Dei via est íntegra
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Q&A Question: Several times you have referred to Vatican II "redefining marriage." Can you be more specific? and how can the Church "redefine" a Sacrament? Answer: The Church has no power to redefine the Sacraments instituted by Christ. Nonetheless, Vatican II and several post-conciliar pronouncements treated the Sacraments, and especially Marriage as though it had this power.1 Traditionally, the primary end of marriage is "the procreation and education of children." The conciliar document Gaudium et spes (on the Church in the Modern World), in the Council's characteristically ambiguous language speaks of Marriage as "a communion of life," and tells us that:
The concilliar re-definition of marriage remained thus ambiguous until Pope Paul VI rendered it more specific in his encyclical Humanæ vitæ. Many expected Pope Paul to promulgate the findings of the committee established by his predecessor, Pope John XXIII, and "permit" artificial birth control. The furror over his refusal to change this tenet of the Moral Law (which, of course, he had no power to do) seems to have drawn everyone's attention away from his assault on the Sacrament:
Accompanied by his usual existentialist jargon on "fundamental structures" and "the acting person" Pope John Paul II gives us:
Omitting the reference to a "primary end," the new Code
of Canon Law reflects the changes of the conciliar era:
Almost immediately, the re-definition of the Sacrament brought forth a number of new grounds on which the Conciliar Church will declare a marriage invalid from its inception and grant an annulment. Understand that the concept of an annulment is not new and can be legitimate. In the past annulments were rare -- perhaps 300 or so in a year for the entire Catholic Church. In the past they were granted either because it could be established either that (a) informed consent to the marriage had not been freely given, or (b) one or both parties were perpetually incapable of marital intercourse or perpetually unwilling to have children. But with the "unitive significance" always being mentioned on par with and prior to the "procreative significance," quite logically, a new ground for annulment was manufactured: (c) inability to live in union. This new "ground" for annulment is, of course, much more difficult to define and identify. Harder still is determining that it existed at the time of the marriage; absolutely necessary if the marriage is to be set aside as "invalid from its inception." (The Conciliar Church still holds that a valid sacramental marriage cannot be dissolved once consummated.) Some might contend that anything from leaving one's socks on the floor to wife-beating is evidence of an "inability to live in union." The "evidence" most generally come in the form of "expert testimony" about the mental state and maturity of the parties -- certainly subjective at best, particularly with regard to dating the onset of the condition relative to the date of the marriage. Not surprisingly, the annulment rate is up from a few hundred a year to fifty or sixty thousand or so. Even when the United States are excluded from the calculation, the world figure is in the ten or twenty thousand range. Some years ago, Father was asked "what comes next? -- where is the Church going with this in the future. His answer was "homosexual 'marriage.'" Most who heard that answer informed him that he was crazy. Well, to be sure, not even the Consiliar Church has gone that far yet, but an interesting piece in a recent Newsweek, discussing the scandal of homosexual priests, shows how the thinking of Catholics has been effected:
Now Catholicism is not defined by polls, and not even by the editors of Newsweek, but it will be left to the reader to determine where the writers might have gotten the idea that the purpose of marriage may be "unitive" as much or even more than it is "procreative." Q&A Notes:
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