The Orthodox do not celebrate divorce. As they hold it, lifelong monogamy is the ideal — akribia — and the Church mourns every marriage that dies. Their case is serious and deserves its full weight. They rest it first on Christ’s own lips: the Matthean exception, “whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication… committeth adultery” (Matt 19:9). Where the Lord Himself seems to qualify the prohibition, the Greek tradition reads a divine permission: when one spouse destroys the marriage, the innocent is not chained to a corpse.

Two more pillars hold up the practice. Oikonomia — economy — lets the Church, to save a soul, tolerate a second (and by strict limit a third) marriage rather than abandon the fallen to despair; the ideal is never abolished, but mercy governs the wounded case. And, decisively, the second-marriage rite is penitential: not the joyous crowning of the first but prayers of repentance, pleading “the contrition of the Publican, the tears of the Harlot, the confession of the Thief.” The East therefore says, with real dignity: we do not bless divorce; we mourn it, and we heal the penitent. Historically the practice grew as the Byzantine Church absorbed the empire’s civil divorce law — a pastoral inheritance, not a cynical invention.

Steelmanned at full strength, it is humane. But the Catholic answer holds, because indissolubility is not a Church rule the Church may bend — it is Christ’s own teaching. “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matt 19:6). And where Matthew alone carries the exception, three witnesses carry the saying with no exception at all: Mark and Luke record it absolutely, and St Paul flags it as the Lord’s own command — “not I but the Lord” — the only remedy for separation being to “remain unmarried, or be reconciled” (1 Cor 7:10–11). The exception clause, read precisely, licenses separation, not remarriage; and its word is porneia (unlawful union), not moicheia (adultery) — the older Western reading takes it of unions that were never valid marriages at all.

Here is the heart of it, and it is the point the companion question on economia turns on. To bless a new union while the first spouse still lives is to assert that the first bond has dissolved. But Christ said no man — and the Church teaches, not even she — can put it asunder; Trent defined it (Session 24, canon 7), and the Catechism teaches that the bond “can never be dissolved” and that the Church “does not have the power” to undo it. So this is not a pastoral relaxation of a canon, which Catholics also practice; it is a claim about doctrine, against the dominical word. Concede honestly: the penitential rite is real, Catholic annulment practice carries its own burdens, and the porneia clause is a genuine crux. But intent does not change what indissolubility means. Be merciful in everything mercy can touch; this one thing it cannot, because the Lord has spoken.