcher living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with his wife and four children.