Let no man separate what God has joined

Why Protestants divorce and Catholics cannot.

Now more than ever people tend to extol the virtues and joys of being single, and engage in long disputes on the crisis of the marriage bond, yet the lives of a vast majority of humanity still hinge on this institution.

Before the last century, most family communities around the world were structured as patriarchal economies.

The stability of marriage was assured by the unity of the ‘extended family’ and by the society they belonged to. The bond was a necessary condition for the continuance of family unity and of social stability.

The choice of spouse was mainly determined by economic and social factors. As a result of marriage, a woman left her own family and became a member of her husband’s family. Love between a young couple was immaterial, what mattered were the continuation of the family and the perpetuation of the bloodline. Passion and love were usually experienced outside marriage and were considered a threat to the peaceful continuation of married life and potentially detrimental to social order.

Only relatively recently has so-called ‘romantic love’ become a premise for marriage and the basis for a shared life.

In parts of the world where modernity has yet to take hold, this institution still bears many of its strictly utilitarian features.

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