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

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Because our high-tech society requires a great deal more education in order to be able to earn a decent living. Not so when you could become your father’s apprentice at 7. Even so, while most people in our society legally become adults when they turn 18, there are a few alternate conditions that allow you to be considered an adult at a younger age: 1. Getting married, 2. Joining the military (currently have to be 17 with parental consent, but this wasn’t always the case), 3. Being declared emancipated by a court after petitioning the court to do so.
 
Not every foolish decision is sinful. Making a poor decision about marrying someone can cause decades of misery, but it’s not in itself sinful. Just as there are people who remain chaste after divorce, there are also couples who got married when they shouldn’t have, but they still remain faithful to their vows.
 
Pedophilia does violate the natural law. However, having gone through puberty, the person is no longer a child, biologically speaking. Obviously, puberty is not sufficient to establish marriageability, as some children begin puberty as early as 5, but there is nothing in natural law that condemns the marriage of an adolescent.
 
As an answer to your question on morals not changing, I think the idea that you shouldn’t marry/have sex with children hasn’t changed, rather the range of childhood has. It would have been sinful to have sex with a girl younger than 12 because she would still have been labeled a child, but after reaching 12 or having reached menarche she would be seen as an adult. Now, with better scientific advancement, we see that a 12 year old is still a child and the idea still sticks that having relations with a child is sinful.
 
My intention as the op was more along the lines of a very much older person (say 22) marrying a 12 year old, not a 14 year old marrying one
 
Freddy said:
We aren’t talking about the church. We’re talking about the Vatican State. Where the legally defined age was 12. And is now 14.
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This thread is too enormous for me to follow everything on my phone, but just wanted to chime in that this isn’t just a ‘Vatican State’ thing. In my country (Canada, famously progressive) the legal age for marriage until just five years ago was 12 for females, 14 for males. (As of 2015 it’s 16 for both, but that’s only a technicality; in real life each province/territory has additional laws so it’s either 18 or 19 depending on where you live).

By the way, to this day, the age of sexual consent in Canada is still 12, if they’re consenting to sex with someone of a similar age. It’s only the marital commitment that Canada requires you to be 18/19 for. See the below, copy/pasted from Canada’s Department of Justice webpage, last updated 2017-08-08:

Close in age exceptions​

A 14 or 15 year old can consent to sexual activity as long as the partner is less than five years older and there is no relationship of trust, authority or dependency or any other exploitation of the young person. This means that if the partner is 5 years or older than the 14 or 15 year old, any sexual activity is a criminal offence.

There is also a “close in age” exception for 12 and 13 year olds. A 12 or 13 year old can consent to sexual activity with a partner as long as the partner is less than two years older and there is no relationship of trust, authority or dependency or any other exploitation of the young person. This means that if the partner is 2 years or older than the 12 or 13 year old, any sexual activity is a criminal offence.
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You’ll note that in effect, this means in Canada today, it is legal for a 12 and 14 year old (well, 13.999 year old) to have sex with each other. So long as it’s fornication instead of marriage. The federal government of Canada is essentially declaring a 12 year old capable of consenting to the physical, emotional, and social elements of sexual intercourse, pregnancy and childbearing, even if it declares that same 12 year old incapable of consenting to marry the father of her child.

Food for thought?

(Edit: I realize that pregnancy may seem unlikely if the father must be within two years of the mother’s age. But there are human fathers on record as young as 9. So the Canadian law permits circumstances to unfold that may result in a pregnancy (even if it’s expected that this may be rare), which is a huge responsibility and commitment for a government to publicly declare itself to believe 12 year olds capable of. But it seems to.)
 
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Avermaria said:
As an answer to your question on morals not changing, I think the idea that you shouldn’t marry/have sex with children hasn’t changed, rather the range of childhood has.
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A fair point. I doubt if my father would have had the same ‘teenage’ years as I did. Certainly as mine were late 60’s. He would have gone from being a child to an adult in no time at all.
 
You’re right. Our findings were fairly recent. I would have expected God to have revealed something, instead of letting us slowly find out that children are children, but they were just forced into unpleasant circumstances. But then again the same can be said for any other marginalised group throughout.
 
It was within my lifetime that I remember knowing people who were married with children before they were 18.
For example, Loretta Lynn got married when she was 13 and she has remained married to the same man for all of her life.
 
Freddy said:
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.
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I hold to the notion that there’s an objective (God-given) morality. So, yeah – cultures, not morals. But, let’s delve into that a little bit more. If a person does something immoral, then we call him immoral, and not assert that his action was moral, right? So, if you go out on the weekends and shoot people dead, would we assert that it’s moral to murder? Of course not; we’d point to the person and assess his actions.

Same thing here: culturally, it was acceptable. That doesn’t mean that it’s moral. It’s just that, at that time, they looked at it and didn’t flinch.
Freddy said:
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?
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You don’t? It’s an easy question (even though it calls for speculation!). We can look within the past 100 years for an easy example: smoking! Far less acceptable today than in the past century, and likely to become more and more unacceptable in the future. We’re already seeing folks assert the immorality of subjecting others to second-hand smoke.

Yeah… I hope you don’t have rosy dreams of your descendants looking through genealogical documents and waxing poetic about you: chances are, we’ll be perceived as immoral, evil louts!
 
The Judeo Christian tradition has been that sex outside marriage is a sin.

Also, for a marriage to be valid, the person needs to be capable to give their “yes” to marriage and sex, and to give their “yes” to this particular Union.

But here’s the thing and nobody has answered it—is there a one size fits all minimum age for this, across every time and culture?
 
Wow it’s bizarre to think that now most marry in 30s and 40s and in olden says that would seem very “old”
 
Our current law on underage sex has an exemption for consenting teenagers of the same age. While I do not agree with it, I cannot see allowing sex between two teenagers to be legal, but not marriage. Until we make underage sex illegal, we still live with some form of hypocrisy on what these teenagers have the right to do. Perhaps 200 years from now the enlightened elite will look at us and cluck their tongues are our tolerance of underage sex.
 
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With regards to natural law, the minimum age of marriage is at puberty.
 
Gorgias said:
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Freddy:
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.
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I hold to the notion that there’s an objective (God-given) morality. So, yeah – cultures, not morals. But, let’s delve into that a little bit more. If a person does something immoral, then we call him immoral, and not assert that his action was moral, right? So, if you go out on the weekends and shoot people dead, would we assert that it’s moral to murder? Of course not; we’d point to the person and assess his actions.

Same thing here: culturally, it was acceptable. That doesn’t mean that it’s moral. It’s just that, at that time, they looked at it and didn’t flinch.
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Well, yeah. That’s the point I was making. Something was immoral and yet wasn’t perceived to be at that time and in that culture. So if the church used to say that 12 was ok, we can excuse them because it was a different time back then. But if you think it’s wrong now then you must agree that they were wrong then.

And smoking is a good example - or at least would be if you saw nothing wrong with it now but thought it might be looked upon as wrong in the future. Although in the current situation we are all being asked to consider what actually is acceptable and what isn’t as regards race. And we get to decide if something like Gone With The Wind is simply an accurate potrayal of antebellum society or a film that perpetuates stereotypes.
 
As recently as the 1980s, high schools had tech school options. When we got rid of them, we did set people up.for poverty. Used to be you could have learned a good trade along with that high school diploma.

This meant walking into the real world with the ability to earn a grown up living.

Sadly, our society decided to eliminate this sector. Now, the same student debt prison steps in if you go to welding school or to pre med. Shameful that we made a world like this
 
Especially if you have a daughter that started puberty at age nine.

Imagine walking her down the aisle to get married.
 
Even so, those graduating from those trade programs were 18, not 14. Even blue-collar trades require substantially more education today than in centuries past.
 
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