#They’re married couple fr(French Revolution)

[solairekaa]

[spiritualdirections]

Hi Father, what do you think of the recent First Things article by a priest that asserts Catholics shouldn't concern themselves with civil marriage?

You mean this article? I’m assuming the author hasn’t served in a Hispanic parish, where the disastrous effects of his proposal have promoted a bizarre marriage culture that Pope Francis has been trying to fix since the beginning of his papacy. Here’s what happens: a guy proposes to his girlfriend that they get married “civilly”, and when they have enough time and money, they get married “in the Church”. Then they live together, have kids, and never get around to getting married--not because they’re not practicing, but because they had settled into a life where the reception of Communion was not part of Mass. In a typical Hispanic parish, less than half of the congregation comes up for Communion, and almost always it’s because they’re in irregular marriages. I had a streak of three years running where I celebrated the marriages of the parents of students in the First Communion class, who finally got around to getting married in order that they could receive Communion with their child. They were active in the parish, they had baptized all their children, one family even had a son with severe developmental disabilities that placed stress on their family life--in many ways they were admirable Catholics. But because they got married civilly and waited to get married “for real”, they were in a state of mortal sin, unable to receive Communion--and untroubled about it, because their conception of Mass and being Catholic didn’t involve Communion.

Fr. Newman has been making this argument for years, as he says, and he hasn’t made his argument any better. He’s got a deformed concept of the cooperation of evil (as if the Church would be clean of the stain of the surrounding marriage culture if it symbolically washed its hands of it). He would play into the hands of those hostile to Catholic marriage, adopting a rule that Catholic haters since the French Revolution have imposed whenever they get in charge of the government. And he gets backwards how civil marriage works in this country--the government recognizes that a real, Catholic marriage has been formed when I inform them of this fact. I don’t opine about any other marriage than marriages recognized as valid by the Church, which differentiates me from a justice of the peace. I believe that Fr. Newman has been corrected on this distinction, and yet he continues to describe priests as “magistrates of the state”. 

Ed Peters has proposed that the Church recognize as valid civil marriages that meet Catholic criteria (man and woman, for life, exclusive, open to children, etc.). His point is that the reason for requiring that the couple get married “in the Church” is no longer necessary--civil authorities are competent at keeping records--and it would help us to reduce the number of annulments for “lack of form.” Even that idea wouldn’t involve the Church in being “witnesses to the civil effects of marriage” as Fr. Newman accuses. It would have the Church witness to the natural and sacramental effects of marriages, just as it does when it presumes marriages between two baptized non-Catholic Christians to be valid. The Church would still be concerned with whether the couple was really bound together in matrimony; it wouldn’t be concerned with civil effects such as tax status or hospital visitations or eligibility for a green card. 

In sum, his idea is a solution without a problem. Rather than asking the enemies of the Church to fight for every inch of the culture, he just wants to concede to them the nature of marriage. Travel to Latin America will reveal just how awful this idea is. The way that America does its marriage licenses is a model that other countries should copy, because it reflects a clear understanding of the respective roles of Church and state.