On Liturgical Marriage

Antiphon 18.1 (2014) 10–31 On Liturgical Marriage David W. Fagerberg I suppose that for a conference of this gravity1 I should not begin my paper with a quip, much less base my paper on that quip, and yet it contains my thesis in such a succinct form that I am going to try it. Sometimes people say “the sacrament of marriage does not involve two persons, but three.” They mean that in addition to the husband and wife, one should remember God. But I like to quip in reply that by my Trinitarian arithmetic, that means there are five persons involved in each marriage. My charge here is to say something liturgical and sacramental about marriage that is of use to pastoral ministry. Where would such a paper begin? I could rehearse the rubrics and text of the wedding rite; I could review arguments that marriage is a sacrament and that it was instituted by Christ; I could plod through the history by which, even without a final nuptial liturgy, the Catholic Church came to practice canonical jurisdiction over marriages by the end of the first millennium in Europe; I could point out that the canons on marriage make up the largest section in the Code of Canon Law’s book IV on the sanctifying office (forty-nine more than the Eucharist); I could recall the hesitation of some scholastic theologians to including marriage in the list of the canonical sacraments because it was a pre-Christian reality involving sex and the exchange of money (and besides, they had to figure out what was the matter and form of marriage). A paper could, I say, begin with these sorts of details. But if I am to say something liturgical and sacramental about marriage 1 “On Liturgical Marriage” © 2006 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington, DC 20017. All rights reserved. This article was originally written for a colloquium sponsored by the office of Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth of the USCCB in 2006. A select committee of Catholic Bishops met at the University of Notre Dame as part of their preparation for the pastoral letter on marriage. It was published online at old.usccb.org/laity/marriage/notredame.shtml and it is with their kind permission that I am republishing it here after having presented it at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Catholic Liturgy. 11 On Liturgical Marriage that is helpful, then I feel obliged to drive myself beyond a history of the ritual, beyond rubrics, beyond canon law, even beyond the clarifications worked out by scholastic categories and recent historical scholarship, and begin instead with liturgical life. And that means we must begin with the Trinity, for I hold that liturgical life is the sacramental participation of the body of Christ in the life of the Trinity. Liturgy is more than rubric, like music is more than score: the latter exists so that the former can be done. We don’t want to examine the score here, we want to ask what two believers are doing in the sacrament of marriage. And that question is best answered by liturgical theology because liturgy is the manifestation of the new creation brought about by the Paschal Mystery and shared with a social, sacramental body, until the Lord of the Church returns as Lord of the World to hand all things over to the Father. Pius XII defines liturgy in Mediator Dei as “the worship rendered by the Mystical Body of Christ in the entirety of its head and members”2 . Christ is, himself, the mediator of the Father’s grace to us, and the mediator of our thanksgiving to the Father, all in the Holy Spirit. Liturgy is best understood as a relationship. It is not a thing that Jesus left to his Church, but himself. Liturgy is participating in the relationship of love that flows between the persons of the Trinity. Every baptized liturgist is grafted into this Trinitarian life, but as married life is a particular vocation, married life is liturgical in a particular way. In the words of Pope Leo XIII from his Encyclical on Christian Marriage, Arcanum, we know that Christ our...