I didn’t know that. So as I’m hearing you, a civilly remarried person must file for divorce, and stop living with their new partner before their sin of irregular marriage–and their sins of adulterous sex in the context of this new “marriage”–could be forgiven in the Sacrament of Penance?
I’m probably not the clearest person as I age–and in the throes of a cold–but I’m speaking of a case where a civilly divorced and remarried person/couple, without a decree of nullity, and continuing to engage in sexual relations.
There are cases where a couple in an irregular marriage (above) abstain from relations, 'living as brother and sister". By Catholic teaching, those people MAY receive because even though there is the sin of having invalidly ‘married’, if there is no real marriage according to the Church AND the couple are not living as a married couple, it’s like having opposite sex roommates. If the couple is seen as a ‘legal married couple’ and don’t say anything about their sexual–or not–relations, there is also no ‘scandal’ as there would be if two people of the opposite sex, not married, lived with each other (even if they were chaste).
The irregularity of an invalid marriage is thus to an extent ‘regularized’ if the couple is not engaging in sexual relations. Since the ‘first marriage’ is held to be valid by the Church, the ideal would be for the original partners to remarry each other and attempt to live out a valid marriage. But sometimes that cannot happen. If there are children in the second marriage, they are as ‘entitled’ to having a mother and father present as any other children. And since they are usually younger, they would need the parents’ presence perhaps a bit more, for a time, than older children, although again this is not always the case.
The Church has always provided pastoral care, but the fact remains, that especially with the advent of the Internet, even in ‘far off places’, people CAN be aware of Church teaching with the same kind of normal effort that they can be aware of the laws regarding driving, voting, how to balance a checkbook. Of course, some people will ignore those laws, not necessarily with evil intent. . . they drive ‘mostly’ by the rules, but ignore the stop sign if they’re in a hurry. They balance a checkbook, except when they have ‘more important things to do’.
Now as a point of information, back in the Stone Age, my mother, Catholic, married a twice divorced Protestant man. She loved him, he loved her, she was young, he didn’t see any problem (even in the early 1950s) with anything, all was going to work out. Yep. Then they started having children. And we were raised Catholic. With my mother accompanying us to every Mass, making sure we attended Catholic school, etc. And never once receiving communion until after my father died. My mother wasn’t stupid. She was very devout. She was raised pre Vatican 2. Her father had attended the seminary in his youth but found his vocation called him to marriage. (BTW, they never treated her any differently and we were as welcome in the family as the other cousins born in valid marriages). She knew what was what. Many times she regretted not the marriage itself, but the situation and the fact that she didn’t push for a decree of nullity (which would, even in the old days, almost certainly have been granted, but she accepted that wrong was wrong, even with all the good she had from it (my dad’s love, her wonderful kids, etc). If she had been told that since it was HER first marriage, and my dad’s marriages nearly certainly invalid, she could receive if her conscience was clear, she’d have reported the priest who said so to the bishop, if a bishop told her, she’d have reported to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. She didn’t think that she deserved to declare herself ‘in union’ with the Catholic Church when she was deliberately disobeying one of its teachings, and she would neither want the teaching changed to accommodate her, nor to be ‘winked at’ and allowed to receive communion under ‘false pretences’.
