Perhaps the error is in our nature to oversimplify. The situation was presented to you as one where a woman had to have sex to keep the one providing home and food. In real life, relationships are more complex. Such marriages, even if sought out of convenience develop well past that. Sexual relations are but one part of what the woman provides the man, and the man the woman. For one with little spiritual life, it might be a very large part. I once remember Peter Kreeft described sexual intimacy is the closest some people will come to a religious experience. So in a case where children are best served by the relationship with two parents, there is a moral good to keeping the family unit, and maintaining the health of all the relationships.
For the unequally yoked, where only one is attempting to reconcile with the Church, there is no easy answer.
Adultery is an intrinsically evil act, i.e, a sinful act (which involves grave matter) as are all extra-marital sexual relations and there is no legitimate reason whatsoever in regards to circumstances or intentions (for example, for the sake of children, family, society at large, or the preservation of one’s life) by which it can be considered a good act or a morally acceptable course of behavior and pleasing to God. “One may not do evil that good may result from it” (CCC#1756; Romans 3:8)
St John Paul II says in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor:
“But the negative moral precepts, those prohibiting certain concrete actions or kinds of behaviour as intrinsically evil, do not allow for any legitimate exception. They do not leave room, in any morally acceptable way, for the “creativity” of any contrary determination whatsoever. Once the moral species of an action prohibited by a universal rule is concretely recognized, the only morally good act is that of obeying the moral law and of refraining from the action which it forbids.” Adultery is precisely that which the sixth commandment of God forbids.
And sin, mortal or venial, does not unite but divides and it is not healthy for any relationship whether one’s relationship with God, one’s relationship with family and children or neighbor, the Church, the whole human community, the whole of creation. Consider the passage in the Bible about the city of Babel and its tower in Genesis 11: 1-9 (in the same vein, we could also consider the consequences on a universal level of the sin of our first parents).
Commenting on this St John Paul II says in the apostolic exhortation Reconciliation and Penance:
Intent on building what was to be at once a symbol and a source of unity, those people found themselves more scattered than before, divided in speech, divided among themselves, incapable of consensus and agreement…According to the Babel story, the result of sin is the shattering of the human family, already begun with the first sin and now reaching its most extreme form on the social level.
Continuing in the same apostolic exhortation, St John Paul II goes on to write of the twofold wound, i.e., personal and social, that every sin carries with it:
The mystery of sin is composed of this twofold wound which the sinner opens in himself and in his relationship with his neighbor. Therefore one can speak of personal and social sin: From one point of view, every sin is personal; from another point of view, every sin is social insofar as and because it also has social repercussions…
As a personal act, sin has its first and most important consequences in the sinner himself: that is, in his relationship with God, who is the very foundation of human life; and also in his spirit, weakening his will and clouding his intellect…
To speak of social sin means in the first place to recognize that, by virtue of human solidarity which is as mysterious and intangible as it is real and concrete, each individual’s sin in some way affects others. This is the other aspect of that solidarity which on the religious level is developed in the profound and magnificent mystery of the communion of saints, thanks to which it has been possible to say that “every soul that rises above itself, raises up the world.” To this law of ascent there unfortunately corresponds the law of descent. Consequently one can speak of a communion of sin, whereby a soul that lowers itself through sin drags down with itself the church and, in some way, the whole world. In other words, there is no sin, not even the most intimate and secret one, the most strictly individual one, that exclusively concerns the person committing it. With greater or lesser violence, with greater or lesser harm, every sin has repercussions on the entire ecclesial body and the whole human family.
And in the CCC#953 concerning the Communion of Saints, we read:
Communion in charity. In the sanctorum communio, “None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself.” “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” “Charity does not insist on its own way.” In this solidarity with all men, living or dead, which is founded on the communion of saints, the least of our acts done in charity redounds to the profit of all. Every sin harms this communion.
. It may well be I am unable to understand what you say. In which case I would amicably give up for my inability to understand.
. I gave up on shoot 'email dead Cowboys and Indians type converse a long time ago.
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