I was wondering if anyone here might be able to point me in the direction of information regarding marital relations between two baptized Catholics who have had an invalid marriage. I am specifically seeking info/ advice on how to view this when one spouse is returning to the church and the other refuses to have the marriage con validated. I am in this situation right now, desperately wanting to return to the church. Dh refuses…will have nothing to do with it and strongly opposes me returning. The priest I have been talking with says that radical sanation is not an option. I have been doing everything that I can to bring about his conversion…any advice on that would be appreciated as well…prayers, novenas, etc… I would like to know how to view this in the meantime. I am so torn between wanting to give myself fully to him as God intends within the sacrament of Marriage, but every time I consent to this I feel that I am offending God committing mortal sin and separating myself from God. If I withhold myself from my husband, it brings strife to family life, it effects our son negatively…I fear that It will have the opposite effect on DH as far as conversion. Any info on recourses I could look into would great. Thank you.
Two baptized Christians cannot have a merely natural marriage; they can only have the true Sacrament of Marriage. Otherwise, they are not married in the eyes of God and His Church at all.
"And since the valid matrimonial consent among the faithful was constituted by Christ as a sign of grace, the sacramental nature is so intimately bound up with Christian wedlock that there can be no true marriage between baptized persons “without it being by that very fact a sacrament.” " Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, n. 39.
If it is the case that you and your ‘DH’ are both baptized and also not validly married in the Sacrament of Marriage, then you are not truly married.** In that case**, any sexual relations that you have would be sex outside of marriage and therefore gravely immoral. You should check with your parish priest and with the diocese **to be certain **of the validity or invalidity of your marriage. But if you are not validly married, you may stay in the same household for the sake of the children but refrain from all sexual relations, or you may marry in the Church and then have marital relations, or you may separate.
Sexual relations outside of marriage is intrinsically evil and so it is never justified by a good intention, nor by a dire circumstance.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church: “It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that good may result from it.” (CCC, n. 1756.)
