That way, just like the other sacraments, whether a marriage was legitimate or not would rest entirely in the hands of the church. But alas, for the church this was deemed impossible to enforce. It rightly recognized that people would continue to marry without the blessing of a priest, much like they had, well, for thousands of years before the church ever came along. This would have entailed the church deeming void from the outset far too many working marriages for any reasonable person to take its pronouncements on the institution seriously.
The upshot of all this is that the celebration of marriage is still the only sacrament that is enacted by the couple and only presided over ”“ merely witnessed ”“ by a priest. I like reminding myself this when I’m doing weddings: I’m just an accessory. The power is in their hands. And it was nice to remember as I was getting married, too. All this may sound slightly odd coming from a Christian priest who represents the institutional church and routinely performs marriages. But that only made such small consolations that much more important. A public apology tacked onto the liturgy may still be worthwhile for some, but, thankfully, I found something of the same thing ”“ written right into its history.
The presence of a priest at a wedding was only required for Roman Catholics in 1563. Before then, a very high proportion of Christian marriages were created simply by private agreement of the parties. Since England and Ireland had already departed the RC fold in 1534, England did not mandate church involvement in marriage until 1753 (and Ireland only after the 1801 Act of Union). With limited exceptions, couples could ONLY lawfully marry in the Anglican church of the parish where at least one of them lived. Provisions for most Catholic and Protestant Dissenters in the United Kingdom were only added in 1834, at which time licensing and registration of marriages by the secular authorities became the norm. Since the 1753 Marriage Act did not apply in Scotland, nonceremonial marriages remained lawful until 2006… as they still are in 11 U.S. states, 7 Canadian provinces, and the District of Columbia. If everyone still regarded marriage as what it traditionally was–a covenant between two persons–and not as something that requires regulation by government and ecclesiastical bureaucrats, Anglicans might not be in our present predicament. The state and church would be free to define matrimony as each of them saw fit, without the two definitions having any necessary relationship with one another.
Dale, nice try but the context is entirely different. There was no dispute in 1563 or 1753 or so forth about the basic constitution of a marriage; in general all of these acts were about recording marriages. I cannot find the actual text of the 1753 act, but I very much doubt that it bothered to define what a marriage was; its intent was to set for rules as to how to engage in one so as to suppress informal and clandestine weddings. And the reason such an act was set forth in the first place was precisely because marriage had legal consequences. I suspect the main reason why we don’t have federal marriage acts in the country is because state regulation has proven adequate. (Also, Dale, you have your facts wrong. DC does require marriage licenses and does require authorized ministers and a ceremony. Domestic partnerships are, by definition, not marriages.)
If marriage had no legal consequences– but that will never happen, for a long list of reasons.
#1 I think there is some truth to that. If we were more traditional we would see marriage as a matter that pertained only to the church’s discipline and teaching. Whatever novel institutions the state elected to create, the covenant of men and women in marriage would remain properly defined by the church’s teaching. Of course the state is unlikely to step out of regulating marriage for all sorts of fairly obvious reasons. Nevertheless you make a good point.
Let the deconstruction begin. It is increasingly clear that we are entering a new phase in the transformation of sexual teaching within our denomination. Its goal will be to disestablish marriage as a normative institution and substitute for it open-ended commitment to sexual fulfillment and self-realization, within the context of mutual consent and “authentic relationships,” as the new standard. Tactically, this is a remarkably powerful move, because it will unite those people, gay or straight, who see sexual expression without the strictures of monogomy as the key to their happenness and self-realization. Thus, the anti-monogomous of whatever orientation, including straights, gays and serial monogomists, can now make common cause under the banner of liberating sexuality from the restaints life-long commitment.
For what it is worth, my prediction is that the battle to make this change in will be more costly and divisive than those who are leading it presently imagine. Ths movement will attempt to deconstuct the insitutional basis on which hundred of thousands of lives and families are built, and women in particular have much to lose if their church begins to make the commitment of their spouses optional. My prediction is that the proponent of the new teaching will have more of a fight on their hands than they think.
Wow, an entire article and 4 comments without a single mention of scripture or Jesus. Jesus did have some very important things to say about marriage. The Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage is not based on some devious institutional control mechanism. As is typical of liberal comment, it is more emotive and judgmental than objectively descriptive.
The admittedly legalistic arguments around all the sacraments, when they occur, how they occur, who is the proper minister, etc. become important when one is concerned about their abuse.
Jesus pronounced marriage a sacred institution and an indissoluble one at that. (Perhaps some Anglicans have their reasons for forgetting this.) It seems a natural progression to me that Church developed a sense of responsibility for this fundamental institution and Christ’s teaching on it.
If we are going to make fun of the Church’s teachings and “legalisms” on marriage, maybe we ought to actually look at them.
For the sacrament to take place both parties must:
1. be free to marry—to prevent multiple marriages which protects women especially.
2. be of age—to prevent child abuse, particularly girls.
3. enter by one’s free choice—to prevent coercion by abusive partners, parents, etc.
4. be mentally capable—to prevent abuse of the mentally disabled.
5. understand fully what one is undertaking—to prevent rash and poor decisions.
etc.,
Also, while the couple are the ministers of the sacrament, it is true that the priest’s blessing is required. I have heard of a case where the priest accidentally skipped over the nuptial blessing and ended up pronouncing it over the couple in the guise of the dinner blessing at the reception. They had no idea and loved it!
It is interesting to note the funerals remain in the same murky space where marriage was for the first 1000 years. I would hope that the church would eventually exercise control over them as well to prevent what is becoming all too common, unclaimed urns of ashes at crematoria, cremains jewelry, the scattering of ashes to the wind, etc. As the Church teaches, the body and its remains are sacred and must be buried together in consecrated ground.
“This led to the church’s eventual development of marriage as a sacrament …”
I leave it to Dale Rye and C. Wingate to settle the question of when in in the Church’s history marriage began to be numbered among the 7 Sacraments. But the scriptural warrant is to be found in Ephesians 5:32. “This mystery [Greek mysterion; Vulgate sacramentum] is profound…” referring to the one flesh relationship of the man and woman in marriage as a lived-out parable of the union of Christ and the Church.
B’shalom,
Chuck Bradshaw
I think the tone of Storm’s essay has an adolescent quality about it. You know the Church made up all these rules because it wanted to control people. Just like the way teenagers see their parents’ rules. There’s something terribly wrong with our culture when adults can’t seem to grow out of their autonomous period. Father Neuhaus said it best when he talked about our culture’s faulty model for maturity being the growth from authoritarianism to autonomy when it should be from authoritariansim to autonomy to authoritativeness.
The Church has such a beautiful teaching on marriage. I encourage everyone to read the Catholic catechism on marriage.
I wasn’t questioning that marriage is a sacrament, or that the Christian Church does not have the absolute right to define the preconditions for that sacrament. Nor was I questioning that marriage is a legal status, or that the State does not have the absolute right to regulate that status.
I was only amplifying the Rev. Ms. Storm’s observation that marriages are created by the parties, and not by either the Church or the State. The modern role of American clergy in conducting ceremonies that legally bind the parties is the result of legislation by the English and American secular authorities, and is completely extrinsic to the historic understanding of Christian marriage as a covenant entered into by two persons standing before God… not before a minister of the Church, and certainly not before someone exercising powers vested in them by the state. Historically, the consent of the parties was entirely sufficient to create a marriage, whether or not the Church blessed them or the State registered them.
If we had retained the original understanding, we would not have to deal with the popular notion (and the legal reality in most states) that people can ONLY be married by getting a license from a state official and undergoing a ceremony conducted by someone acting under state authority. When the American Church bought into that notion, it was inevitable that the boundaries that had existed for at least 1700 years between Holy Matrimony as a sacrament and marriage as a civil status would gradually be eradicated. Principles of equal rights that may be entirely appropriate in the context of civil law have been imported willy-nilly into ecclesiastical policy. That was entirely predictable once the Church conceded that the State had the power to define marriage. If the Church had insisted on its independent right to define Holy Matrimony, we might well have avoided much of the current Anglican difficulties.
I will note the interesting position of Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1096–1141), who described two “sacraments†of matrimony, one physical and one spiritual, that often did not coincide. If the Church had followed his lead and regarded secular unions and Holy Matrimony as distinct from one another, we wouldn’t have people citing the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as an authority for changing the theological principles of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
P.S. to C. Wingate–at least as of 2005, when the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit decided [i]Dickey v. OPM,[/i] nonceremonial marriages under the Common Law were still valid for D.C. residents.
P.S. to Fr. J.–while it is now true that “the priest’s blessing is required” for Roman Catholics, that only became the case after the post-Reformation Council of Trent. A review of 14th-century matrimonial court records from England shows that almost 90% of the cases involved unions that were originally clandestine. The validity, and indeed irrevocability, of these marriages was never in question until after 1563.
What kind of “priest” writes a lengthy piece on Marriage, without a single mention of God or of His plan for it?