When They Marry Outside the Church

We’ve just gone through an experience that I’m sure many other Catholic grandparents have been through: our granddaughter got married. And she didn’t do it in the Church.

I “just happened” to listen to a sermon on the Audio Sancto website shortly after the engagement was announced. (You can listen to the whole sermon here, and I’ve transcribed part of it below.) Near the end of the homily, the priest says:

And every year at this time of year, the phone rings off the hook, the calls keep pouring in. They go something like this: "Father we just got an invitation to a wedding. My son (daughter, nephew, niece, brother, sister, cousin, God son, God daughter) is a Catholic, but has decided to get married down at the First Church of What's Happening Now. Can we go to the wedding?"

I have to ask: Do they have a dispensation from the bishop?

"No Father."

 Well, I'm sorry to say then, you can't go. See, they've decided to not invite Christ to the wedding. And if they're gonna force you to make a choice, you're gonna have to choose Christ our Lord. They're not getting married, and as Catholics who love our Lord, we don't want to get involved in those kinds of situations...

Parents, tell your children that you love them, but they must obey the Church's marriage laws. And if they ever decide to disobey and force you to take sides, as much as you love them, if they're gonna force you to take sides, you're always gonna side with Christ Our Lord.  

We live quite a distance away, so I wrote our granddaughter a letter to explain that, even under the best of circumstances, I would not be attending the wedding, but also, and more importantly, that she was taking a step that would endanger her soul. I didn’t expect a reply; I just wanted to make sure she knew the gravity of the situation.

I did receive a reply via email, but it was a couple of weeks after the wedding. She told me that she could not have had a Catholic wedding because the young man was not Catholic and that  

the only way that I am “more Catholic”’ than him is that I was baptized in the Catholic church, received my First Holy Communion when I was young, and have gone to confession once, because we had to for CCD.

Cafeteria Catholics?

I shouldn’t have been surprised at what she said. The writing had been on the wall for some time. After all, most of her school years had been spent in a private Christian school – not a Catholic school, but a Protestant one.  She chose not to be confirmed. She also spent a year at a Protestant Bible college.  As for an example from her parents, her father has been a faithful Catholic, always attending Sunday Mass, as far as I know. But for years, her mother attended both Sunday Mass at their local parish as well as a nondenominational Protestant service; her mother also attends a Protestant Bible study and has been involved in the summer vacation bible school of a local Protestant church for a number of years; and her mother had told me a few years previous that she herself was not “a strict Catholic”, and said things that left me feeling sad and wondering how it was that a cradle Catholic could be sucked into Protestantism.  Another of my husband’s sons had married outside the Church, and our granddaughter had participated in that “wedding”.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course.

RE Class

And where was the Church in all this? I think this is a clear example of the failure of the Church to catechize the parents as well as the children. If the parents weren’t properly catechized as they were growing up, then how can they pass the faith on to their children? I imagine that, more and more, Catholic parents in the last 50 years have come to rely on weekly, one-hour “CCD” or “RE” classes to teach their children the faith, all the while sending their children to public school (or even Protestant schools). One hour a week of fluffy RE, combined with Mass attendance on Sunday (if that), will not inoculate the young against the feel-good theology of Protestantism. Catholic schools these days seem to be wanting in the quality of their catechesis as well – sometimes for fear of offending their non-Catholic students (or the parents of these students). Then there is the problem of the  Protestantization of the Mass; and the fact that many Catholic priests are preaching sermons devoid of Catholic identity; and that few Catholics are willing to say, as Michael Voris does, that Protestantism is a heresy…

Sigh.

Our granddaughter also wanted to know:

Since we are equally matched with a love and passion for God, faithful to His command of sexual purity, and regularly attend and enjoy being involved in church, why is our decision to get married outside of the Catholic Church considered a grave sin?

Yes, thank God, they did not live together before marriage, nor surrender their purity. And yet, she seems to have an incomplete understanding of what marriage means. If she’d been married in the Church, she and her fiancé would at least have gone through some pre-marriage classes (though, seriously, I have little confidence in such things these days). I wonder if she would have heard the definition of marriage the FSSP priest gives in his sermon:

[What do we mean by the marriage contract?] A man and a woman give and accept an exclusive and perpetual right for acts which are of themselves suitable for the generation of children. That's the marriage contract; if it's properly made, validly made, then this contract results in a relationship known as marriage. The man and the woman make the contract; if it's properly made, God makes the relationship, which is marriage...

…[T]hey've just been given not only God's permission, but His blessing, His actual blessing at that moment, to use the great creative power. They may use this great power on the condition that the acts are of themselves suitable for the generation of children, so that tells us God's limits on the power, right there. They use it on the condition that these rights are exclusive, which means that each partner uses these rights exclusively to the other partner; that shows the unity of the relationship. And on the condition that each partner yields these rights perpetually, till death do us part. And that shows the indissolubility of the relationship.

…It's important to note this: if the couple did not make a valid contract, then the relationship does not come into being. In other words, they weren't actually married.

The priest goes on to explain about the canonical requirements of marriage:

The canonical form of marriage means that in order to be valid, the marriage must be contracted in the presence of two witnesses and also in the presence of the local bishop or the parish priest, or a priest or a deacon with delegation from the bishop or the parish priest. The basic idea here is, if you're Catholic, the Church requires you to have a Catholic wedding…

…See here's the problem. If a Catholic guy and his girlfriend get a wild idea to go to the local justice of the peace or over to the First Church of What's Happenin' Now, and stand up there in front of everybody and exchange vows, it's not valid. That's another way of saying nothing happened. They came in as boyfriend and girlfriend, and they left as boyfriend and girlfriend. They don't actually leave as man and wife. They're not married.

Would she have been taught this kind of thing in a pre-marriage class? Having never attended one myself, I have no idea. And would our granddaughter have been made aware of the wonderful symbolism of the wedding Mass itself? (See my transcription of a homily by this same priest on that subject here).

Does anyone make sure our Catholic kids know this stuff? Well, parents have the first responsibility to make sure this happens, of course. But they’re getting very little help, support, or encouragement from the Church!

And that, dear readers, is why we need to know our faith. That is why we need to pass our faith onto our children first-hand, us to them, not relying on the local parish RE program which may be under the influence of a modernist, liberal, progressive Protestantized RE director. Our Catholic identity is important. It is unique. It is different from a Protestant identity! Our children need to know this, and they need to know it at more than a second-grade level.

And, as parents (and grandparents, and godparents), so do we.

Take to heart these words which I enjoin on you today. Drill them into your children. Speak of them at home and abroad, whether you are busy or at rest. (Deuteronomy 6:6-7)

Click "read more" to see the transcript.