A Criticism of Pope St. Leo the Great

"...Question VI. Concerning those who leave the women by whom they have children and take wives.

Reply: Seeing that the wife is different from the concubine, to turn a bondwoman from one's couch and take a wife whose free birth is assured, is not bigamy but an honorable proceeding."

Commentary:

               I have never seen such a hypocritical response as this one made by Pope St. Leo.  In order to uphold and maintain legality, he ends up crushing the human side of a woman and child. The question is:  if  a man is living a non-sacramental union with a woman, even if he has many children with her,  whether it is permitted him to leave and abandon this person, if deciding, in a second moment, to finally marry in the Church with a second partner? The Pope, seeing only the moral loophole in the story, says "yes, of course!" and completely neglects and dismisses the human situation of the former woman and her child. How cruel can you get?

                       Does the Pope forget that that poor woman and her children need human sustenance, aid, love and protection? They too, have feelings, desires, hurts, fears, loves, etc. Are they simply to be abandoned and left alone to their own resources? Is he so worried about the sacrament that he forgets a child of God in this story? Has his legalism blinded him to the point that he no longer perceives the psychological needs of women and children? Even if a man who is not married in the Church can theoretically leave a woman and the children he had with her, to take on a new female in the Church, he still has a deep and grave natural responsibility to the former person. He is to assure that they receive financial, material, moral and psychological support.

                   I do not see any "honorable proceeding" in a man abandoning a person to marry in the Church with a second one. To me, it is just a cowardly cop-out. It is to use religion to one's personal advantage. I remember of a case, many years ago in Brazil, of a man who lived with a woman for several decades and had eight children with her. He met a young chick and asked me to marry him in the Church with her. He had abandoned the children and the woman with whom he had lived with. I refused to do this marriage. He protested and said that it was his right. I also told that him that there were other priests he could solicit. I then gave him a piece of my mind and expressed my feelings and thoughts on the matter.  

Father Anthony Mellace