Vatican newspaper highlights Orthodox prelate’s reflections on marriage
August 21, 2015
L’Osservatore Romano has published excerpts of a 2005 lecture on marriage by Belgium’s leading Orthodox prelate.
In the portion of the lecture published by the Vatican newspaper, Metropolitan Athenagoras Peckstadt stated marriage is a covenant between one man and one woman that is primarily ordered to love rather than to procreation.
The prelate also said that the Christ’s words on the indissolubility of marriage (“what God has joined together, let no man put asunder”) are akin to the commandment “you shall not kill.”
“But man is free and therefore can dissolve his marriage and kill another man,” he said, and each is a “grave sin.”
L’Osservatore Romano did not reprint the portions of Metropolitan Athenagoras’ lecture in which he spoke about the practice of second and third marriages permitted by Orthodox bishops “in exceptional and serious cases.”
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Further information:
- Divina alleanza ((L’Osservatore Romano, p. 7)
- Mariage, divorce et remariage dans l’Eglise orthodoxe: économie et accompagnement pastoral (2005)
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