Is divorce ever permitted?

Yes - and the Episcopal Church says so plainly, though it took real wrestling to get there, and Anglicans elsewhere still draw the line differently.

The starting point is Jesus's own teaching, which sets marriage against the hardness of heart that allows divorce in the first place. Let me put that beside what we have here - Matthew's Gospel records it with a notable exception clause attached, while Mark's version has none. That difference has shaped the whole conversation. Here is the real tension: Mark gives Jesus's teaching with no exception at all - marriage is indissoluble, full stop. Matthew hands us the same scene with except for sexual immorality written in. Scholars generally read that clause as Matthew's own community working out a hard case rather than two different sayings of Jesus - but it is Scripture as we have it, and the Church has had to live with both texts side by side for two thousand years.

Anglicans read this, as always, through Scripture, tradition, and reason together, not Scripture alone pressed into a rule. The ideal Jesus names - one flesh, not to be separated - stands as the norm against which everything else is measured. But the Episcopal Church does not treat marriage as literally unbreakable. It permits divorce and permits remarriage in church, with a bishop's consent, after real pastoral attention to what failed and why. The logic is that the Church's task is to proclaim an ideal faithfully while remaining honest that people, being fallen, sometimes cannot live inside it - and that shutting the sacraments to someone a second time is not always mercy.

Other Anglicans - and most Roman Catholics - read Matthew's clause more narrowly or not at all, and hold marriage as permanent until death, full annulment aside. That is a real disagreement inside the wider Anglican Communion, not a settled question even among people who share a prayer book.

The Catholic answer is no, not in the sense of dissolving a valid sacramental marriage - and I want to be honest about how that sits next to what Reverend Anne just laid out, because she's right that Matthew and Mark hand us the exception clause problem, and it's a real one.

Let me look at the text itself rather than argue around it. There it is - what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder, and then the clause except it be for fornication. The Church has never read that as Jesus quietly reopening the door Moses opened. Rather: Jesus is explicitly overturning the Mosaic concession, not extending it. He says plainly that Moses permitted divorce only because of hardened hearts, and from the beginning it was not so. The exception, in the Church's longstanding reading, concerns something narrower - unions that were never valid marriages to begin with, not valid ones later broken. That's the root of annulment: not dissolving a marriage but recognizing one of the conditions for a true marriage was absent from the start.

So the Church does not perform divorce, does not bless remarriage after civil divorce while a spouse lives, and holds marriage as a sacrament that two baptized people cannot themselves undo once validly made - because it is a sign of Christ's own unbreakable union with the Church.

What the Church does allow, and takes seriously: civil separation and civil divorce where there is danger, abuse, or a marriage that has truly died, without calling that an answer to the sacramental bond. And it allows the question of validity to be examined through annulment, which is not "Catholic divorce" but a finding that no marriage existed sacramentally.

I'd gently push back on one thing Reverend Anne said: that most scholars read Matthew's clause as the community's own addition to Jesus's saying, not two sayings of one teaching. That may be so historically - but the Church reads Matthew as inspired Scripture, not as evidence against itself, and reads the clause as clarifying rather than contradicting Mark's absolute statement.

From where I stand, the answer is a clear yes - and it always has been. Torah itself provides for it. Let me say the actual mechanism, because it matters: the word is get, a bill of divorce, and Deuteronomy sets out that a man who finds something objectionable in his wife may write her a sefer keritut, a document of severance, and send her away.

Let me open that passage so we're reading the actual text rather than my summary of it. There it is - divorce assumed as a real institution, with its own document and its own procedure, not a concession grudgingly tolerated. The rabbis of the Talmud argued at length over how broadly "unseemly thing" should be read - the House of Shammai held it meant something close to sexual impropriety, the House of Hillel read it far more broadly, even to something as small as burning a meal. Jewish law generally followed the more lenient path, though always through a formal process: a get, written and delivered with care, overseen by a beit din.

So where Father Thomas reads Jesus as overturning the Mosaic concession and Reverend Anne reads him as working within it reluctantly, I'd say plainly: Judaism never treated Deuteronomy 24 as a concession to hardness of heart in the first place. Marriage is a covenant, kiddushin, sacred - but it is a covenant between two people, not an unbreakable metaphysical fusion that only death can dissolve. When the marriage has genuinely died, the law gives it a dignified, documented end rather than trapping two people in a bond that no longer holds.

That doesn't mean divorce is taken lightly - the sages said that even the altar sheds tears when a man divorces the wife of his youth. But permitted, yes, without qualification, and has been from Sinai.

Three serious traditions, three different hinges, so let me locate them precisely rather than adjudicate.

**Hinge one: the Markan/Matthean divergence.** Mark records Jesus's teaching with no exception. Matthew's version includes the clause except for porneia. Reverend Anne is right that the critical-scholarly default reads this as Matthew's community clarifying a hard case rather than a second saying of Jesus himself - but that's a judgment about composition history, not something the text announces about itself. Let me check the actual wording rather than trust memory here. That confirms it exactly as both described it - Mark's version is unqualified; Matthew's inserts except for sexual immorality. No textual variant is at stake here; both readings are the main text of their respective Gospels, not a manuscript dispute. The hinge is real and it's about the word *porneia* itself - does it mean adultery specifically, premarital unchastity discovered after the fact, or incestuous unions (its sense elsewhere in the New Testament varies). Catholic reading takes it as the latter, preserving an absolute rule about valid marriages; Anglican and most Protestant readings have historically taken it as permitting divorce for marital unfaithfulness.

One correction worth naming: no New Testament writer quotes Deuteronomy 24's "unseemly thing" language directly when reporting this exchange - Matthew and Mark both have the Pharisees paraphrase Moses's command, not cite chapter and verse. So the connection to Deuteronomy 24 that Rabbi Adler opened is the Pharisees' own framing of the law, read back into the debate, not a formal citation.

What complicates all three readings alike: Paul, writing earlier than any Gospel was fixed in its current form, handles a case Jesus never addresses directly - a believer deserted by an unbelieving spouse - and permits release there too, on his own authority, distinguishing it explicitly from "the Lord's" command. That's a fourth data point inside the New Testament itself, not just between traditions.