The Church would not ask us to illicitly cooperate with evil. Marriage licenses, as used in our society, certainly do not violate any moral law and the Church cooperates with the state.
Please show us where the Church holds the state should not be involved in marriage as you claim.
Thank you for your response.
I am not sure if you read my posts in their entirety, because nothing you quoted from Rome contradicts what I said. I said I felt that government only has the power to recognize marriage as it already exists, and to confer the legal rights it has due to any other contract arrangement, nothing more.
This is not the current system. The government defines marriage in a license and then decides if you fit their definition to get married. This is not a power they rightfully have. Only the Church (by extension, any private institution) can decide if you are fit for marriage. Read from the quote you put here:
"Because married couples ensure the succession of generations and are therefore eminently within the public interest, civil law grants them
institutional recognition. "
Not the same as regulation, definition, or permission. Government, as the document points out, cannot define what does not exist, that is, homosexual marriage. I cannot make what never was. Equally, it cannot give permission or regulate an act over which it has no such power. The fact that this definition currently coincides more or less with the Church’s is by coincedence, not intent. This is Pope Leo XIII’s point.
I quote Arcanum :
“Hence are owing civil marriages, commonly so called; 'hence laws are framed which impose impediments to marriage;
hence arise judicial sentences affecting the marriage contract, as to whether or not it have been rightly made. Lastly, all power of prescribing and passing judgment in this class of cases is, as we see, of set purpose denied to the Catholic Church, so that no regard is paid either to her divine power or to her prudent laws…Nevertheless, the naturalists, as well as all who profess that they worship above all things the divinity of the State, and strive to disturb whole communities with such wicked doctrines, cannot escape the charge of delusion.”
Again, I quote:
“The scope of the civil law is certainly more limited than that of the moral law, but civil law cannot contradict right reason without losing its binding force on conscience. Every humanly-created law is legitimate insofar as it is consistent with the natural moral law…”
Again, in line with Pope Leo in Arcanum, the State can only recognize what the moral law already recognizes, and nothing more. More than this and the State is playing God, and we know where that gets us! I am not reading anything more into Church teaching than what is there in plain words, and the State should not either.
Arcanum again:
“As, then, marriage is holy by its own power, in its own nature, and of itself,
it ought not to be regulated and administered by the will of civil rulers, but by the divine authority of the Church, which alone in sacred matters professes the office of teaching.”
Seems pretty straightforward to me!
Hope this helps!
