What actually makes a marriage invalid? [CNA]

[Tomdstone]

By the way, I am not picking on you. In fact I appreciate your comments, very much.

Thank you.
With reference to literal and non-literal, I think that we all know that Catholics take some passages in the Bible literally (e.g., the words of Consecration) and other passages not so much (e.g. Call no man father). A non-believer may suggest that this seems to him to be inconsistent and somewhat arbitrary.
Can cohabitation be a real marriage? I suppose so if the couple were alone on an isolated island somewhere and there were no priests or civil authorities around. However, as a blanket statement, such a belief is worrisome because young couples may use it as justification for their living together without being married.

 

[graciew]

So is the bible going to be updated? If what you say is so then, don’t we need more clarity from the “Word of God”. I read the bible and I clearly see fornication as a grave sin.

Fornication is listed among murderers and thieves. Are we to assume that they are filled with grace even though they murder innocent people? What happened to the ten commandments - Are they being updated too?

Did you read the post?
What does not have to be related to a wedding is God s presence in our lives.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

Whether I read the terms of the agreement or not, I am still bound by them. I can’t go back later and claim that I wasn’t bound because I didn’t read the agreement. My signature is binding on a contract. It doesn’t matter what I understood or didn’t understand, I assented to it.

And ceremonies don’t make bread into flesh.

By the same logic it is foolish to think that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist at the words of institution. It is foolish to assume the gift of the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of baptism and confirmation. It is foolish to assume the forgiveness of your sins when the priest pronounces the words and gives you your penance. The sacraments are all foolish, because we can’t trust in the words that the Church considered binding only a decade ago. It used to be believed that when the priest spoke the words ‘this is my body’ it was actually a true statement in the person of Christ. It is the body of Christ. It was also believed that when the two people getting married spoke their vows before witnesses it was transformative act. The words actually had meaning and consequences. Now both the words of the couple, and the testimony of the witnesses is meaningless. In addition, we can no longer trust that God will act and give the grace of the sacrament.

All the sacraments are now in doubt because they no longer depend on the power of God, but on the will of man. You might as well assert that the Eucharist isn’t valid if the priest is a sinner or his mind isn’t fully involved in the act of the mass. It was once dogma that the Eucharist was truly the body of Christ even if the priest was a heretic who denied the presence of Christ in the Eucharist because it isn’t the power of man that brings about the sacraments, but the power of God. That seems to no longer be the case.

That is a distinction without any meaning anymore. You can call it what you want, but either way you have declared a mans word and his vows to be meaningless.

Not only did he destroy indissolubility, he also destroyed the sacramentality of marriage. There is no longer any divine grace or action in it.

If you mean what you say about the operation of Sacraments, esp marriage, then that would be superstition. Depending on the particular Sacrament human intention is always involved for efficacy. Sure, exactly who’s intention and the sort of intention varies with each sacrament, but it is always essential. Conditions obviously affect efficacy of some results also. It is not wholly a work of God that is required for efficacy. Nor are the graces and results the same.

When you are truly ready to discuss the readily identifiable ambiguities in the things you mention perhaps we can have a rational discussion .

At the moment you seem to be venting in a somewhat black and white manner.

Perhaps you are at the first stage of grieving (over lost childhood absolutes of certainty re the Sacraments) … denial and anger?

 

[JimG]

let me just say that I believe that the great majority of Christian marriages are valid, that a matrimonial contract was therefore effected between the parties at the time of their wedding, and that by the will of Christ an indissoluble sacramental bond simultaneously arose between those spouses. To be clear, I also hold that many marriages are (and could be proven to be) canonically null and that the percentage of null marriages has indeed risen over recent decades, but I can and do reject anyone’s claim that the majority, let alone “the great majority”, of Christian marriages are null.

–Edward Peters (Source)

 

[PRmerger]

Thank you.
With reference to literal and non-literal, I think that we all know that Catholics take some passages in the Bible literally (e.g., the words of Consecration) and other passages not so much (e.g. Call no man father). A non-believer may suggest that this seems to him to be inconsistent and somewhat arbitrary.

If this nonbeliever said this, it would be because he has a rather impoverished understanding of how Catholicism interprets the Word of God.

We read and interpret it through the lens of Sacred Tradition.

 

[Mongo]

If you mean what you say about the operation of Sacraments, esp marriage, then that would be superstition. Depending on the particular Sacrament human intention is always involved for efficacy. Sure, exactly who’s intention and the sort of intention varies with each sacrament, but it is always essential. Conditions obviously affect efficacy of some results also. It is not wholly a work of God that is required for efficacy. Nor are the graces and results the same.

When you are truly ready to discuss the readily identifiable ambiguities in the things you mention perhaps we can have a rational discussion .

At the moment you seem to be venting in a somewhat black and white manner.

Perhaps you are at the first stage of grieving (over lost childhood absolutes of certainty re the Sacraments) … denial and anger?

Apparently you aren’t ready for a rational discussion yourself. I accept the tradition of the Church, apparently you don’t. It is good that we are clear on the fact that the sacraments are just superstitions.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

Apparently you aren’t ready for a rational discussion yourself. I accept the tradition of the Church, apparently you don’t. It is good that we are clear on the fact that the sacraments are just superstitions.

Mongo the question is whether your somewhat black and white, idiosyncratic lay interpretation of Sacramental Theology is able to be rationally discussed.

As you seem to be merely venting here I think not.
So I am not even sure of your reason for making a contribution on the forum.

If you are venting rather than wanting to check your views with well intentioned others why not just go outside and shout or punch a few water melons rather than punching Pope Francis on a public Catholic forum .

 

[Vico]

And this part from the same Q&A session. Pope speaking, emphases mine: "In Argentina’s northeast countryside, couples have a child and live together. They have a civil wedding when the child goes to school, and when they become grandparents they ‘get married religiously.’

“It’s a superstition, because marriage frightens the husband. It’s a superstition we have to overcome. I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity."

Prior to that was: “Pope Francis attributed the marriage crisis to people who “don’t know what the sacrament is” and don’t know “the beauty of the sacrament.””

This shows that he was speaking of ignorance, and this is an important consideration, for when it is invincible it removes culpability for mortal sin.

 

[Justin_Swanton]

Prior to that was: “Pope Francis attributed the marriage crisis to people who “don’t know what the sacrament is” and don’t know “the beauty of the sacrament.””

This shows that he was speaking of ignorance, and this is an important consideration, for when it is invincible it removes culpability for mortal sin.

More exactly, he was referring to Catholics who ***do ***get married in church, but the great majority of whom he assumed contract invalid marriages since they don’t understand that Catholic marriage is permanent. This assumption by itself raises huge problems.

It is not the same as those Argentinian countryfolk, who don’t get married in church precisely because they know marriage is permanent and - the men at least - don’t want to undertake that kind of commitment until they are old enough for it no longer to be an issue.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

More exactly, he was referring to Catholics who ***do ***get married in church, but the great majority of whom he assumed contract invalid marriages since they don’t understand that Catholic marriage is permanent. This assumption by itself raises huge problems.

Christians are encouraged by St Paul to be “slow to anger” and by Aquinas to put the best possible interpretation one the arguments of ones opponent.

These are wise words and so surely faithful Catholics would want to respect their own Pope in just this way so long as there is room for ambiguity.

In that light I suggest that what the Pope means above is that today, should many young couples seek an Annulment, there is a high chance they would get one.

There is nothing extraordinary in this observation. I was at a Seminary University in the 1980s and this observation was commonly made in private by my professors - including the one who gave my Canon Law paper. It is also a common pastoral lament of the many now priest friends I made in those days. Nothing new here in fact.

Being a cradle, conveyer-belt Catholic with all the official boxes ticked (baptism, confirmation, marriage etc) does not by itself guarantee our values are more religious than secular. Many “Catholics” are so only by cultural inheritance not by personal choice. Just as an oil tanker continues to move for another 15km after the engines have in fact died.

There are huge problems with the way we prepare and allow entry to Catholic marriages.
So I do not believe this observation is a huge assumption.

Pope Francis is just telling it as it is, the Emporer is indeed wearing no clothes.
And many experienced pastoral priests have been quietly and privately observing this for years.

 

[Don_Ruggero]

Christians are encouraged by St Paul to be “slow to anger” and by Aquinas to put the best possible interpretation one the arguments of ones opponent.

These are wise words and so surely faithful Catholics would want to respect their own Pope in just this way so long as there is room for ambiguity.

In that light I suggest that what the Pope means above is that today, should many young couples seek an Annulment, there is a high chance they would get one.

There is nothing extraordinary in this observation. I was at a Seminary University in the 1980s and this observation was commonly made in private by my professors - including the one who gave my Canon Law paper. It is also a common pastoral lament of the many now priest friends I made in those days. Nothing new here in fact.

Being a cradle, conveyer-belt Catholic with all the official boxes ticked (baptism, confirmation, marriage etc) does not by itself guarantee our values are more religious than secular. Many “Catholics” are so only by cultural inheritance not by personal choice. Just as an oil tanker continues to move for another 15km after the engines have in fact died.

There are huge problems with the way we prepare and allow entry to Catholic marriages.
So I do not believe this observation is a huge assumption.

Pope Francis is just telling it as it is, the Emporer is indeed wearing no clothes.
And many experienced pastoral priests have been quietly and privately observing this for years.

You have said it quite well.

For me, Pope Francis is a great gift to the Church, given the stage of life I am in. After all these years of being a priest, and now reaching the age of retiring, it is as if a bishop who had not spent his life immersed in the administrative side of being a bishop but one who was very immersed in pastoral life with the marginalised has been elected pope, with all the awareness that a pastor of long standing has…relative to the high number of marriages that are, in fact, not valid as well as the awareness, which he articulates, that we pastorally see God’s grace at work outside the lines and in places where we would not always expect to see it from the vantage point of where text books say we should properly find it. That insight has been a great driver of the ecumenical movement for many decades until now.

 

[Vico]

More exactly, he was referring to Catholics who ***do ***get married in church, but the great majority of whom he assumed contract invalid marriages since they don’t understand that Catholic marriage is permanent. This assumption by itself raises huge problems.

It is not the same as those Argentinian countryfolk, who don’t get married in church precisely because they know marriage is permanent and - the men at least - don’t want to undertake that kind of commitment until they are old enough for it no longer to be an issue.

I was thinking of:

“They prefer to cohabitate, and this is a challenge, a task. Not to ask ‘why don’t you marry?’ No, to accompany, to wait, and to help them to mature, help fidelity to mature.”

He said that in Argentina’s northeast countryside, couples have a child and live together. They have a civil wedding when the child goes to school, and when they become grandparents they “get married religiously.”

 

[Justin_Swanton]

Christians are encouraged by St Paul to be “slow to anger” and by Aquinas to put the best possible interpretation one the arguments of ones opponent.

These are wise words and so surely faithful Catholics would want to respect their own Pope in just this way so long as there is room for ambiguity.

Let me be clear: I am not angry and I do not disrespect the Pope. If one can give the benefit of the doubt one must do so, especially in the case of Pope Francis, however the point has been reached when affirmations are being made that are not ambiguous and simply do not square up with what we accept as sound Catholic teaching.

In that light I suggest that what the Pope means above is that today, should many young couples seek an Annulment, there is a high chance they would get one.

There is nothing extraordinary in this observation. I was at a Seminary University in the 1980s and this observation was commonly made in private by my professors - including the one who gave my Canon Law paper. It is also a common pastoral lament of the many now priest friends I made in those days. Nothing new here in fact.

Being a cradle, conveyer-belt Catholic with all the official boxes ticked (baptism, confirmation, marriage etc) does not by itself guarantee our values are more religious than secular. Many “Catholics” are so only by cultural inheritance not by personal choice. Just as an oil tanker continues to move for another 15km after the engines have in fact died.

There are huge problems with the way we prepare and allow entry to Catholic marriages.
So I do not believe this observation is a huge assumption.

Pope Francis is just telling it as it is, the Emporer is indeed wearing no clothes.
And many experienced pastoral priests have been quietly and privately observing this for years.

If the percentage of annulment applications that are granted is a reliable indication of the percentage of all Catholic marriages that are valid (remembering that only a minority of married Catholics ever seek an annulment), then the contemporary Catholic priesthood has utterly failed in its primary duty of inculcating a Catholic outlook in its flock, or ensuring that Catholics who marry have some idea of what they are doing. Is it really that bad?

 

[PRmerger]

then the contemporary Catholic priesthood has utterly failed in its primary duty of inculcating a Catholic outlook in its flock, or ensuring that Catholics who marry have some idea of what they are doing. Is it really that bad?

Well, let’s set aside the fact that it’s arguable whether this is the “primary duty” of priests, but I am astonished that this is even a question.

Yes, it’s really “that bad”.

Catholics today have an abysmal inculcation of the faith.

Most do not believe in the Real Presence.
Most believe in the morality artificial contraception.
Most engage in pre-marital sex.

So there is no question that, yes, it really is “that bad”.

 

[dans0622]

In my own experience, I very seldom see people who claim that they did not know that marriage involves a commitment to permanence…less than 1%, in my estimation.

Dan

 

[Maximilan_Kolbe]

More exactly, he was referring to Catholics who ***do ***get married in church, but the great majority of whom he assumed contract invalid marriages since they don’t understand that Catholic marriage is permanent. This assumption by itself raises huge problems.

It is not the same as those Argentinian countryfolk, who don’t get married in church precisely because they know marriage is permanent and - the men at least - don’t want to undertake that kind of commitment until they are old enough for it no longer to be an issue.

Exactly. He cites examples of country folk in his home country of Argentina, but the examples cited show people who understand marriage quite well, which is why they avoid it. That’s the part of his example I didn’t get.

 

[Vico]

And this part from the same Q&A session. Pope speaking, emphases mine: "In Argentina’s northeast countryside, couples have a child and live together. They have a civil wedding when the child goes to school, and when they become grandparents they ‘get married religiously.’

“It’s a superstition, because marriage frightens the husband. It’s a superstition we have to overcome. I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity."

These people are not in a sacramental marriage but a free union so they are not able to be admitted to the sacraments (except for confession). Grace received in natural marriage is actual grace not sanctifying grace, an also with sacramental marriage, when not properly disposed, there is actual grace not sanctifying grace.

 

[JimG]

Exactly. He cites examples of country folk in his home country of Argentina, but the examples cited show people who understand marriage quite well, which is why they avoid it. That’s the part of his example I didn’t get.

It sounds to me like these folks understand marriage quite well, and opt not to enter it. Not only that, one need not be a sacramental theologian to understand marriage. Ordinary people understand marriage and have been entering into it for thousands of years. Is our own age the apex of ignorance? I doubt it. The wedding vows are easy enough to understand. One doesn’t have to be a theologian to enter marriage any more than one has to be a lawyer to enter into a mortgage contract. Not only that, but ignorance does not necessarily make a marriage invalid. That is for a tribunal to decide. The danger of such a sweeping comment is that it may cause people to doubt the validity of their marriages for no good reason.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

You have said it quite well.

For me, Pope Francis is a great gift to the Church, given the stage of life I am in. After all these years of being a priest, and now reaching the age of retiring, it is as if a bishop who had not spent his life immersed in the administrative side of being a bishop but one who was very immersed in pastoral life with the marginalised has been elected pope, with all the awareness that a pastor of long standing has…relative to the high number of marriages that are, in fact, not valid as well as the awareness, which he articulates, that we pastorally see God’s grace at work outside the lines and in places where we would not always expect to see it from the vantage point of where text books say we should properly find it. That insight has been a great driver of the ecumenical movement for many decades until now.

DG thankyou for sharing your long pastoral experience and mature age observations.
It accords well with the experience and theological conclusions of my peer priest friends (Dominicans), some more scholarly, some more pastoral in background. I am in my late 50s.

My own lay pastoral experience has included Marriage Preparation of Catholic couples since the 1980s. We all know that significant numbers of young couples (and some older ones) are simply not mature enough to validly appreciate and take on the duties of a Catholic marriage at the time of their wedding. And a 10 lesson course over 10 weeks of course cannot fix that.

We talk about the frailty of the nuclear family, but noone talks about the frailty of nuclear reception of the Sacraments. In times past communities were far more cohesive and extended than nowadays. It did not matter if couples married at a very young age (Mary was probably 13-14!) because the extended families, the local Catholic community, probably did much of the heavy lifting for them.

I may be a closet heretic but I find all this talk of the graces of a sacramental marriage little more than pious platitudes and wishful thinking. It is by far a solid faith community that grounds the success or failure of “the Sacraments” administered individually. The greatest divine sacrament is Jesus’s own human body, and by extension his body the Church community.

So we let through immature couples to Catholic Marriage even though we prudently know they probably don’t really know what they are taking on. Their daily values are heavily secular influenced, though we gamble that when the whips are cracking they will one day find a Christian bedrock within themselves if they are heroic in their crises. We trust, against hope, that the anemic faith communities they are attached to (many aren’t actually known at Sunday mass, though their parents may be known to come) will be of help…but its a long shot nowadays.

To many couples I have longed to say, you really don’t have a clue, live in sin for a few years, come regularly to Church and then seek Communion and Sacramental marriage when you have a better idea of what Catholic marriage values are. God will be with you you on your journey despite its irregularity if you are committed to the people of His Body, the Church.

But the Church is caught between a rock and a hard place since the 1960s it seems to me. If we are too rigorous we risk becoming a Church of the pure so small that we actually have little influence, little leavening opportunity re secular society at all. And what sort of “purity” would that be - an “older brother” hypocritical one I suspect.
Jesus himself was very happy to live and die amongst the great unwashed. He told the parable of the wheat and the darnel, leaving such judgements re sinners and justified to his Father not his earthly leaders.

So we accompany our less than mature, secularly influenced young married couples on their marriage journey and do as much as they will allow us to do. We know that they may well learn on the job some years later what it means to live a Catholic marriage and only then will true consent before God manifest itself in gentle unnoticed fashion - or not.

This Pope is, as you say, pastorally very wise and he is not interested in providing the older brothers amongst us with a nice consistent theology of grace that justifies only the sacramentally ritually pure or a theology of sin that puts the sacramentally ritually unclean in their place.

Just as was the case with Jesus.

I am continually astounded to see theologically unqualified and pastorally inexperienced lay Catholics lay into Pope Francis as if they somehow have this education/experience personally infused into them, by a direct gift of the Holy Spirit.

As far as I know the only person who might validly claim to have this personal charism … is actually Pope Francis himself .

I would have thought that if the Pope clearly says something at odds with my lay understanding of Catholicism the first thing to do would be to re-assess my own understanding for cracks…and I have the equiv of a Masters in Theology .
If that taught me anything it taught me how little I know re the workings of God in the lives of the faithful and how mysterious are his ways.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

Grace received in natural marriage is actual grace not sanctifying grace.

How on earth would you or I or the Church know that for sure and in each and every case Vico?

It is the Church that is limited by the Sacraments - not God.
He gives His Life to whomsoever he Wills and does not need the Church’s permission so long as he finds a responsive heart.

Whenever there is impaired consent or understanding sanctifying grace may abound even in the most objectively mortal or irregular of ongoing situations.

“Living in a state of sin” has never logically denied the possibility of sanctifying grace being present as far as I know.

If you have a clear Magisterial statement that says otherwise I am all ears.
As Pope Francis clearly affirms my long held understanding I would be surprised if you find one.

Then again your statement above could be viewed as a mere apriori tautology.
If an irregular union does have sanctifying grace then maybe we are mistaken in thinking it is irregular . i.e. a true statement but not actually having any helpful practical application.