Christian marriage as a sacrament in Catholic tradition and doctrine

Christian marriage as a sacrament was first beheld by the early Roman Catholic Church as a result of the sanctification of the marriage witnessed by Christ at the wedding feast of Cana, where Scripture reports that the first public miracle of Christ was worked at His mother’s request (D’Avray). Marriage was not a Christian custom but rather a social custom common among all societies all over the world throughout all history. What the Church recognized from the beginning, however, was that it was elevated to a sacrament by the presence of Christ at the wedding feast of Cana and that from that point on, marriage was to be considered a sacred union between a man and a woman who promised to join together to become “two in one flesh” until death. Christian Tradition Social Concepts: Marriage in the Catholic Tradition In the larger Christian tradition, the seriousness of marriage has been reduced over the last 500 years as a result of the example set by Henry VIII, who was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for assuming upon himself the powers of Church authorities when he made himself head of the Church of England. Henry VIII famously divorced several wives because they would not bear him a son, and though it was still many more centuries before divorce became popularized among various Christian denominations in the 20th century, the English monarch still set the historical stage for this denigration of the sacrament that Catholics had always viewed as a sacred union that could not be dissolved by any human being once confected. This is why Catholics never believed in the validity of divorce, though today, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, many people in the Catholic Church are more sympathetic and open to the idea of divorce (Wilde).
As Kurtz points out, the Roman Catholic Church always maintained a very strict chain of command from its earliest days, starting with its assertion that Christ had selected Peter as the first Pope and that from Peter the line of succession could be traced over the centuries right down to the modern Pope Francis of today. However, Pope Francis of today has shown himself to be far more sympathetic to the needs of divorced Catholics and has asked bishops to look into the matter of allowing them to receive Holy Communion—a practice tradition denied them as a result of the fact that Catholics are not permitted to divorce and that a divorced Catholic who has remarried or is living with another person in a new relationship is a public sinner and therefore not able to receive Holy Communion.
Communion in the Roman Catholic Church has to be explained for its significance helps to explain why this would be an important issue when it comes to the tradition of the social concept of marriage in the Church. Holy Communion in the Roman Catholic Church has the appearances of bread and wine but is believed to be the Real Presence of Jesus Christ—i.e., the Body and Blood of Christ. This is what Catholics have believed for several centuries, and for a Catholic to have “life” in him he is expected to receive Holy Communion in a state of grace at least once per year during the Easter time.
Receiving Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist—Holy Communion—is necessary for having life everlasting, according to the Church, which is why it has a rule for Catholics that they receive Communion once per year. This is to prevent Catholics from backsliding and becoming negligent in their spiritual duties. To cut off Catholics from the Eucharist is something that can only be done if the Catholic is a public sinner—i.e., a divorced Catholic who is either not living a celibate life or who willfully divorced his or her partner rather than was divorced without consent by an unfaithful partner. In the case of divorces where the Catholic did not want a divorce but the other spouse did and was granted one by the state, such a Catholic is not seen as a public sinner and so is not cut off from the Eucharist. However, in today’s Church, there is much confusion and disorder about what is the correct policy, as the divorce rate has skyrocketed particularly in the U.S. with half of all marriages ending in divorce. It has become so common for Protestants and Catholics that there is a great deal of confusion about the matter, and the Roman Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council has not provided much staunch teaching on the matter or much moral guidance like it did in prior centuries on issues such as this (Wilde).
Marriage in the Catholic tradition was traditionally held to have a primary purpose of begetting children for the regeneration of society. Indeed, one of the conditions for annulment—i.e., notification that the “marriage” never took place and thus two individuals were not bound by law to be together—was that the two had never engaged in sexual copulation. A refusal of one party to consent to the having of children would have been a major violation of the primary purpose of marriage in the Catholic tradition (Moore). While this condition may seem like an invasion of privacy to modern sensibilities, it points to the fact that the Catholic Church always viewed marriage as having as its intended aim the producing of children.
Naturally being unable to have children would have been a different matter altogether, and if a couple was unable to become pregnant that would not have been a condition for annulment. This was the problem that Henry VIII famously faced. Henry VIII had been a staunch Catholic and had even been given the title of Defender of the Faith by the Pope for his rebuttal to the arguments of the Protestant Martin Luther during the onset of the Protestant Reformation (Rankin). His issue was not on the Catholic Church’s teaching about the purpose of marriage. Rather, his issue was that the Roman Catholic Church would not give him the annulment from his first wife, which would have allowed him to legally and validly marry another woman. So Henry VIII appointed himself head of the Church in England and gave himself the power to annul his own marriages. It was all an act in legalism because it was not predicated upon any of the principles that had theoretically guided the Church up to that point. The Church had very clear principles upon which the decision for an annulment could be based and if those conditions were not met, theoretically, then an annulment was not possible. It was not a matter of divorce but rather a matter of determining whether the actual sacrament of marriage had been confected between the man and woman. If the Church judged that the sacrament had not been confected for whatever reason, then the “marriage” was annulled, meaning it was never lawfully sanctioned and therefore did not happen in the eyes of the Church.
Today, divorce has become commonplace because there is less respect among Catholics for the teachings of the traditional Church as a result of the innovations that have occurred in the Church since the 1960s. Indeed, there is not a lot of knowledge on this matter among Catholics, as the focus on doctrine has weakened substantially in the decades since the Council. Catholics tend to understand that they need an annulment from their first marriage if they divorce and want to be remarried, but the annulments today are not difficult to obtain and so many view the annulment process today as Catholic divorce even though, technically speaking, that is not what happens with an annulment—at least not traditionally.
Marriage today is also popularly believed to be primarily for the purpose of two people falling in love. It is popularly disconnected from the traditional primary purpose, which was the begetting of children. One reason for that is that birth control has become more accepted by much of society as normal and natural. Big families, which used to be common a century ago in Catholic families, and much less common today as many Roman Catholics view birth control as an acceptable practice even though it remains a condemned practice by the Church. The encyclical Humane Vitae by Paul VI was meant to reaffirm the Roman Catholic Church’s position on and condemnation of birth control, but the encyclical also adopted a soft stance and had a sympathetic tone towards those families who feel they would be overburdened by more children—and the encyclical left the window open for using some form of natural family planning in those cases where the economic toll would be viewed as too great for families. That has resulted in many Catholics now using birth control in some form or another to limit the size of their families.
Thus, for Roman Catholics marriage used to be accepted as a “sacrament which contains the promise of grace,” as Lawler puts it (78). However, it has become for many Catholics less sacramental and more merely social. Its understood purpose has been watered down by soft stances on the part of the Vatican since the 1960s. Today, the Roman Catholic Church emphasizes the “love” and “romance” aspect of marriage as though this were the primary purpose of it, which may be another reason why so many marriages fail today: love and romance are good for the movies, but in real life, people may need a bit more of something like “grace” to make it work. Works Cited