Regardless of wether a married person is infertile faulty eggs/sperm ] or impotent
cant perform the conjugal act ], it is still a valid marriage. Peter was married, did he have children? or did he like many from the period take a vow of celibacy despite being married?
You don’t get to just re-define what marriage is because you like your idea of what its nature is better than what its nature has always been. There is a reason that they say that when a married couple has had sexual intercourse that the marriage has been “consummated”. Since Peter was married, be very sure that he consummated his marriage if either he or his wife wanted that–which we would not assume they did not–because consummation was required under Jewish law, too. No consummation, and the parties were not bound to honor the other aspects of their consent.
It is telling, BTW, that the English Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, a refusal or inability to consummate a marriage can be grounds for the marriage to be voided, and yet The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill introduced into the UK parliament in 2013 specifically excluded non-consummation as a ground for the annulment of a same-sex marriage. It is also telling that the importance of the ability to consummate has been denigrated. It is because people want to divorce openness to procreation from the nature of what spouses can expect from the marriage contract!
Now note:
***Can. 1061 §1. **A valid marriage between the baptized is called ratum tantum if it has not been consummated; it is called ratum et consummatum if the spouses have performed between themselves in a human fashion a conjugal act which is suitable in itself for the procreation of offspring, to which marriage is ordered by its nature and by which the spouses become one flesh.
§2. After a marriage has been celebrated, if the spouses have lived together consummation is presumed until the contrary is proven.
§3. An invalid marriage is called putative if at least one party celebrated it in good faith, until both parties become certain of its nullity.*
No one comes to a married couple and asks if they’ve consummated their marriage. There isn’t a time clock running. This isn’t an invasive law. It is a law that guarantees that each spouse will realize in their relationship with each other the full nature of marriage. You can’t marry someone and then deny later that your promise to “love” had nothing to do with intercourse. You may think that is a marriage, but it is the right of someone else to say, “No, marriage requires consummation, and if my spouse give ‘consent’ but then can’t consummate, I have grounds to say that our contract has not been ratified.”
Do you want to have it both ways–that is, that if someone wants consummation to be necessary, it is necessary and if they don’t want that, it isn’t necessary–or do you think that spouses should have no right to expect their partner to consent freely to engage in sex open to procreation? Since the spouses do not have to testify to anyone that their marriage has been consummated, we are about as close to that as honesty allows–that is, if *neither spouse *wants to insist on their right to consummation, no one is coming around and checking. I don’t see a way around this…that is, either consummation is in the nature of marriage, as the Church says it is and as at least Western society has long held that it is, and therefore it is within the rights of the spouses to expect a willingness and ability in their spouse to consummate, or else it is not a right, and if your spouse never could (or never would) have sex with you in the natural human fashion, oh well, too bad for you.
Are you saying that without sex marriage is no different than any other relationship? I would strongly disagree.