Sacramental Marriage Solution to 'Gay Marriage'?

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Rau said:
I tend to think the shopkeeper is ok to supply the cake. To do so is to conduct the business he’s in, and to abide by the law. He’s not trumpeting his support for gay marriage. If two Catholics propose to marry in the garden with a civil celebrant, they also do wrong, but it is unrealistic to asert that all (catholic) service providers should refuse to deal with them.

I think we are far away from your last point, but I anticipate the various lobbies may try it on. But I think there is ample precedent to ensure they will lose.
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The question is not whether the bakers actions are sinful or not. At most he would be culpable of remote material cooperation. It’s not like he’s committing mortal sin if he chooses to provide the cake (unless he does so to make a statement in support of same-sex “marriage”)

The more important point is whether, even if the evil is remote, he should be **forced **to do so? Why should he not have the choice to limit his wedding cake business to traditionally man-woman couples? He is not providing an essential service (health care, education or security). The service could easily be provided by other bakers. Why must he be put in that position and not allowed to simply say “no, thank you”?
 
Rau said:
I tend to think the shopkeeper is ok to supply the cake. To do so is to conduct the business he’s in, and to abide by the law. He’s not trumpeting his support for gay marriage. If two Catholics propose to marry in the garden with a civil celebrant, they also do wrong, but it is unrealistic to asert that all (catholic) service providers should refuse to deal with them.

I think we are far away from your last point, but I anticipate the various lobbies may try it on. But I think there is ample precedent to ensure they will lose.
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No, baking a cake to celebrate an act that the Bible calls an abomination is voicing your support for it. It’s cooperating in the act. Two Catholics marrying with a civil celebrant is not a sin, much less called an abomination.
 
Why have the priest act as an agent of the State anymore? Why not just marry in the Catholic Church, completely forgoing the “marriage license”?

For the Sacrament, do we need to have a civil marriage at all, or just the priest/deacon and the Mass?
 
Corki said:
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The more important point is whether, even if the evil is remote, he should be **forced **to do so? Why should he not have the choice to limit his wedding cake business to traditionally man-woman couples? He is not providing an essential service (health care, education or security). The service could easily be provided by other bakers. Why must he be put in that position and not allowed to simply say “no, thank you”?
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Yes, I agree that’s the key question. And I guess this is the price of being a part of a broad society, which itself is governed by rules, in this case controlling the actions of businesses.
 
holyrood said:
No, baking a cake to celebrate an act that the Bible calls an abomination is voicing your support for it. It’s cooperating in the act. Two Catholics marrying with a civil celebrant is not a sin, much less called an abomination.
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Yes, the act of a civil ceremony is not itself wrong, but Catholics wishing to live as a married couple need to be married in the church, prior to consummating their marriage.
 
bsroufek said:
Why have the priest act as an agent of the State anymore? Why not just marry in the Catholic Church, completely forgoing the “marriage license”?

For the Sacrament, do we need to have a civil marriage at all, or just the priest/deacon and the Mass?
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Well, it’s generally necessary for the State to register marriages, for good reasons. Eg. To facilitate government benefits and to guard against a person married seeking to marry another. The sacrament doesn’t require the civil act, nor a Mass actually. It is efficient for the priest to fill the civil role (effectively signing papers).
 
bsroufek said:
Why have the priest act as an agent of the State anymore? Why not just marry in the Catholic Church, completely forgoing the “marriage license”?

For the Sacrament, do we need to have a civil marriage at all, or just the priest/deacon and the Mass?
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The Catholic Church has a mission to pray for all people to enter Heaven, even non-Catholics. Marriage is a natural good that is spiritually beneficial to all peoples. To abandon civil marriage is to abandon the very mission of the Church.
 
runningdude said:
To abandon civil marriage is to abandon the very mission of the Church.
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  1. Yet, owing to the efforts of the archenemy of mankind, there are persons who, thanklessly casting away so many other blessings of redemption, despise also or utterly ignore the restoration of marriage to its original perfection…
  2. Now, since the family and human society at large spring from marriage, these men will on no account allow matrimony to be the subject of the jurisdiction of the Church. Nay, they endeavor to deprive it of all holiness, and so bring it within the contracted sphere of those rights which, having been instituted by man, are ruled and administered by the civil jurisprudence of the community. **Wherefore it necessarily follows that they attribute all power over marriage to civil rulers, and allow none whatever to the Church; and, when the Church exercises any such power, they think that she acts either by favor of the civil authority or to its injury. **Now is the time, they say, for the heads of the State to vindicate their rights unflinchingly, and to do their best to settle all that relates to marriage according as to them seems good.
  3. 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. Yet, under these, for so many centuries, have the nations lived on whom the light of civilization shone bright with the wisdom of Christ Jesus.
  4. Nevertheless, the naturalists,[32] 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. Marriage has God for its Author, and was from the very beginning a kind of foreshadowing of the Incarnation of His Son; and therefore there abides in it a something holy and religious; not extraneous, but innate; not derived from men, but implanted by nature…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.
  5. Next, the dignity of the sacrament must be considered, for through addition of the sacrament the marriages of Christians have become far the noblest of all matrimonial unions. But to decree and ordain concerning the sacrament is, by the will of Christ Himself, so much a part of the power and duty of the Church that it is plainly absurd to maintain that even the very smallest fraction of such power has been transferred to the civil ruler.
  6. Lastly should be borne in mind the great weight and crucial test of history, by which it is plainly proved that the legislative and judicial authority of which We are speaking has been freely and constantly used by the Church, even in times when some foolishly suppose the head of the State either to have consented to it or connived at it…
Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum (On Christian Marriage), 1880
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It seems that, per Leo XIII, marriage is something that was usurped by the State. Rather than condoning civil marriage as you suggest, he opposed it. Very vociferously, I might add.

Pope Pius XI concurred with his venerable predecessor’s statements:
  1. We have so far, Venerable Brethren, shown the excellency of the first two blessings of Christian wedlock which the modern subverters of society are attacking. And now considering that the third blessing, which is that of the sacrament, far surpasses the other two, we should not be surprised to find that this, because of its outstanding excellence, is much more sharply attacked by the same people. They put forward in the first place that matrimony belongs entirely to the profane and purely civil sphere, that it is not to be committed to the religious society, the Church of Christ, but to civil society alone…
 
markomalley said:
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Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum (On Christian Marriage), 1880
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It seems that, per Leo XIII, marriage is something that was usurped by the State. Rather than condoning civil marriage as you suggest, he opposed it. Very vociferously, I might add.

Pope Pius XI concurred with his venerable predecessor’s statements:

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You can find a statement from nearly any era that superficially supports the cause du jour. However, these statements don’t necessarily apply to today’s circumstances; they addressed specific grievances in specific times and locations.

These statements certainly don’t support the notion that the church should stand by idly while the state condones false marriages.
 
runningdude said:
You can find a statement from nearly any era that superficially supports the cause du jour. However, these statements don’t necessarily apply to today’s circumstances; they addressed specific grievances in specific times and locations.

These statements certainly don’t support the notion that the church should stand by idly while the state condones false marriages.
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No, the issues that he was addressing were primarily divorce and the beginnings of eugenics.

The reason I quoted Pius XI (50 years later) was to show that it wasn’t something that was specific to the issue.

The fact of the matter is that marriage has always been the exclusive province of the Church. That is, up until Henry VIII…but even then, actions were done by the (lower case) church.

Even so, it was not until the Enlightenment that the idea of purely “civil” marriage came through…and then, outside of France, the idea didn’t start to take hold until the last part of the 19th Century.

Your thesis, To abandon civil marriage is to abandon the very mission of the Church, just does not hold up to any type of serious scrutiny.

Having said that, the genie is out of the bottle. Stuffing that genie back in the bottle where it belongs is not a simplistic task.
 
markomalley said:
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Your thesis, To abandon civil marriage is to abandon the very mission of the Church, just does not hold up to any type of serious scrutiny.
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My ‘thesis’ is that the church to should work to ensure that civil marriages are valid marriages.
 
runningdude said:
My ‘thesis’ is that the church to should work to ensure that civil marriages are valid marriages.
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Some people don’t know that the priest at a Church wedding acts as both an agent of the State and the Church. That’s right. He won’t marry just anybody. You have to provide a marriage license and be prepared for the Sacrament.

Peace,
Ed
 
runningdude said:
My ‘thesis’ is that the church to should work to ensure that civil marriages are valid marriages.
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I can (almost) agree with the above (that’s not what you said in earlier, but perhaps that’s what you actually meant). How I would put it:

Catholics should work to ensure that civil marriages are valid marriages.
  • That means to protect the institution against the perversion of the homosexual simulation of a natural marriage
  • That also means to roll back the ability to execute invalid “heterosexual” natural marriages that the State has allowed. (For example, divorce/remarriage)
The Second Vatican Council has declared these are areas that are the proper function of the laity.

Sadly, the majority of the laity (including an excessive number who are in the pews most weeks) are so poorly or so defectively catechized, that the Church will have a hard time catechizing them so that they will be energized to move out.
 
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