Roman Catholic marriage is a sacrament and is seen as a sign of the love uniting Christ and the Church; it establishes between the spouses a permanent and exclusive bond, sealed by God. A unity that cannot be dissolved.

“For the good times and the bad, until death do us part.” This is one of the promises that spouses give to each other during their wedding ceremony.

But what is the bad time? Does it include when one of the spouses beats the other continuously, spend money unwisely and leave his/her spouse and children in poverty? Does it include infidelity, child and emotion abuse?

If some Roman Catholic says yes “until death do us part” you must live your married life by these bad things, then the least a priest can do while celebrating the sacrament of marriage is to make these bad things clearly known to the couple. The priest must tell the couple that if, when you are married, one of you starts to beat up the other regularly, leave you and your children in poverty, you have no right to divorce your spouse. You have no right to remarry.

This promise “For the good times and the bad, until death do us part” is a blind promise and is fake because the meaning of the bad things is unknown to the couple during the celebration of the sacrament of marriage. When the priests start to make this clear and are sure that the couples do understand what the bad things are, only then the Roman Catholic Church can insist that the marriage within it is a unity that cannot be dissolved.

Until then the Roman Catholic Church has no right to deny separated people the right to remarry.

I believe God never wants us to live in slavery and misery because of mistakes. I hope the Roman Catholic Church believes this too.

■ Peter Grima

Sliema