The only problem with these is the fact that marriage as being argued by the Supreme Court is not an invention of the Catholic Church. It is recognized and practiced as a sacrament in the Church, but it did not invent the institution of marriage itself. Nor was authority to preside over weddings or officiate at them a direct command from heaven or Scripture.
Marriage predates Christianity, and though recognizing the bringing of Adam and Eve together as the first “marriage,” even Judaism recognizes that the institution was a development of misogyny of ancient cultures.
*A Brief History of Marriage *from
ReformJudaism.org states:
Most scholars agree that “marriages” originally constituted a man’s “reserving” a particular woman or women as his property. This was accomplished simply by bringing a woman into his tent or cave (or palace) and having sexual relations with her. As such, it was referred to as “taking a wife.” By the time of the Bible, however, the Jewish people had already begun to invest the man/woman relationship with far more than sexual significance.
Outside of Jewish culture, marriages were a secular affair. As societies grew, secular laws and secular authorities governed and defined marriage. In contrast there are no wedding ceremonies or directives found in the Torah and no structure to this arrangement in the rest of Hebrew Scripture.
Christianity also has a set of inspired Scriptures that do not demand or authorize the Church or her ministers to officiate at a marriage.
USCatholic.org in an article entitled
What is the history of marriage? noted:
Attempting to find a role for marriage that did not conflict with their communitarian ideals, some early Christian writers suggested that marriage “has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament” because Jesus performed his first public miracle at a wedding.
But the account of the Wedding of Cana found in John chapter 2 offers no instruction on how to perform a wedding, no authorization by Jesus to engage in a ceremony or officiate at one, and no theological details that explain how matrimony has a sacramental nature.
In the first century it was the governing powers of Rome that were the authorities which demanded registration of marriage. When Rome fell, the Church being the only structure left to exercise authority began to be officiate and register the unions. It was only afterwards, in the fifth-century, that the Church declared marriage a sacrament at the Council of Florence. By then the Roman Catholic Church had become the world power over secular powers, Herself crowning kings and queens, replacing the secular Roman power that crumbled before it. While Catholicism recognizes Providence as the author of the Church becoming the “author” of the definition of matrimony, this is only because there were no other powers at the time that could claim authority over the lives of what eventually became European Christendom. But still the Church was never the inventor of the institutional arrangement itself.
As such the sacrament of Matrimony isn’t the same thing as a marriage as recognized by the state. It never has been. Marriage as practiced by Catholics is something different than marriage as recognized by states.
What would help the Church’s arguments against the current ruling on same-sex marriage is a clear and demonstrable logic to its arguments. For instance:
Instead of claiming that same-sex marriage is a tragedy and against God’s purpose, we as Catholics must demonstrate how this is so.
What is the evidence from same-sex couplings up to now?
How do they validate the Catholic position?
What is the Scriptural and Apostolic Tradition’s evidence that gives the Church its reason for its stand, current and future positions on her defining marriage?
Questions will have to be answered to prove that the Church did not merely “inherit” officiating at marriages merely due to the collapse of Western society. She will have to show how this is inarguably the decision of Heaven and that unlike situations in the past (where the Church has found itself on the wrong side of history, such as in the persecution of the Waldensians, the Spanish Inquisition, failure of some bishops to report and correct child predators, etc. and is now making public reparation for) that She is in no way ever going to be found on the wrong side of history again by taking this stand.
We as Catholics cannot fail on this. Whatever stand we take we shall either know and claim for certain that we take it with the guidance of the Holy Spirit or we will end up having to apologize again to the world for blinding ourselves, claiming we believed we were doing God’s will at the time but now know we aren’t.
I for one am tired of belonging to a Church where we and our popes are having to apologize for how wrong we were in the past for our failure to act, our persecution, our wrong views, etc. We are the Church who burned our own St. Joan of Arc at the stake. We need more than opinion this time around.
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