For sacramental validity, believe in the Church

Sep 11, 2015

The reality of the internal forum has emerged in the last couple of decades mainly due to the ever-growing secularization of faith-societies of the by-gone eras.

Consequently, today, on the one hand, there are many nominal Catholics, persons who are validly baptized, but who do not practice or believe what the Church teaches. But on the other hand, by canonical definition, a marriage between two baptized persons, by that very fact of baptism, has to be a sacrament.

Thus, Canon 1055 of the 1983 Code says: “Between baptized persons, no valid matrimonial contract can exist that is not, by that fact, a sacrament”.

But does this canonical assertion hold good when a baptized person who does not believe in what the Church teaches (including what she teaches on the sacrament of marriage), enters into a marriage with another baptized person? After all, every sacrament demands at least a basic faith to believe what the Church teaches.

Vatican Council II insisted that the sacraments “not only presuppose faith, but by words and objects they nourish, strengthen and express it. That is why they are called ‘sacraments of faith’”. The same view is repeated by Ordo Celebrandi Matrimonium (1969) which said: “Pastors should first of all strengthen and nourish the faith of those about to be married. The sacrament of matrimony presupposes and demands faith”. The CCC says that sacraments “presuppose faith” (No. 1123), and that when they are “celebrated worthily in faith, the sacraments confer the grace that they signify” (No: 1127). Lawler describes the anomaly that arises when all baptized are taken for granted as “believers”:

Today, the faith-situation of the baptized is anything but clear, and the Church and its theologians recognize two kinds of baptized, believers and nonbelievers. The two are easily distinguished, theologically, on the basis of the presence, or absence of active personal faith. They ought never, therefore, to be as easily equated in law as they are in the Code.

Cardinal Kasper expresses the issue at stake well when he says:

...Familiaris Consortio says that some of the divorced and remarried are subjectively convinced, in conscience, that their irreparably broken previous marriage was never validly contracted. For as a sacrament of faith, marriage presupposes faith and consent to the essential characteristics of marriage — unity and indissolubility. But can we, in the present situation, presuppose without further ado, that the engaged couple shares the belief in the mystery that is signified by the sacrament and that they really understand and affirm the canonical conditions for the validity of their marriage? Is not the praesumptioiuris [presumption of validity], from which canon law proceeds, often a fictioiuris [legal fiction]?

In fact, some 35 years ago, the Synod of Bishops (1980) expressed their view on this issue when they passed the following proposition by a near unanimous vote (201 placet and 3 non placet):

We have to take into account the engaged couple’s degree of faith maturity, and their awareness of doing what the Church does. This intention is required for sacramental validity. It is absent if there is not at least a minimal intention of believing with the Church.

At the recently concluded Synod too, this issue came up quite a few times. This pastoral dilemma of the Church is a blessing in disguise in a way, because it has coerced the Church to re-consider her exclusively juridical-pastoral stance on marriage itself. Kasper illustrates the point well when he says:

Because marriage as a sacrament has a public character, the decision about the validity of a marriage cannot simply be left to the subjective judgment of the parties concerned. However, one can ask whether the juridical path, which is, in fact, not hire divino (by divine law), but has developed in the course of history, can be the only path to the resolution of the problem, or whether other, more pastoral and spiritual procedures are conceivable. Alternatively, one might imagine that the bishop could entrust this task to a priest with spiritual and pastoral experience as a penitentiary or Episcopal vicar.

Could this be another way out for quite a number of re-married Catholics, especially in the developed Western world where one finds many nominal Christians? In fact, this is one of the proposals made by the recent Synod: “Among other proposals, the role which faith plays in persons who marry could possibly be examined in ascertaining the validity of the Sacrament of Marriage, all the while maintaining that the marriage of two baptized Christians is always a sacrament.” -- Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Reflection

-- To be continued next week