Divorce Rule Questioned

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31724, 6 July 1968, Page 13

Divorce Rule Questioned

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, July 5. The Church of England’s present law on divorce and remarriage is pointedly questioned in a new book published today under the authorship of Canon Arthur R. Winnett, an acknowledged Church authority on the subject. Under this canonical law, a divorced person cannot be remarried in Church while the former partner is still living. This attitude was modified by a controversial decision of the Church’s daughter, the Anglican Church of Canada, last year. The law also lays down that anyone who has remarried after divorce may be admitted to holy Communion only on the recommendation of a priest and at the discretion of his bishop. Canon Winnett questions whether the present proce-

dure is founded on any basis of principle or logic. "With all that can be said in defence of the present marriage discipline of the Church of England there are factors which give rise to serious questionings and misgivings,” he writes.

He also says: “The feeling is undoubtedly growing in the Church of England that the time has come for a re-exam-ination of the whole question of remarriage in Church after divorce.”

Canon Winnett then turns to the report, “Putting Asunder,” published in July, 1966, by a group appointed by Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury two years earlier under Bishop Robert Mortimer of Exeter. This made the “primary and fundamental” recommendation that the law of the breakdown of marriage should be comprehensively substituted for the doctrine of the matrimonial offence (such as cruelty and adultery) as the basis of all divorce. Canon Winnett declares, “The need for a reconsideration of the Church’s attitude to divorce and remarriage has

been given added urgency by the publication of ‘Putting Asunder* and the welcome afforded to that document by the Church Assembly (the Church of England’s parliament)”. He added: “Tbe Church cannot in one context assert the principle of irretrievable breakdown, namely, that when all personal reality has gone out of a marriage, the marriage may be regarded as at an end, and in another context maintain that though all personal relationship has ceased to exist between the parties, they are still bound together by the vinculum or tie of marriage.” Canon Winnett, who has been married for 25 years and is the father of two daughters, is an honorary canon of Guildford Cathedral, south of London. He expresses his views in “The Church and Divorce”, published by A. R. Mowbray and Company, Ltd, of Oxford. A bill to liberalise divorce, which reflects a compromise between proposals put forward by the Church of England’s own theologians and Government legal experts, is

going through Parliament, though the Church strongly opposes any idea of divorce by consent As far as the Church of England is concerned. Canon Winnett says a more satisfactory solution to the problem would be to follow a course similar to that laid down by the Anglican Church of Canada in its sensational synod decision last year. That Church then overwhelmingly approved a new canon which Canon Whinnett says "represents the most radical approach so far adopted anywhere in the Anglican Communion to the problem of divorce and remarriage. It marks an unambiguous break with the doctrine of indissolubility (of marriage) and by Implication recognises that a marriage may die otherwise than by the physical death of one of its partners.” Under the terms of this Canadian canon an ecclesiastical matrimonial commission reviews all applications for remarriage in Church after divorce and comes to a decision on tbe basis of all evidence submitted.