Do Women Belong to Their Fathers Until They Get Married?

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Hume said:
“A father has a son until he finds a wife,
But a father has a daughter until the end of his life.”

I may have messed that up a bit, but that’s roughly how it goes.

I thought I was kidding at first, but I’m not so sure.
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It’s more often quoted as “A son is a son till he takes a wife; a daughter is a daughter for the rest of her life.” Old proverb, Irish I believe, and applies to mothers as well as fathers as many a mother can testify…as can I, having a married son. 😀
 
Thanks!

Got it from my dad who probably said it correctly and I stored it poorly.
 
I feel like I should clarify something. I, under no circumstance, endorse giving the bride away or the thought that it’s part of any of the Catholic Rites for their sacrament of Matrimony. I know it’s not part of the wedding rite.

I guess the area I grew up in had a much broader definition for what “giving the bride away” meant which was why I was saying that it happened to my parents. Not a lot of church ask, the actual gesture of the father putting the woman’s hand in the man’s is what is considered the bare minimum for “giving away” around here.
 
Question;

Would Catholicism within a culture that arranges marriages require that part of the culture be abolished, then? Or could it accommodate?
 
^ (I ran out of likes.)

It’s almost midnight so I’m signing off.

Good night everyone! 🌙
 
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The bishop has zero authority over religious orders in his territory.

Still waiting for the text of the rite where the father gives away the bride. Hint: it doesn’t exit.
 
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StRaphaelPray4Us said:
and it primarily came from the Anglican Protestants
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Out of curiosity, I looked up the two forms of marriage used in the Church of England today. The modern form, Common Worship, has this:

6 ‘Giving Away’​

This traditional ceremony is optional. Immediately before the couple exchange vows, the minister may ask:

Who brings this woman to be married to this man?

The bride’s father (or mother, or another member of her family or a friend representing the family) gives the bride’s right hand to the minister who puts it in the bridegroom’s right hand. Alternatively, after the bride and bridegroom have made their Declarations, the minister may ask the parents of bride and bridegroom in these or similar words:

N and N have declared their intention towards each other.

As their parents, will you now entrust your son and daughter to one another as they come to be married?

Both sets of parents respond:

We will.
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In the original form, the Book of Common Prayer, one finds this:
Then shall the Minister say,

Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?

Then shall they give their troth to each other in this manner.

The Minister, receiving the Woman at her father’s or friend’s hands, shall cause the Man with his right hand to take the Woman by her right hand, and to say after him as followeth.
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It’s interesting that even in the original form, the person who gives the woman to be married to the man does not have to be her father. It therefore seems that there was never anything in the Anglican form of marriage that supported the idea that the woman was transferred like property.
 
RoseScented said:
I feel like I should clarify something. I, under no circumstance, endorse giving the bride away or the thought that it’s part of any of the Catholic Rites for their sacrament of Matrimony. I know it’s not part of the wedding rite.

I guess the area I grew up in had a much broader definition for what “giving the bride away” meant which was why I was saying that it happened to my parents. Not a lot of church ask, the actual gesture of the father putting the woman’s hand in the man’s is what is considered the bare minimum for “giving away” around here.
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What you are saying is accurate. Years ago, not so much these day, in Catholic weddings the bride was always escorted/accompanied/walked down the aisle by her father or a male relative or friend if her father was not available. Most here I think would agree that this was usually labelled “giving her away” but the discussion here is whether or not this was a symbol of a teaching about a daughter “belonging to her father until she married” and most here including myself say it was not.
 
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But it would be incorrect to say that “all women are under the authority of all men”, right?
 
Bishops have no authority over religious in their territory, bishop of Rome included.

Church law gives the Pope, in his role as Supreme Pontiff, legislative authority over the whole church as well as certain other authority.
 
Casti Connubii doesn’t say what you are trying to make it say certainly not that a woman is under her father’s authority her whole life until she marries.

Still waiting for that proof that a father gives his daughter away. Hint: not gonna find it.
 
The quotes you’ve provided so far demonstrate a father / husband’s authority over his house, which no one has disputed…not a father’s authority over an adult woman who has started her own life elsewhere. What about a woman who never married? It’s not uncommon. I don’t mean religious… just an unmarried woman. …plus, her dad is going to die at some point.
 
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To say an adult daughter is under the authority of her father is a cultural thing, not true of Western culture. I don’t know where the opening poster lives. Adult daughters in the West do not feel any need to lives in their parent’s house, and live elsewhere, making their own decisions, obviously.
To say this is a Christian value is to say something not true. It is possible that some Protestant groups in the West say this is possible, but if so this has nothing to do with Catholic belief.
 
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Of course you will find texts based on Scripture which say, as Scripture does, that the spiritual head of the family is the husband - and that this leadership is enacted in Christ-like, self-giving sacrificial love.

What you are not going to find is a text saying that women are perpetual minors who always have to be under some male’s authority, because that doesn’t exist.

“Giving away” one’s daughter is a cultural custom linked to the times when marriages were, in part at least, a financial transaction between two families. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the sacrament of matrimony and its meaning.

Where I live, the custom for weddings is that the groom processes in escorted by his mother, and the bride processes in escorted by her father. It’s just a way of including the parents, and if there was to be a symbolism in it, it would be at most that the old family units are shifted to form a new one - that “man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

The sacramental bond which creates the relationship you’re talking of between a man and a woman is precisely between a man and a woman, not between a man and a future, not yet extent, hypothetical family.

From the CCC:
2217 As long as a child lives at home with his parents, the child should obey his parents in all that they ask of him when it is for his good or that of the family.
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2232 Family ties are important but not absolute. Just as the child grows to maturity and human and spiritual autonomy, so his unique vocation which comes from God asserts itself more clearly and forcefully.
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By that logic, fathers should give away their sons as well.
 
Yes, and I’d like to see an actual magisterial citation supporting the idea that children are submitted to their fathers’ spiritual authority until marriage - or even, as that was the thread’s topic, specifically girls.
 
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