Does it bother anyone else the marriageable age was 12 before?

[Freddy]

Freddy:

fredystairs:

Freddy:

fredystairs:

You cannot use today’s standards to judge people’s conduct from hundreds of years ago because the situation and the worldview has changed.

So what was morally acceptable then is, relatively speaking, not acceptable now. Is that your position?

What would you say?

Pax

I’d say that you have made your position clear. I was giving you the opportunity to clarify it if you felt the need.

I was asking whether you thought if what was morally acceptable then is, relatively speaking, not acceptable now.

Pax

I’ve no problem with it. Now I’m asking you if that’s your position. Mainly because I get told by many Catholics that morals are fixed. What is right now has always been right. What was wrong in another time or in another place is always wrong whenever or wherever you are.

Quite a few comments in this thread contradict that position.

 

[Elf01]

That wasn’t the question. I want to know what someone personally thinks is ok now that wont be in years to come. If someone thought it was ok for children to be involved in war or to work in mines many years ago but it’s not acceptable now, then what’s personally acceptable now that eventually wont be?

I don’t know if you’d count it, but I think that removing a tube with an embryo in it is currently moral. In the future, I can imagine a way to save both might be discovered, and I would no longer consider removing the tube moral.

But isn’t this

Then you start swinging the lead. You don’t put in the time. Me and goout are doing the hard yards and you think - ‘Why should I bother? There’s always enough for each of us’. But goout and I feel a sense of injustice. I react selfishly and think of myself doing the work and not getting the full benefit from the group. And goout thinks the same.

your view of morality?

 

[fredystairs]

I’ve no problem with it. Now I’m asking you if that’s your position. Mainly because I get told by many Catholics that morals are fixed. What is right now has always been right. What was wrong in another time or in another place is always wrong whenever or wherever you are.

Quite a few comments in this thread contradict that position.

What I would say is that the moral position between now and say the 1700s is the same: love your children, do what’s best for them. However, the circumstances between then and now are radically different. Now, as I mentioned before, we have safety nets to help; then, there were few, or no, safety nets. So I would say that it was an act of love to have an 8 year old be apprenticed or become a cabin boy if the family could not afford to keep him. (Sorry son, but we cannot feed you and your brothers and sisters. However, Captain So and So will take you on his ship to be the cabin boy.) It is an act of love now to keep one’s children in school until the 12th grade (in the US).

Different circumstances, different ways of acting out the act of love.

Pax

 

[tuffsmurf]

Can child marriage sometimes be an act of love?

 

[Elf01]

Can child marriage sometimes be an act of love?

In societies where women needed to marry and her parents couldn’t afford to take care of her, maybe.

 

[tuffsmurf]

Those weren’t the girls who got married at 12. That was an upper class phenomenon, poor women got married much later, usually after 20.

 

[Neithan]

That is really young. It was based on the ancient Roman laws. I think the church left it as a legal allowance for betrothal. Canon laws were not understood as moral ideals.

 

[tuffsmurf]

The minimum age if betrothal was 7 (the age of reason). 12 was the lowest age for the actual marriage ceremony.

 

[chevalier]

As for me, well, 12 is pushing it, but times were different. As long as the individual is sufficiently mature so as to avoid becoming psychologically damaged by the experience, and as long as the other individual is held to appropriate standards of conduct, and the whole affair is consensual (which presupposes sufficient maturity, use of reason and awareness, etc., to give valid consent), then I’m not horribly bothered by the age being less than 21, 18, or even 16. Those age figures are not some kind of metaphysical limits, they are not magical or moral, they instead represent society’s judgement of what is the bottom limit of acceptability.

 

[chevalier]

Just because marriageable age was 12 doesn’t mean the wedding night occurred just after the wedding. People tended to wait at least until menstruation. And yes, that’s still early.

But one can’t expect the historical Church to have been an agent of rapid change, applying our perspective of 2000 years of evolution retroactively and judging the ancients or the mediaevals for not having achieved within a single generation something that took us hundreds or thousands of years to get to where we are at in 2020.

There were a lot of other issues that needed evolution, too — slavery, serfdom, children’s rights, employee rights, rights of children born out of wedlock, and so on. Can’t make the age of consent a single issue when looking back at what is basically centuries of gradual evolution of human society.

 

[Sarcelle]

There is also the “marry your rapist” law which people in the past didn’t seem to have a problem with.

There is the case of an Italian woman, Franca Viola, who was the first to defy the tradition of women marrying their rapists in spite of tremendous social pressure. She refused to marry the man who kidnapped and raped her.

Where was the Catholic Church and why didn’t it speak out against this tradition? I thought that a valid marriage required the consent of both parties.

Franca Viola - Wikipedia

 

[TheLittleLady]

Child marriage is a inaccurate term. While royalty would at times have weddings for prepubescent people, there was not a rush to marry by 16.

When people attained sexual maturity, if both canon law and local civil law permit, they may enter a valid marriage

 

[TheLittleLady]

Maybe I am strange, but, I’ve been reading socialogy and anthropology since middle school. Today, we have the public. Library at our fingertips. Our understanding of culture across the centuries is part of education. We ought not stop learning and expanding our knowledge just because we have graduated.

 

[babochka]

I thought that a valid marriage required the consent of both parties.

It does. That is why she was able to refuse to marry him. And marriage was a social convention in this case, not the law. In reality, coercion was common, of course. But in theory, marriage has always required the free consent to of both parties, even in the case of an arranged marriage.

 

[Gorgias]

But I don’t know or have ever known any girl of that age where the question of her getting married and having sex would even be entertained.

Wait – you’re saying that you think that 14-year-old (or even 12-year-old) girls aren’t thinking about sex, babies, and marriage?

And I can’t believe I actually had to type that out. If I’d started a thread suggesting that I was interested in a twelve year old and asking if sex would be ok if she consented I would rightly be howled down.

Could I use culture as a reason why it woukd be ok? Could I suggest that she was more mature than her age would indicate?

Good points. Yet, cultures in the past would’ve considered a person who had entered puberty as someone who was putatively ready for marriage. Today? Nah; you’ve got that one right – the current culturally accepted position is “they’re a minor”. I think culture is relevant measuring stick, in this context. What was acceptable 100 years ago isn’t acceptable now (and what is acceptable now is likely not to be acceptable in another 100 years).

So what was morally acceptable then is, relatively speaking, not acceptable now. Is that your position?

I would respond that the issue is “cultural acceptability” rather than “moral”.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

So what was morally acceptable then is, relatively speaking, not acceptable now. Is that your position?

I would respond that the issue is “cultural acceptability” rather than “moral”.

And I would put it that the moral position was culturally acceptable. As I said, I keep getting told that cultures may change but morals don’t.

And I keep asking this but getting no reply. If that is the case then there must be moral acts today that are culturally acceptable to any one person but which will not be in years to come. What are they?

Unless someone wants to propose that we have reached the peak of moral responsibility then what do you think we’re doing that we think is ok that we’ll eventually realise is wrong.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

I’ve no problem with it. Now I’m asking you if that’s your position. Mainly because I get told by many Catholics that morals are fixed. What is right now has always been right. What was wrong in another time or in another place is always wrong whenever or wherever you are.

Quite a few comments in this thread contradict that position.

What I would say is that the moral position between now and say the 1700s is the same: love your children, do what’s best for them. However, the circumstances between then and now are radically different. Now, as I mentioned before, we have safety nets to help; then, there were few, or no, safety nets. So I would say that it was an act of love to have an 8 year old be apprenticed or become a cabin boy if the family could not afford to keep him. (Sorry son, but we cannot feed you and your brothers and sisters. However, Captain So and So will take you on his ship to be the cabin boy.) It is an act of love now to keep one’s children in school until the 12th grade (in the US).

Different circumstances, different ways of acting out the act of love.

Pax

“Sorry dear, times are tight so no new dress for your 12th birthday. But you’ll be marrying that guy who runs the pub next week. Maybe he’ll buy you one”.

 

[ATraveller]

Puberty doesn’t correlate with intelligence/maturity as well. Your daughter would be the same girl as she was the day before she got her period.

I think the moral aspect is that only those that can consent to marriage can marry. The problem here is how that will be applied in real life i.e age. Puberty was the most obvious sign of adulthood and the end of childhood. I would guess those involved with making canon law assumed that people are fully developed mentally at that age too but arbitrarily placed at least an extra year. What we think we know about the brain and mental development has only been recent. The MRI only came into use for neurology in the 1970’s if I’m not mistaken.

 

[HomeschoolDad]

Maybe I am strange, but, I’ve been reading socialogy and anthropology since middle school. Today, we have the public. Library at our fingertips. Our understanding of culture across the centuries is part of education. We ought not stop learning and expanding our knowledge just because we have graduated.

Truer words were never spoken (at least in the realm of the secular).

I read practically every moment that I am not caring for my family or fulfilling other temporal obligations. I have learned many, many times over, more than I ever learned in college, and that with two master’s degrees. Several times a day, I give thanks to Almighty God that the Internet exists. For one thing, without it, Catholic Answers (if it existed) would be a monthly magazine with letters to the editor and an “ask the experts” column. I wouldn’t want to go back to those days.

 

[Neithan]

Just to be clear: What exactly is the moral issue? Is it always a sin/evil for a 12 year old girl to marry a 14 year old boy, for example? Or does this become a sin/evil considering some other circumstances?

Obviously this seems really inappropriate today. I just am not sure we should pass judgment that this is always something sinful for human beings in any circumstances whatsoever.