Do Women Belong to Their Fathers Until They Get Married?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tina.Kamira
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
I raised twin daughters. I was responsible for raising them, but they were independent human beings, born with free will and intelligence; and it was my duty to form them as best I could to be fully human and to follow Christ.

They did not “belong” to me as chattel, they were not my possessions. They “belonged” to me as genetically descendants from me - but ultimately they were God’s. I was just the first intervenor.
 
No.

Children don’t belong to their parents.

They belong to God, God entrusts the parents to teach them to get them to adulthood and hopefully back to God in heaven.

If a woman is old enough to be married, she’s old enough to be independent.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her dad, or dad doesn’t love her. She’s not his possession .
 
Last edited:
I think in Christian cultures that do arrange marriages, the couple still consents to be married. The parents are match makers in a sense. They aren’t forced into it. The parents make the arrangements then the couple is free to say no.
 
Common Worship is modern, but the Book of Common Prayer in its current form dates from 1662 and is a revision of the 1549 version.
 
If my father doesn’t hand me away at the altar or doesn’t want me to marry my fiance because he’s Catholic, is the marriage invalid? After all, my husband was never given spiritual authority over me according to how you view it, and so how could he possibly be my husband? And for that matter, how could that be for all marriages where dad isn’t around for whatever reason?
 
Last edited:
My father walked me down the aisle, then stopped short of the seats where I was to sit with my husband at the front. My husband walked down to meet us while my father gave me a blessing and then gestured for my husband to come and walk me the rest of the way. It was NOT that my dad was “giving me away”, it was more symbolic of “it’s time for you to continue with your life and here is my blessing for the way.”
 
Not sure what is going on with this forum. In recent days it seems like its turning into a parody site. Or maybe is being deluged with posters that are just trying to denigrate the Church by applying a bunch of false negative stereotypes about Christians to the Church.

Really, let’s not turn a site about learning Catholicism into a pit by spewing out false Church teachings, like this misogynistic nonsense.
 
No.

The woman belongs to herself,
since she was born,
until she die.

She is not any one’s property.
She should not become anyone’s property( sick and ugly )

This is a basic human right.

You do not have to become a catholic to know this, every educated human should know this
 
Last edited:
OP, because of this teaching which isn’t Catholic teaching, many non-Catholics and even Catholics think or believe that Church hates women, that undervalue them and looks at them as some object which is subordinated to men.
I see @(name removed by moderator) you are also convinced of that idea in some way.
 
Last edited:
@Fauken already said what I was going to answer.

It looks to me that it’s more your interpretation of ordinary magisterium than ordinary magisterium itself.
 
@Tina.Kamira

Women are not property. They don’t “belong” to anyone but God.

This explains it concisely.
 
I don’t think you have any idea of the evil that happens because of this teaching, at least in Protestant families. Please seek out a good priest from a legitimate Catholic parish and ask him to give you correct and current teaching of the Catholic Church.

My father-in-law, 85 years old, has the belief–that a daughter is under the authority of her father forever, even after marriage. It was a teaching in his Pentecostal church upbringing.

He has two sons (my husband and another son), and one daughter.

He is insisting that his daughter is responsible to care for him and her mother in their old age. He won’t accept care from a home health care service. He and his wife desperately need consistent care.

My sister-in-law is a nurse by profession, an APN, so she has advanced education and training. So she is certainly qualified to take care of of him and her mother and their multiple health issues, including a lot of mobility issues.

But she also has a husband and children, three teenagers who still need a lot of care (one had childhood cancer and has some health issues, the other two have autism). She works full time as a school nurse–the debts from her child’s cancer treatments years ago still total close to a million dollars NOT covered by insurance or any type of government program.

And she has health issues herself, mainly with addictive tendencies (smoking, drinking wine, etc.–I think these are definitely coping mechanisms to help her deal with her complicated life and family).

And yet, Daddy is still insisting that his CHILDREN, specifically his DAUGHTER, are under his authority and need to be taking care of him, ideally moving in with him and his wife (they have a five-bedroom home, but it is filthy because of a stupid little dog that isn’t housetrained and rules the house).

My husband and I do what we can–I cook them a good supper at least 2-3 evenings a week and we bring it out and eat with them (ick–in their gross house). My husband does a lot of simple household tasks for them (takes out garbage, changes light bulbs, installs electronics, etc.).

But we have totally resisted giving up our lives and moving in with them. I refuse to give up my HUSBAND and watch him forced to be a little boy again under Daddy’s thumb.

And my sister-in-law is also resisting, and we support her in this. She is NOT UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF HER FATHER, spiritual or otherwise. This is EVIL teaching, IMO, and I hope that this post helps everyone reading this thread to wake up and see the teaching for what it is–FALSE!

Peeps
 
Tina.Kamira said:
I just have a quick question about something I’ve heard lots of Protestants say-- that a women belongs to her father until she gets married, and then she belongs to her husband. I’ve always thought this was kind of weird, because not all women choose to get married, and according to their logic a 50 year-old unmarried women would still “belong” to her father, which sounds kind of crazy to me. do catholics believe this or is it mostly a Protestant thing?
Click to expand...
Minors usually become adults at around 15-20, depending on their country. There’s not a Catholic teaching that says a woman belongs to the father or mother.

Peace.
 
Last edited:
All right, let’s go back to the beginning.

The custom of the father giving the bride away, having bridesmaids and groomsmen, etc. are Germanic tribal customs that came down through the Middle Ages to our day. They weren’t even universal Germanic customs. We have them in a lot of English-language American weddings because the Saxons and other tribes that settled England were some of the Germanic tribes in question. These customs are okayed by the Church, but they aren’t norms for everyone who’s Catholic, or even everyone who’s Roman/Latin Rite. They are not theology, any more than a wedding dress or a unity candle is theology, or any other secular fad.

Some of the attitudes described in this thread are those of secular Roman or Greek law, while others are secular or religious ideas from other places. They do not apply to general Catholic canon law or teaching

In canon law and Catholic teaching, women, like men, cease to be under their fathers" authority when they are no longer legal minors. A woman or man who lives under a father’s roof is obliged to respect his reasonable wishes until moving out; and all adult children are obliged to honor their parents in a reasonable manner. These things may not be reasonable to do if the parents are abusive.

Any person above the age of seven, or who has attained the age of reason, has the right to join the Catholic Church without parental permission and receive the various Sacraments without hindrance. Usually the Church doesn’t push this, because the Church wants to respect parental authority over minors. But if minors push this, pastors really are not allowed to stand in their way.

So if we are obliged to support the rights of seven-year-olds, I don’t see why people are shocked that we support the rights of eighteen-year-old women who are fully initiated into the Catholic Church!

If anybody is actually interested in reading, there are plenty of pre-modern texts on the obligations of adult women who are unmarried and who have careers. Father Lasance talked a fair amount about this, in reference mostly to women working in factories, or as servants, or as teachers. So did a lot of other moral teachers in the Catholic world. Their obligations did not usually involve “obeying their fathers”, and I don’t remember any concept of "spiritual authority.

OTOH, throughout Catholic history, there are plenty of female saints who snuck out of the house and immediately began disobliging their parents by joining convents. Even if their fathers kidnapped them and tried to force them to marry, it was their duty to do their best to escape the house again and find a convent with better walls. For example, one of St. Dominic’s pen pals was a young lady who had to escape her family three times, and the matter was not resolved until St. Dominic was dead and Blessed Jordan of Saxony took over. (He convinced the family to build the kid a convent within easy distance of both the Dominicans and the family home, and it worked out for everyone.)
 
Last edited:
And I don’t have Clue One what Fr. Ripperger or anybody else actually said about this, but I bet it wasn’t anything sensational.

And if it was? Anybody can be wrong. I’ve been wrong. Great scholars have been wrong. Fathers of the Church have been wrong. Theological opinions or pastoral comments are not binding. (And they certainly don’t rewrite history.)

That said, it is sad that men have been so denigrated that this kind of backlash has formed.

(And one more thing. Those Germanic tribes? A lot of them didn’t actually give the bride away. They rented her out. If a woman’s husband died or divorced her, a Frankish woman was obliged to leave her kids to the other clan, come home to her own clan, and make herself available to be married out again. Women were the knowledge base of the clan, so you didn’t want them out in another clan forever. And since divorce was really common among the Franks, your clan usually ended up with a bunch of older divorced women available to teach the young ones.)

(Of course, Frankish history was also full of disgruntled women poisoning people. And unlimited polygamy for kings and clan leaders, although you could be married with money and rights involved, or married in a way that gave you nothing after you got thrown out. A great many of the Church’s canon laws to protect the rights of married people were instituted because of shenanigans by supposedly now-Christian Frankish kings.)
 
Last edited:
Mintaka said:
And I don’t have Clue One what Fr. Ripperger or anybody else actually said about this, but I bet it wasn’t anything sensational.
Click to expand...
In a video he outright states that the father gives the bride away and all sorts of other nonsense that is completely wrong.
Mintaka said:
Anybody can be wrong.
Click to expand...
Yep. But unfortunately those determined to believe the wrong information are twisting Church teaching and promulgating the misinformation widely.
 
Lovely. Well, I’ll have to see if I can find the video. (“Someone is wrong on the Internet!”)

(And to be fair, the Frankish clans also regarded the male members of the clan as their pawns in the game of life. There were men who ran away to the monastery as well as women who ran away to the convent, and they were both subject to being kidnapped back, despite complaints and punishments by the Church or the kings. It was harder if you had your own property and founded your own monastery or convent.)

(So you can see where supporting the rights of adults, against their own parents and relatives, is just a tad bit important to Catholic canon law and teaching.)
 
Last edited:
Wrong just wrong.

There is no giving away of the daughter by the father in a Catholic wedding. This practice I’ve been told came out of Anglican tradition, not Catholic tradition.

In Catholic tradition, the bride and groom march down the aisle together and confer the sacrament of matrimony on each other with the priest officiating. For a marriage to be valid both participants are assumed to be freely entering the marriage. Any presence of coercion makes the marriage invalid.

Women are not perpetual minors who need adult permission to do anything nor are they property to be given, no matter what Father Ripperger says.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top