Here’s the canon law regarding marriage Authority That Regulates MarriageCan. 1016. The marriage of baptized persons is regulated not only by divine but also by canonical law, the civil power remaining competent in regard to the purely civil effects of marriage.
1. Marriage of Baptized Persons. It is governed by the divine law, the canonical law, and, in regard to certain effects, the civil law.
(a) The Divine Law. All that is required by the law of nature for a contract and a marriage contract is necessary also for Christian marriage. To this must be added the prescriptions of the divine positive law, from which the Church does not and cannot dispense.
(b) The Ecclesiastical Law. The Church claims full, independent and exclusive power over the marriage of all baptized persons – Catholics, heretics, schismatics – because she has received from Christ supreme authority in religious matters, and marriage is a sacrament, and because by Baptism men become her subjects, whether willing or not. The power is exclusive: “To decree and ordain about the sacrament is, by the will of Christ, so much a part of the power and duty of the Church that it is plainly absurd to maintain that even the smallest particle of such power has been transferred to the civil ruler” (Leo XIII, Encyc. Arcanum). It includes the legislative, judicial, and coercive power; that is, the power of establishing impediments both diriment and impedient, of deciding all matrimonial causes, of constraining married persons to comply with obligations, etc. It has, however, to be exercised within the limits of the natural and divine positive law, does not extend to merely civil effects, and should not unnecessarily interfere with the liberty of marriage. To marry is a right which every man has received from nature. It has to be respected; still, it is not absolutely independent in its exercise — the common and private good may demand that it be restricted at times and perhaps taken away altogether in some extraordinary cases. Thus, the Church might forbid a person infected with a serious contagious disease ever to marry, even under pain of nullity. In reality, such a person has no right to marry. (c) Civil Power. The civil power has no authority over the bond itself or what is essential to it, and can establish no real impediment, diriment or impediment, to the marriage of Christians. It has authority over the civil effects. The merely civil effects are those which concern the temporal order, and are separable from the marriage contract, as what pertains to the dowry, the right of succession, etc. (Vidal, n. 74). **The State has legislative, judicial, and coercive power over these; it may require certain formalities, like registration, as a condition for granting legal value to a canonically valid marriage, and punish the omission of those requirements. But even the purely civil effects should not be withheld without legitimate cause from a valid contract. And those which, although of a civil or temporal order in themselves, are inseparable from a valid contract – e.g., the legitimacy of children or cohabitation — should not be denied by the civil courts to marriage contracted in accordance with the laws of the Church (Cappello, n. 73; Can 1961). **
