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We cannot recommend Doors to the Sacred as a book on the sacraments in particular, nor Martos as a reliable Catholic theologian in general.
While Martos can be commended for some of his research in Doors to the Sacred, we cannot recommend his book. I own a copy of the 1982 edition from Image books. Liguori Publications issued an “enlarged, updated edition” in 2014. However, since that new edition doesn’t also say “revised,” we infer that while updated changes were made to jibe with more recent liturgical texts in the Church, key problematic points regarding Church history and doctrine were not corrected from the 1982 edition.
Regarding his book, we will confine ourselves to the author’s treatment of Christian marriage. Martos argues that St. Basil of Caesarea—an early Church Father, Doctor and bishop—wrote that the early Church allowed for exceptions on the indissolubility of Christian marriage, specifically for adulterous Christian husbands. Martos writes, “[A] man who abandoned his wife just to marry another woman could be readmitted to the ranks of the faithful after doing penance for seven years.” He cites St. Basil’s Letters 188 and 199 as evidence (p. 411). However, there is no supporting evidence in either of Basil’s letters for Martos’s assertion.
Regarding Christian marriage, i.e., a marriage between two baptized persons, Basil is very clear, affirming the words of Jesus Christ in Matthew 5 and 19: “If the man who has deserted his wife goes to another, he is himself an adulterer because he makes her commit adultery; and the woman who lives with him is an adulteress, because she has caused another woman’s husband to come over to her” (Letter 188, IX.).
Similarly, in Letter 199, Basil writes, “In the case of a man deserted by his wife, the cause of the desertion must be taken into account. If she appears to have abandoned him without reason, he is deserving of pardon, but the wife of punishment. Pardon will be given to him that he may communicate with the Church” (XXXV). So, the husband can be pardoned if she left him without reason, so that he can receive the Eucharist and other sacraments. And so too could the wife, after repentance and a period of penance. Yet, contrary to what Martos conveys, Basil never says that an aggrieved Christian husband is permitted to remarry in the event of abandonment by his spouse, let alone when he abandons her simply to marry another and irrespective of whether he does any “penance” for leaving his spouse.
In addition, Basil also addresses a marriage between two unbaptized persons in which the wife is subsequently baptized. Following St. Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7, a wife who is baptized after marriage should not leave her still unbelieving husband, if that husband wants to remain with her. That would include in the pastorally challenging case in which the unbelieving husband is unfaithful and yet wants to remain with his believing spouse. Of such a case, Basil writes:
From an unbelieving husband a wife is commanded not to depart, but to remain, on account of the uncertainty of the issue “For what do you know, O wife, whether you shall save your husband?” (1 Cor. 7:16). Here then the wife, if she leaves her husband and goes to another, is an adulteress. But the man who has been abandoned is pardonable, and the woman who lives with such a man is not condemned (Letter 188, IX; emphasis added).
The problem is not simply that the baptized wife left her husband but that she also took up with another man (i.e., “and goes to another”). Thus, she is condemned for her adultery, though she certainly would not be beyond forgiveness. The unbelieving husband is pardonable, and yet he himself must repent of any sin that contributed to his wife’s departure, e.g., if he were unfaithful. In addition, lest there be any confusion, his receiving a lighter canonical penalty for his own misdeeds didn’t mean he’d be morally free to continue engaging in intimate relations with his non-spouse. Further, if he didn’t reconcile with his believing spouse, it’s possible that their marriage could be dissolved under the Pauline privilege and that he could eventually remarry (see 1 Cor. 7:12-15).
Undoubtedly, as the Catholic Encyclopedia makes clear in this article on divorce, and Basil affirms, adulterous wives were subject to harsher canonical penalties than husbands in the early Church. Yet, contrary to Martos’s claims, there was no allowance in the early Church for a husband in a Christian marriage to divorce his wife and remarry someone else while his wife remained alive (see also Basil, Letter 199, XXXI). Further, to be clear, St. Paul also teaches that a husband baptized after marriage should not leave his still-unbelieving wife if she desires to remain with him (1 Cor. 7:16).
Martos substantiates his unreliability as a Catholic theologian in a more recent series of articles on the sacraments, “The Questionable Origins of the Sacraments,” which he published in 2015. The following excerpts from the introduction to this series will suffice, as Martos’s assertions stand in stark contradiction, for example, to the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of a valid marriage between two Christians (see CCC 1638-40, 1644-45):
Catholic sacramental theology evolved through centuries during which creative thinkers such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas unintentionally misinterpreted texts from the past and unwittingly assumed that ancient texts could be applied to church practices in their own eras . . . .
Ideas and theories that once made sense in terms of people’s experience no longer make sense today. For example, the idea that marriage is indissoluble made sense when marriages were arranged by parents and divorce was socially impossible, but it contradicts our experience as Christians living in the twenty-first century (bolded emphasis original, italicized emphasis added).
For more on the sacraments and their origins, see our articles on “The Seven Signs” (and related scriptural footnotes in its CCC cites) and “To Be or Not to Be a Sacrament.”
And for more on the Pauline privilege, please see this article.