Marriage between Catholic and Protestant

[agick]

Hi.

I have a question related to the one asked earlier in this forum about marriage between a Catholic and Protestant and requirements.

My son, a Catholic, married a Presbyterian woman in her church. Before this marriage he told me that they planned to marry in her church which led me to tell him that they would have to attend required pre-marriage classes in his church, and fulfil other requirements such as getting a dispensation from his bishop. As part of his requirements I had my priest witness a document from my son’s diocese stating that he had never been married before, etc. My son then went through the pre-marriage classes and set the date for his marriage. Since I lived in a parish in Michigan and he lived in a parish in Indiana, I had to assume that all requirements for his marriage were satisfied.

When my son and daughter-in-law were finally married in her church which my wife and I attended, I found that there was only going to be the Protestant minister performing the marriage – there was no Catholic priest or deacon there. So my question is whether there should have been a Catholic priest or deacon as a requirement.

God bless!
TonyG

 

[Jim_Blackburn]

It sounds like your son may have received a dispensation from canonical form. Code of Canon Law (CIC) allows this under certain conditions:

“If grave difficulties hinder the observance of canonical form, the local ordinary of the Catholic party has the right of dispensing from the form in individual cases, after having consulted the ordinary of the place in which the marriage is celebrated and with some public form of celebration for validity. It is for the conference of bishops to establish norms by which the aforementioned dispensation is to be granted in a uniform manner.” (CIC 1127 §2)