Marriage: The Conversation Continues

Antiphon 18.1 (2014) 3–9 Marriage: The Conversation Continues1 Bishop Joseph N. Perry It took the Church about 1200 years to fit marriage snugly into the Christian life. There was no official wedding ceremony in the church for the longest time. Marriages were put together and celebrated by local custom, by the ways of the clan, the tribe, the village. Later on, during the Dark Ages, Christians were urged to obtain a blessing from the local priest or bishop, which often took place after local celebrations were finished, even days after the wedding. From the earliest the Church knew there was something special about the marriages of Christians; that they were called to bear a quality that was hinted at in Scripture—not only the denunciation of divorce and remarriage from the words of Jesus recorded in the gospels of Mark (10:2-12) and Matthew (19:3-12), but even the teaching of the letter to the Ephesians summons men from surrounding heathen lifestyles to an exclusive love and commitment to one wife as Christ loves his bride the Church (5:25-33). “Love” was a dirty word in that ancient world. Love was for your women on the side, your concubines and mistresses. The wife bore you children. The wife was part of your estate, your labor force. The Christian community would teach against this, advising a true affection of a Christian man for his wife while dismissing all others as evidence of an appropriation of this higher summons. It took the Church a good deal of time to reflect on all of this. Bishops were plagued by disjointed practices dealing with the social mess arising from desertions, war, the consequences of ar1 Keynote Address delivered at the Annual Conference of the Society for Catholic Liturgy at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein, Illinois, on October 2, 2013. 4 Bishop Joseph N. Perry ranged marriages, child marriages, secret marriages; when divorce could be allowed and when it could not. Preoccupying Church thought about the human enterprise of marriage was: 1. what constituted marriage for Christians; 2. how does a marriage come about; 3. what is expected of the spouses; 4.  when is a marriage considered complete—through mere agreement between the spouses or with the subsequent act of sexual intercourse; 5. is marriage worthy of the Christian life; 6.  can persons acquire salvation by reason of the married state; 7. is sex evil, somewhat evil or neutral in married life. Renowned theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and others commented on these queries. Augustine is the only Church Father who wrote most extensively about sex and marriage in the Christian context. In a converted life he managed to isolate three qualities of Christian marriage, being, namely: children, fidelity or permanence, and sacramentality ,2 which remain useful to this day in the Church courts through the juridical lens to isolate valid marriage bonds. As missionaries penetrated the northern tribes trying to convert the barbarians, the Church pressed for order in the marriage practices of peoples, establishing the earliest laws about who could marry who, especially amidst the consanguine or blood ties of relatives. The canon lawyers were heavily involved in the discussion , being asked to clarify the validity of marriages that were arranged by the royals and the wealthy, who often promised their children to children of other monarchs and fiefdoms to secure alliances, peace treaties, land acquisitions and the like. For the longest time the Church pressed the need for the spouses to consent to marry each other rather than be promised or arranged to marry someone they never knew, let alone loved. It proved a tussle with long cultivated private understandings , cultural, political machinations, entrenched customs and social imperatives laid on marriage. 2 Augustine, De bono coniugali, XXIV , 32. 5 Marriage: The Conversation Continues It took the Church over a thousand years to fit marriage into Christian discipleship following the few things Jesus said about it and St. Paul wrote about it to the churches. By the twelfth century, a valid marriage with sexual consummation was legislated to indicate the completion of a sacramental union taking place from which...