1. Classical Meaning of Marriage

Many different answers have been given throughout human history to the question of the meaning of the shared life of man and woman in marriage. There is little historical support for the notion of monogamy as the earliest form of marriage or that polygamy represents a decadent form of it. The opposite view, that sexual practice began as a universal promiscuity, continued as polygamous, and ended as monogamy, is also an uncertain construct, based on liberal presuppositions. Still, it must be accepted that the modern understanding of marriage as a partnership was hardly the norm from the beginning; in fact, historically, married life was seen mainly in the context of the tribe, clan or extended family.

The varied ways in which marriage has been understood and practised in the plurality of human cultures shows how sexuality has always a certain openness and flexibility and that it has to be given form and definition by society. It is remarkable that all the great movements of the modern era—liberalism, socialism and conservativism—have produced not only their own political and economic theory, but also a distinctive view of human sexuality and marriage.

This raises the question whether the nature of marriage as such is in any sense fixed. Thomas Aquinas was concerned with this question, and his teaching about the natural law has become classical. To the question whether the bond of marriage is natural, he answers that while there is a natural inclination in man to marry, each actual marriage takes place through an act of human freedom. With regard to marriage, Thomas maintained that human nature was quite changeable. This allowed him to accept the multiplicity of forms in which marriage had expressed itself at various stages of human history. Thomas's conclusion is that marriage can only exist in historical forms and that it is in the nature of marriage to be historical. The task of the Christian revelation is to help people who are inclined to error and weakened by sin, to know the meaning of human nature at a deeper level, and to make it a noble reality.

The Christian reality of marriage is therefore something that modifies through history. Christianity has to remain open to culture and to historical change. It is therefore hardly surprising that across the centuries Catholic teaching and law about marriage have considerably modified. Sexuality and marriage have frequently been devalued in the history of Christianity. On the other hand, the dignity of marriage has again and again been defended against many dangerous tendencies. In this historical process, the Christian understanding of marriage may in some sense be called “the womb of our western culture and its spiritual attitudes.

Thomas Aquinas wrote his great theological synthesis (the Summa) in an attempt to express in an all-embracing form a Christian view of all human values, including those of marriage. His aim was to integrate marriage into a total understanding of humanity and the world. He did this by going back to Augustine's doctrine of the three goods or values ("bona") of marriage: descendants, mutual love and faithfulness, and the sacramental sign. Whereas Augustine was concerned principally with the justifying grounds for marriage, however, Thomas wanted also to express the dignity of marriage.

Merely sensual love tends, according to Aquinas, tends to break away from humanity's total orientation in life. If it is allowed to assume an independent value of its own it can threaten the dignity of human beings. However, sensuality is integrated into the total meaning of human life by the three goods of marriage. Sexuality was placed at the service of mankind within marriage for the begetting of descendants. It was incorporated into personal love and self-surrender by the mutual love and faithfulness of the two spouses; this also provided a guarantee that a woman was valued not simply as a sexual being, but as a life partner. In Jesus Christ human faithfulness became a sign of God's faithfulness to the covenant and was incorporated into humanity's orientation towards God as the ultimate purpose of its existence, by the sacramental sign of marriage.

This is the central Christian tradition on marriage, as summarized by Aquinas. It had a very deep influence on our western culture. It stood or fell, however, within the total Christian understanding of humanity and the world as such. Therefore the process of secularization that has intensified in recent centuries has inevitably led to the weakening of this synthesis and a crisis in the traditional Christian understanding of marriage. We have therefore to undertake again the task that Thomas Aquinas so successfully performed in the high Middle Ages, but we are bound to do so under new presuppositions.

2. Changing Significance of Marriage

The present fluctuating views of marriage can be traced back to a number of historical causes. One reason was the transition from an earlier agrarian society to a modern industrialized and urbanized civilization. A striking characteristic of the new society emerging from this process is the division between the private and the public sphere. In the past, marriage was not simply a private and personal agreement to form a nuclear family based on partnership. It was also an economic and producing community within the framework of the extended family.

In our technological society, a division has occurred between the sphere of marriage and family on the one hand and that of work and professional life on the other. This has led, especially where a wife is professionally employed, to an general collapse of the economic function of the extended family, its loss of function with regard to social welfare and care, and the reduction of the idea of marriage to personal relationship with the emphasis on sympathy and love.

The discovery of the problem of overpopulation (Malthus) and the evolution of new forms of family planning and birth control furthered the emancipation of marriage and family life. Marriage is now much less dependent on social determinants; it can also, at least in principle, be separated from natural conditions of reproduction and procreation, as a result of the new biological insights gained in the scientific age. Perhaps the most important discovery for the improved position of woman and our understanding of marriage as a partnership was when, in 1875, it was learnt that new life arose from the fusion of one sperm-cell and one egg-cell and that the woman consequently made an active and not simply a receptive contribution to procreation.

The positive opportunity provided by the recent social and economic changes is that marriage may be more deeply personalized. Nowadays, the intimate sphere of that way of life is experienced by countless people as an antidote to the increasing emptiness of the world. It is clear that marriage and family life are a necessary balance to the growing complexity and globalization of public life. Individuals find themselves increasingly lonely in an increasingly anonymous world, and marriage offers them a refuge in their search for security. This is a major reason reason why the institution of marriage has shown an astonishing stability despite all the questionings and threats to which it has been subjected. Certainly the relationship of mutual partnership between man and wife in modern marriage deserves to be helped, supported and promoted in every way by the Church.

With this positive opportunity for deeper personalization, there is also, however, a danger that the personal relationship in marriage may be restricted to the exclusively private sphere, and therefore may be seen as having no moral obligations to society as a whole. Now that lovemaking has lost its element of risk because of the pill, it is in danger of also losing both its importance and its gravity. Since the Romantic period, people's understanding of freedom has become more privatized - and this has in turn led to a deeper questioning of the obligation of the marriage bond.

From early in the twentieth century, there was a great deal of discussion about free love, experimental marriage and companionate marriage. There was a marked tendency toward emancipation from earlier forms of marriage, based on a synthesis of ideas from Marxism and psychoanalysis. The so-called sexual revolution was directed against the institutional forms that society imposed on human sexuality and towards dissociation from nature and the limitations imposed by it (fertility and procreation).

Even more dangerous is the fact that the more it is limited to the purely private sphere, the more marriage is exposed to influences exerted by the current norms of society and public life. The values of modern society, based on performance, production, consumption and prestige, are always threatening to penetrate into the sphere of marriage and family life. Human sexuality, in other words, is in constant danger of becoming merely sex, a commodity for consumption, pleasure, or exploitation. The privatization of marriage does not necessarily lead to its personalization, or to the deepening of the bond of commitment.

The contemporary opportunities and dangers regarding marriage present the Church with a challenge to which it must respond in its preaching and practice. The fundamental question is whether the positive possibilities of the understanding of marriage as a personal partnership will be successfully exploited, and the objective structures within which marriage has hitherto existed in the Christian tradition can be adapted to this end.

This question of the relationship between the personal and the objective aspects of marriage underlay the two great debates on marriage in the Church in the twentieth century: the discussion about birth regulation and that about indissolubility. Both these problems should, of course, be seen against the background of the transition from a static and natural understanding of reality to a more dynamic, personal and historically conditioned understanding.

Some have questioned whether it is possible for such a development to take place without breaking radically with the tradition of the Church. It would be true to say that the traditional Catholic teaching about marriage was dominated by an objective and institutional understanding. The definition of the consent to marriage provided by the older (1917) canon law is very significant here, where it was defined as an act of the will in which each party gives and receives the exclusive and lasting right to the body in respect of the acts appropriate to the begetting of descendants.

Fortunately, the new canon law on marriage (1981) is very different and every effort has been made in it to overcome a narrow and objective view of marriage that is nowadays almost incomprehensible. The earlier tradition in the Church shows evidence of a much wider and more all-embracing view of marriage. According to the Roman Catechism of 1566, for example, the primary reason for marriage is the community of man and woman for the purpose of mutual help so that together they will more easily be able to bear the difficulties of life and especially those of old age. This idea was taken up again in the encyclical Casti Conubii of 1930, where it was called the further definition of marriage.

An important breakthrough came with the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes of the Second Vatican Council (1965), where marriage is defined as a personal community within which the partners give and accept each other. The objective and institutional aspects of marriage were obviously understood in a new way in this conciliar document and made subordinate to the more personalist view. This process was continued in the encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968). In the first part of this letter, marriage is seen in what is, for a church document, a surprisingly new light, that is, as a personal community. On the other hand, however, many of the statements made in the second part, which deals with the permitted methods of birth regulation, give the impression of a distinct return to an earlier biological view of marriage. It was, of course, this part of the encyclical that occasioned such criticism.

Although the Church has so far not succeeded in satisfactorily reintegrating the different aspects of marriage within a personalist perspective, a beginning has certainly been made. It is at least clear in which direction theologians ought to be thinking with regard to marriage. It is not a question of personalizing marriage to the extent of stripping it of all its essential institutional elements, but rather a question of preserving, as in the past, the inner unity of the three traditional values emphasized by Augustine and Aquinas; in other words, of continuing to envisage marriage in its natural, social, personal and sacramental aspects, but no longer taking the begetting of descendants as the only basis for marriage.

The starting-point for Christian thinking about marriage today should be the aspect of mutual love and faithfulness. In other words, the essence of marriage should be determined not naturally, but relationally. If we are successful in developing such a view of marriage, it will harmonise with the basic principle stated by the Second Vatican Council: "The beginning, the subject and the goal of all social institutions is the human person, which for its part and by its very nature stands completely in need of social life."

Inevitably a renewed vision of marriage of this kind will lead to concrete questions and practical consequences. In this whole process of rethinking, however, we should not simply be conscious of the breaking down of old forms. We should also recognize the opportunity provided for a deeper personal understanding of the reality of marriage.

3. Personalist Understanding of Marriage


(i) Personal love

If, in defining the essential aspect of love, we speak of the mutual love of the partners, we are, of course, not using the word “love” in a superficial or sentimental way. If we think of love at a deeper level, that is, in the sense in which we understand it here, it can be seen as the most fundamental of all realities. Finite being is dependent on and in constant need of fulfillment by another reality. A person, as a finite being with such a need, is also always striving for fulfillment by material, biological, and spiritual goods. None of these, however, is able to satisfy him or her completely. A man or woman needs a partner who is in accordance with himself or herself (Gen. 2:20ff). Human persons have dignity because they exist for their own sakes. A person only finds fulfillment when he or she is accepted as a person. Human fulfillment therefore only exists in personal love, that is, in a love that says: I want you to be; it is good that you are. This love consents to the other as the other. An essential aspect of the dialectics of love is that it joins two persons together in the most intimate way and at the same time sets them free to independent personal existence.

People only exist in their bodies and in their relationship with the world. Sexuality is also determined by this. It is not a partial determination, but a fundamental modality by which a person is deeply marked even in the most sublime spiritual aspects of being and doing. On the other hand, human sexuality also has the task of expressing and mediating intersubjective communication. It is only to the extent that it is integrated into personal bonds that human sexuality can be fully realized. Without these personal bonds, sexuality can result in the disintegration and loss of dignity of the human person. The most all-embracing personal bond between man and woman is marriage. More than any other form of human relationship, marriage embraces the whole person of both partners. The fulfilment of sexual intercourse obviously has a meaningful place in marriage, because it is set within a sharing involving the whole of the partners' life and fate.

However, the corporeal nature of the human person means that one can never speak of marriage as a purely personal and private matter. It is obvious that at least a minimum of physical, social and economic requirements are needed if a marriage is to be successful. To express this in a more abstract way, we may say that love includes justice - the justice that gives to the other his or her due. Without this justice, love would be dishonest and empty. A personalist view of marriage must also include some objective and institutional elements. A renewed theology of marriage must therefore guard against overemphasizing its institutional aspect, but also against a too individualistic understanding of the part played by the person in marriage. Marriage, in other words, should not be seen purely and exclusively as a love relationship. It must also be seen within the framework of the social and economic conditions of human freedom.

The Church clearly has an important ministry in the sphere of marriage. Along with the task of helping and counselling individuals, it must also use its influence politically and legally, and take active steps to ensure, as far as possible, the success of marriages in their early and later stages. Perhaps the most important service that the Church has to carry out, however, is that of helping young people to see their loving on the basis of Christian faith. The fundamental law of any life led in faith is “He who loses his life will find it” (see Matt. 10:39 etc.). An increase of faith is therefore the most important preparation for marriage that any Christian can undertake.

(ii) Fruitful love

An essential aspect of love is that it does not stay within itself, but tends to be fruitful. This essential connection between married love and fruitfulness was, in the past, usually given a purely biological justification. This, however, proved to be quite an unsatisfactory explanation because, in contrast to the sexuality of animals, the function of human sexuality is clearly not restricted to the preservation of the species. In human sexuality, quite different from that of animals, there is no seasonal rhythm of sexual impulse (a rutting season or season in heat). Man's sexual urge is constantly active, resulting in a surfeit of sexual impulse that is in need of normalization and culture. When we speak of the need to humanize sexuality, we do not mean repression or inhibition. Human culture is based to a great extent on sexual asceticism, and the sublimation of sexual urges has led to the advance of civilization.

A major aspect of the cultivation of human sexuality is the expression of personal love in marriage, where through their sexuality the partners are able to experience mutual happiness. In the past, eros or sexual desire as such was frequently defamed and there is an urgent need to correct this tendency where it still persists. It is clear that human sexuality cannot be restricted simply to the sex act and the reproduction of the species. The fruitfulness of marriage can therefore not be justified purely on the basis of biology.

The fruitfulness of marriage comes from the inner essence of personal love itself. If it is essential for love to empty itself, true love cannot just stay within itself. It is inevitably impelled to realization, objectivization and embodiment in a shared third party. As the fruit of shared love, a child is not simply an external, fortuitous addition to the mutual love of the marriage partners; it is rather the realization and fulfilment of their love. The two partners normally find themselves in a new way in their child or children, and the latter can only thrive as human beings if they are secure in the mutual love of the parents. Although a distinction is usually made between descendants and mutual love as the first and second purpose of marriage, these two aspects really form a single organic whole.

This does not mean, of course, that a marriage which is childless is bound to be unfulfilled and unhappy. Love has a value and a meaning of its own. It does, however, become a perversion of itself if it becomes deliberately and selfishly closed in on itself and consciously excludes fruitfulness for purely egoistic reasons. When this happens, it eventually loses contact with its central reality. Such physical union is in contradiction to the meaning of love and therefore immoral if it is selfishly closed in on itself and not open to the greater reality of “we.”

When it transcends itself in children, love takes its place in the wider context of human society as a whole. By begetting and bringing up children, the partners in marriage are contributing to the continued existence of society and ensuring the survival of mankind in the future. This is not simply an increase in or an addition to the number of human beings in society. It is an authentic process of procreation and education, in which human culture is mediated and history is transmitted. This inner connection between the commandment to man to be fruitful and his cultural task is stressed in the Old Testament: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen.1:28). This makes clear that the fruitfulness of marriage is not based on biological nature, but on humanity's cultural, social and historical task. Marriage and the family, then, cannot be regarded by Christians as a purely private matter. They are public and, in the widest sense of the word, political. Human fruitfulness must be subordinated to man's sense of moral responsibility. Responsible parenthood is in no way autocratic or arbitrary. The human person, with a personal conscience, is always placed within previously given relationships.

Four criteria on which moral decisions can be based emerge as a result of what we have said so far. Firstly, there must be respect for the dignity of the other partner in marriage and a desire to continue and deepen their mutual love. Secondly, there must be responsibility for the children already present in the family and still to come. Thirdly, there must also be responsibility for the future of society and mankind as a whole. Fourthly, there must be respect for the inner meaning of human nature as created by God and given to us, not for unlimited exploitation and manipulation, but so that we can achieve our cultural and social task. It would be an act of ultimate cynicism to strive for a freedom that is liberated from all natural bonds. Such an act would also lead to agnostic division between spirit and matter. This would be in direct opposition to the Christian theory and practice of consent to the world and the body.

These four criteria should not lead us into the sphere of casuistry. They provide us rather with a broad outline of the form and meaning of fruitfulness in marriage. They represent a concrete model which is, in the sense of the classic Aristotelian and Thomist doctrine of the natural law, not abstract and deductive, but historical and based on humanity's experience and normal behaviour and manners in society in whatever period we are living. It is by considering these criteria that a Christian can make conscientious personal decisions, about life and marriage within the framework of the community of believers and the Church's teaching. They should inspire people to live their married and family life in a fully responsible, human and Christian way.

<

(iii) Faithfulness and Freedom

The shared responsibility of the partners for their children is a strong argument for the indissolubility of marriage. This third good of marriage, faithfulness, can, however, be more directly attributed to the essential meaning of love itself. Unlike an animal, a human being lacks the security of instinctive behaviour in a clearly defined and specific environment. As anthropologists say, we are open to the world. If one is to avoid losing oneself in this openness, with its surfeit of stimuli, one has to give oneself, in free responsibility, his or her own outline, face, and form. This openness is the other side of one's freedom. It is, however, freedom that enables human beings to give themselves a definitive form. In this respect, freedom is the opposite of arbitrary choice, which claims the name of freedom, but believes that it is possible always to begin at the beginning and again and again cancel every decision in which people realize themselves. This arbitrary and dissipated bachelor form of freedom is perhaps the greatest threat to true freedom, since, if nothing is definitive and everything can be changed, everything assumes an equal importance or lack of importance and nothing is taken seriously. It is only when there are really irreversible decisions that life becomes a real risk and a genuine adventure. True freedom is therefore realized in faithfulness.

Freedom that expresses itself in faithfulness is best seen in the form of dialogue. It is for this reason that Nietzsche called a human being an animal that can promise. This promise tends inwardly towards definitiveness. According to Gabriel Marcel, loving another person means telling him or her: 'You will not die.' The bond of faithfulness in marriage is essentially not a yoke imposed on the two partners, depriving them of their freedom. On the contrary, it is the most sublime way in which their freedom is realized, an existential expression that makes the partners free in a new way. Above all, it makes them free from the moods and fickleness of the moment. In this way, faithfulness is a victory over time.

Man and woman are able to find their definitive status in this faithfulness. They become “one flesh” or “one” (Gen. 2:24; Mark 10:8; Eph. 5:31); in other words, they become a “we” person. The marital bond of faithfulness creates something that transcends the single person and binds the history of two people together definitively and at the deepest level.

What do we mean, then, by the bond of marriage? To define it negatively, it is not a kind of metaphysical entity existing above or alongside the personal love of the partners (the “objectivist” view). Nor is it simply a factor that becomes absorbed into each act of love, with the result that, if these acts cease, as they do when there is a prolonged period of unfaithfulness, the marriage is de facto at an end (this is the “actualist” view). A promise of faithfulness made in freedom is permanently inscribed in the history of the two persons. It is an intersubjective intention and determination made in freedom through which a man and a woman reach their definitive status in and through their bond of unity.

Whenever a person commits himself or herself totally and definitively in this way, then, according to Christian faith, God inevitably enters the arena. The definitive bond of faithfulness in marriage has, in other words, an essential religious dimension. In this bond, a person commits himself or herself to an existence, the end of which cannot be foreseen, and which is something unconditional. People commit themselves to something that they do not possess and that they will never fully possess. They live on hope and trust and neither spouse can ever fully account for this. Marital, faithfulness, then, is both a symbol that points to a reality beyond itself and a participation in the faithfulness of God. In this definitive and unconditioned way, two people can accept each other only because they have already been definitively and unconditionally accepted. Faithfulness in marriage is therefore a place where transcendence can possibly be experienced.

4. Topical pastoral issues on Marriage

Catholic and civil solemnisation of marriage

The Catholic Church describes marriage as a sacrament and this interpretation of the reality of marriage has not simply been imposed from outside. Even in its universally human form, marriage already has an orientation towards this interpretation and fulfilment. Human faithfulness is, as it were, the grammar by means of which God's faithfulness, definitively revealed in Jesus Christ, can be spelt out. Just as a poem cannot be derived from the rules of grammar, so too can the sacramental reality of marriage not be traced back to a purely anthropological origin. The sacramentality of marriage is rather a new, creative concentration and determination of the reality that is already implied, vaguely and universally, in the human form of marriage. The sacrament of marriage uniquely fulfils what has so far been suggested as the essential being of marriage.

The mediaeval doctrine located the core of the sacrament of marriage in the consensus or mutual consent of the bride and bridegroom and thereby in a sense set marriage free from the clan framework. While marriage was personalized by this theory of mutual consent, this led to the abuse of clandestine marriages, based exclusively on the mutual promise made by the bride and bridegroom, without any public form. The aim of the Tridentine decree Tametsi (1563) was to remove this abuse by introducing an obligatory church form. But this attempt on the part of the Church to correct the abuse led in turn to the solemnization of marriage being dominated by the Church, a practice which was quite contrary to early and mediaeval Christian tradition. It was not until the civil form of marriage was introduced as an obligatory legal condition by modern secularized states that an alternative was provided. The introduction of the civil ceremony meant that Catholics, who were still obliged to use the church form of marriage, had in fact to submit to a double solemnization of marriage. The relationship between the civil and the church marriage therefore became a problem.

One solution to this problem that proved unacceptable to the Catholic Church was the theory of the absolute authority of the State, as manifested in France by Gallicanism and in Austria by Josephism. The marriage contract, as a matter of civil law, was made subject to the exclusive competence of the State, while the sacrament, which was seen as merely a blessing, was placed within the authority of the Church. Certain court theologians regarded the contract of marriage as a prior condition for the sacrament and the sacramental sign as contained in the priest' s blessing. According to this understanding, the sacrament was added to the marriage contract proper. The unity existing between the order of creation and that of redemption, which is fundamental to the sacramentality of marriage, was in this way cancelled out.

These ideas were rejected by various popes and, according to canon law, there could be no valid contract of marriage among baptized persons that was not a sacrament. This meant that for a time the Church refused to allow baptized Catholics to take part in the civil marriage ceremony, both in its optional and in its obligatory form. It is a naive assumption that this refusal was based on fear of losing influence in society. On the contrary, it was based on a genuine pastoral intent, since the obligatory civil marriage could easily lead to the belief that the marriage contract was a purely secular matter and the church marriage was no more than an additional blessing that could easily be allowed to lapse. The civil form of marriage that evolved from the secularization of society, on the other hand, could and did lead to a secularized understanding of marriage.

Although there were justified concerns at the root of the Church's critical attitude towards the obligatory form of civil marriage, we are bound to ask today whether many of the arguments used in the past by the Church have not become anachronistic, This is particularly so when the relationship between the Church and the State is not marked by hostile opposition, but by amicable partnership. This modern relationship is to a great extent the consequence of the stress placed by the Second Vatican Council on the autonomy of the secular sphere.

The relationship between civil and church marriage no longer has to be regarded as one of hostile opposition or indifferent coexistence. They are different but related realities and together they are able to express the many different aspects of the one marriage contract. Present canon law (1981) recognizes that the state has the task of dealing with the civil consequences of marriage, such as entitlement to name, property, and inheritance. It is certainly not in the Church's interest to concern itself even indirectly with questions of this type by accepting responsibility for some form of optional civil marriage. On the other hand, even if it represents certain fundamental Christian values, the modern and ideologically neutral State cannot give sufficient material content to marriage. It can only protect it and lay down the legal forms or norms for its civil and legal validity.

It is at this point that the Church has a social service to perform, so essential that without it a marriage between Christians cannot be regarded as fully valid. Church marriage and civil marriage, seen in this light, form a single whole which can achieve inner completion and sacramental status for Christians only with the form prescribed by the Church.

Sacramental or purely civil marriage

In theory, the Church ought to be able to return today to a situation similar to that before the promulgation of the Tridentine decree Tametsi and allow its members to choose either a civil marriage, which was at that time recognized as valid and sacramental, or a church marriage. Although this solution has been suggested by some specialists in the field, there are good pastoral reasons for rejecting it, primarily because a civil marriage in modern secularized society is not the same as a marriage contracted in an earlier society existing before the Enlightenment and thinking of itself in principle as religious. In this, Luther presupposed an understanding of the State that was not that of the modern world. The philosophically neutral State cannot give an inner meaning to marriage. The civil marriage ceremony was therefore bound to lead to a secularization of marriage and consequently to marriage's being gradually emptied of meaning to become an exclusively private affair of the partners. This, however, is in contradiction to the Christian understanding of marriage both as a public affair and as a service that the Church owes to married couples. For this reason, we ought now to have a respectful attitude towards civil marriage and its human values, while at the same time regarding church marriage as an important public sign of faith in the readiness of married couples to be united in the Lord,

What is fundamentally at stake is this: how can the Christian view of marriage in the secularized situation be made intelligible, and how can that view be translated in the concrete into practice in the Church? Like the other sacraments, marriage is also a sacrament of faith. It can therefore only be entered into in faith as a sacrament and it can only be lived in the Christian sense from the experience of faith. This living faith cannot, however, in the contemporary situation, be presupposed or taken for granted.

Non-religious Marriages: The many baptized but non-practising Catholics who do not value the religious content of a church marriage and are therefore satisfied with a civil ceremony present the Church with a problem. How should such marriages be assessed? Certainly they cannot be regarded as canonically valid, but this does not mean that they are valueless from the human and Christian point of view. In any attempt to solve this problem, it is important to remember that, according to canon law, a purely civil marriage can be recognized as canonically valid if it is "cured at root" (sanatio in radice) on the basis of the genuine will to marriage. What is recognized, in other words, is the existence of a human will to marriage, a phenomenon that distinguishes a civilly contracted marriage from simple concubinage.

Problems relating to Divorce: It is, however, difficult to reconcile this with another ruling, according to which each of the two partners of such a civil marriage are able, after divorce, to enter into another marriage, contracted in Church. This is a serious cause of scandal for both Christians and non-Christians because of the gulf it reveals between the Church's law and its moral teaching. Most people rightly believe that the Church should, in its law, protect the human values of civilly contracted marriages. Even if the Church is unable to recognize such marriages as canonically valid, it ought to take care that no one should come, by means of an injustice (the guilty dissolution of a civilly contracted union), to a sacramental marriage in the Church. It is, in this context, worth considering whether, in this case, there should not be a “contemporary” impediment to marriage, similar to the impediment of “crime,” according to which no one should be able to come to a new marriage by murdering the first partner) The Church ought, in cases such as this, to be able to stand up for people and their rights.

Situations bordering on Marriage: Let us continue a little further in this direction. Since all reality exists in Jesus Christ, and God wants all men and women to be saved in him, he is the head of all people, and God's grace is offered to everyone in him and in every human situation. In the Church as the universal sacrament of salvation, then, there are many stages and degrees of realization, from that of those who do not believe but are in good faith to that of Catholic Christians in a state of sanctifying grace. All human will towards marriage is therefore a partial link with the mystery of Christ and his Church. This may be an important value if, for one reason or another, a sacramental church marriage is not possible, but a desire for marriage, which is both human and Christian, is really present, as is frequently the case with those who have divorced and are remarried. Such partners should trust in God to give them the grace to fulfil their duties as a married couple, since their union is a participation in the mystery of Christ and the Church because of their faith, which is expressed as penance for their guilt incurred in the breaking of their first marriage.

Marriage ceremony of a non-practising Christian: What happens when a baptized, but nonpractising Christian enters into a church marriage, perhaps, for example, for human or social reasons or because it is a more festive form of ceremony, but who does not give his consent to its inner meaning? Would it be advisable in such a case to recommend that marriage should be delayed (a parallel situation to delayed baptism)? In other words, should the church marriage be deferred and a purely civil ceremony be advised? Is it possible for a priest in an extreme case even to refuse to solemnize a church marriage? This problem is particularly pressing in our modern secularized society and it points to a need to define the relationship between faith and sacrament.

There can be no automatic sacrament and there can be no sacrament without faith. A distinction is made in Catholic sacramental theology between the objective validity of the sacrament, based on its “objective” expression ("ex opere operato") and the person's fruitfulness in grace which presupposes a certain subjective disposition ("opus operantis"). An integral aspect of the fulfilment of the sacrament is the presence of at least a minimal intention in the giver and in the receiver of the sacrament. Since the bride and bridegroom give each other in marriage and are therefore each at the same time givers and receivers, they must both have the intention, as an integral element of their consensus or mutual consent, of entering into their marriage in the Lord. If not, neither a canonically valid nor a sacramental marriage takes place.

What does this intention consist of? According to the traditional teaching of the Church, it does not need to be consciously present at the moment; all that is required is that it should be virtually present. It must, however, not be purely externally orientated towards the performance of external actions under the customary circumstances (the place, time, dress, and so on). Nor does it need to be a special or deeply reflected intention; in other words, it does not have to be explicitly directed towards the administration of the sacrament and towards the aim and effect of that sacrament. It is sufficient to have a general and direct intention to do what Christians are in the habit of doing in the rite in question. When applied to the sacrament of marriage, it amounts to this: the bride and bridegroom do not need to have the intention of giving and receiving a sacrament of the Church by means of the marriage contract. It is enough for them to have the intention of marrying in the way in which Christians marry. This includes the intention to receive the sacrament of marriage as long as it is not explicitly denied.

Obviously, this is a minimal definition and hardly an ideal of faith and intention in marriage. Even according to this minimal definition, however, there can be no valid and sacramental marriage without at least a minimum of faith. Two conclusions can be drawn from this. In the first place, the Church has to do everything possible, by its proclamation of faith in the context of preparation for marriage and at the marriage ceremony itself, to arouse an understanding in faith of the fulness of the sacrament of marriage. It is not enough, if the sacrament is to be fully effective, for the partners to be given a minimal instruction about what constitutes a valid marriage. The aim must be a real deepening of the Christian meaning of marriage. In the second place, it seems important that the church marriage should be delayed in the case of couples who, despite all attempts based on pastoral concern, do not give their consent explicitly to the minimal conditions outlined above. This can, of course, only happen in marginal cases, Normally it must, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, be assumed that couples who want to be married in church will have the right intention. A deferment of the church marriage can, after all, only be considered after an intensive application of pastoral care. If the church marriage has, however, eventually to be deferred and the bride and bridegroom have a marriage which is not valid in the eyes of the Church, but which is honourable because of its human values, no injustice is done to them, at least in a highly secularized and therefore increasingly tolerant society. Above all, honesty is satisfied.

In conclusion, think of the pastoral consequences of these doctrinal considerations. Because the context in which marriage and the other Christian sacraments are placed has changed radically in recent years, we are tending to speak more explicitly than in the past of a sacrament of faith and to recognize the large pastoral task involved in the administration of the sacrament of marriage in particular. This pastoral work includes preparation for marriage (for engaged couples and others), marriage counselling, the formation of marriage and family groups, and education in the Christian view of marriage by preaching, catechesis, work among young people and adults, and in publications. It is also pastorally important to find the best possible form for the liturgical celebration of the wedding itself. If some success is achieved in this pastoral work, it is likely that the present crisis may become an opportunity to reach a fuller and deeper human and Christian understanding of marriage.