The Catholic Church and the Non-sacramental Marriages

Abstract

The statistics show that each year in Poland, a traditional Christian country, there is an increasing number of divorces. Nowadays the divorce is commonly perceived as a universal form of ending a failed marriage. Every year, on average, 90.000-100.000 people are divorced, and a large part of them remarry or live in cohabitation, which is not considered as valid and sacramental by the Church. Therefore, with each successive year more and more people are entering the ranks of “non-sacramental marriages” who may not fully participate in religious practices. The scale of divorces has already become large enough to raise concerns of the clergy and calls for concrete actions in order to find space for the divorced in the community of believers, to stop them from moving away from the faith and the Church. This article aims to present the current position of the Catholic Church towards the Catholics joined solely by civil union. It presents the doctrinal grounds stemming from Scripture and Magisterium, the arrangements contained in the documents of the Church,  institutional solutions of the problem (faith groups for non-sacramental marriages), which constitute a form of assistance to those who are excluded from full participation in religious life  Quantitative growth of such faith groups indicates the societal demands for this type of help and the change in the position of the Church towards civil unions. Perhaps in the future, this change of attitude towards “open sinners” will also affect other communities denounced by the Church.