Catholics and marriage licenses

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She’s been told all this before. It’s not what she wants to hear, so she ignores it.
 
ByWhatAuthority said:
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abucs:
Now at the moment people are adamant that the priest should not be forced to give his services but the florist must. In time this inconsistency in law will be challenged (at the most opportune time ) and under the secular concepts of equal rights, the church may lose. The time isn’t right now but in the future there will be pressure on priests.
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^This is something every priest in the US should be thinking about!!! Thank you @abucs for your very thoughtful and articulate responses to this most pressing issue.
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Fr. David ALREADY addressed this.

Should the church be pressed to do something immoral, then they will simply no longer be administers of civil paperwork. HOWEVER, he has stated that it would be like in other countries where one must be married by civil authorities FIRST.

You’d STILL need to obtain a civil Marriage license. You there’s no way around it.
 
Quit feeding this thread. No one here has to participate in every argument they are invited to.
 
Yes I agree Horton.

3 priests, a deacon, many scriptures, many senior posters, a lawyer, and a poster very familar with finance and taxes, have explained why its necessary to submit to church authority on this.

The op cannot be helped.

Edited to add: the 3rd priest is her own.
 
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ByWhatAuthority said:
It would be going against her conscience to do so.
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This person would be advised to form her conscience well, that means bringing it into conformity with all of the teachings of Holy Mother Church. This includes the teaching on our duty to follow laws, to pay our taxes, to be good citizens.

Upthread are all of the references, documents, that will help her to better learn the doctrines.

Every one of us has an area of doctrine that chaffs us. That is an area of pride that we must work on through penance and sacrifice and prayer and fasting.
 
Ding Ding Ding Ding!

If I were guessing, the friend is your fiancee and he won’t marry you unless he can do it “under the table”.

Am I getting warm?
 
I was married in the UK before moving to Canada. No one has ever questioned that I am married to my husband, nor asked for a marriage certificate.
I had never lived in Canada before, and my husband and I have different surnames.
 
I dare say no one would require any papers if I moved to the US either.
 
Xanthippe_Voorhees said:
y point is that the state can do this because they have the technology to link everything. They can ensure that someone has not been married before in that state because they have your ID. It’s cheap because they have a system that works for millions of people.

If you were going to do what the government does in this simple transaction without any government help, then it would cost thousands.
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The state doesn’t do this! And the Church doesn’t use a marriage license in that way.
 
sunandstars said:
I dare say no one would require any papers if I moved to the US either.
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The UK and Canada share an overarching governmental system. They are part of the same parlementary democracy. They don’t need to ask for information because they already have it.

You would most certainly need to provide documentation if you wanted to be a temporary or permanent resident of the US without holding dual citizenship. Come here for a visit on a visa? You’re still going to have some paperwork.

Canada requires a TON of paperwork for people residing in within it’s walls from the US. I know this for a fact because I’m not that far from Canada and at my Uni it wasn’t uncommon for a professor to be asked to teach at a Canadian Uni. In order to do so there was a TON of paperwork.

And even getting a student visa was sometimes too much work. I had many classmates who were Canadian citizens who chose to commute an hour+ from Canada for classes rather than live in the US because the paperwork was so burdensome and complicated.
 
1ke said:
The state doesn’t do this! And the Church doesn’t use a marriage license in that way.
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They use it to verify that a couple is free to marry. If they had to ascertain that a couple was free to marry on their own, it’d be an expensive process.
 
abucs said:
The state no longer underpins Christian concepts of marriage
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The Church did not invent marriage. Civil marriage came first. The idea of “Christian marriage” as something separate or unique from plain-old-marriage is a newly invented idea.

Christ elevated natural marriage to a sacrament between the baptized by virtue of baptism. The Church has never had a concept of marriage apart from the state or civil aspects of marriage. Baptism elevates marriage to a sacrament, not the location or witnesses to the marriage.
 
abucs said:
Now at the moment people are adamant that the priest should not be forced to give his services but the florist must. In time this inconsistency in law will be challenged (at the most opportune time ) and under the secular concepts of equal rights, the church may lose. The time isn’t right now but in the future there will be pressure on priests.
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The first amendment and the case law on non interference in Church matters makes this scenario not applicable in the US. Perhaps not in other places.
 
Canon law states the marriage must conform to civil law. In the US, where this couple wants to marry, that means a license.

Elsewhere it may mean something else.
 
Xanthippe_Voorhees said:
They use it to verify that a couple is free to marry. If they had to ascertain that a couple was free to marry on their own, it’d be an expensive process
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This simply isn’t true!

Look at the process: determination of freedom to marry the priest conducts happens MONTHS before any marriage license (which can happen as little as one day before the wedding— or the day of in some locations).

The marriage license has nothing to do with the investigation of freedom to marry in the Church, the least reason of which is because criteria to marry in the state and church are not the same.

The license is required in the US because the clergy are both the civil and religious officiant.
 
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Yes, I think we’ve reached the “Someone is wrong on the internet” stage of this debate.
 
I was referring to the fact that once I had moved to Canada (yes, perfectly legally, and with only one document), no one, not the bank, not the mortgage company, not the university, not the medical services, has ever asked for my marriage certificate.

I do have dual actually thrice, citizenship, and have the passports to prove it. But I was not a citizen in the UK at the time of my marriage, and was not required to take out a marriage license. My point being that I can move around quite nicely in Canada, and the US, and anywhere I like, without ever having to have had a marriage license. It being different than citizenship, or legal resident papers. You are conflating the two types of documents.

Further, many of the posters on this posting are being very judgmental and insulting to the family the post is speaking about. This is certainly a huge change in the attitude of Catholic Answers and I detest it. I’ve seen this negative attitude on other posts as well. The difference between then, and now are quite startling, and go much deeper than format or web colors.

Seems to me, the family’s status is between the government and them, and we have nothing to say about it, especially since we know nothing about the circumstances or legality of the situation. I can off the top of my head, think of at least two valid and legal reasons why a family might have severed official ties with the US or state government. Both of which would require the permission and cooperation of said government.

Let’s invest energy in helping, not in slinging mud around.

Have they looked into what the various Caribbean islands require? Many of their economies turn on the tourist trade and weddings on the beach are a big part of that.
My English friend was married in a Caribbean resort that caters to romantics without being a resident, or citizen.
 
Are you talking Civil marriage or actual Sacramental marriage?

Because I’m sure the Caribbean does a booming business in civil marriages. For a priest in the Caribbean to perform a marriage he’s still going to have to follow Canon Law–and therefore would be in communication with the dioceses of origin…and it’d be a highly irregular situation.

Edit- I see no evidence that you don’t need a marriage liscence in the UK. It appears that the process is differet and the church obtains state documentation, but it dosn’t mean that it dosnt exist.
 
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There is no investigation done to get a marriage license. As you said, one walks in with ID and whatever documents that state requires such as a birth certificate. The bride and groom sign the request stating there are no legal impediments to the marriage.

My sister is married to a guy who has married another woman since being married to my sister. While he & my sister have been separated for several years, they never divorced. He “married” another women since. Both marriages happened in the same state.

In the 80’s I walked into a county courthouse in Nevada and received a marriage license to marry my second husband. We got married the next day in Lake Tahoe. This was before the internet and getting the license took about 10 minutes.

People really need to be careful about posting information that is not true in fact.
 
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