Sacrament of Marriage

The Sacramental system is fundamental to Catholic theology (which we believe was given by Christ).

The Catholic way is to sanctify ordinary, Earthly things and raise them – or ‘interface’ them – with the Supernatural.

My pet cat mates. Angels do not ‘marry or be given in marriage’; unbaptised human beings unite the two worlds: as C.S.Lewis writes, to cats and dogs, we are supernatural. We have a whole world that they cannot see, even though we live on the same world. There is a dimension to human love that dogs cannot imagine. And yet, as Lewis wryly remarks, a Puritan dog would be shocked to learn how we actually produce new offspring.

But Sacramental marriage takes us one step beyond that again. Through the Graces given to the Church from Christ, an extra donation of Grace is given to the couple who enter Sacramental Matrimony: the Grace of State, which helps us through the difficult times, and sanctifies the entire project, of marriage.

The validity of the marriage, however, does not depend upon the feelings of the spouses. Among other things, it is a social contract like many others, involving identity, property and inheritance. In fact it is a remarkable union of the Lower and the Higher, of the intimately personal and of the social fabric.

In marriage, a family lives out the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity in a very direct way. In the Marriage Act the eternal Designs of God the Father are realised: the immortal souls are brought into the world whom God had predestined from all eternity, yet contingent on the exercise of free will on the part of the spouses. That is why artificial contraception, in frustrating the Divinely established Natural Order, has no place in marriage (or anywhere else).

Because Sacramental Marriage produces a real, although mysterious, unity between the spouses, it cannot be dissolved before death. That is why legal separation may be tolerated for the greater good, but not divorce.

Because marriage impinges on our deepest feelings and motivations, it is considered ‘the Normal Means of sanctification’ for most. At the same time, it leaves the couple open to great upset if things go wrong. Hence the proverb ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure’. Yet ‘Marriage is no more unhappy than life is unhappy’.

Protestants, rejecting the priestly hierarchy, reject the entire concept of the Sacraments in daily life.

There are details in the integral Catholic life that have been forgotten in the English-speaking world, from whom the Faith was effectively exterminated in the 16th and 17th centuries (we have a proverb: ‘It took the English a hundred years to realise that they had lost the Faith’). One such Catholic practice, for which there is a prescribed prayer in the Roman Ritual, is The Blessing of the marriage bed!

Not to mention that the Catholic priest does not say, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’. He is merely an accredited observer: it is the bride and groom who are ‘the Ministers of the Sacrament’: it is they who effect the marriage.

(That is why a man and woman, if they are very isolated, may in extreme circumstances, pronounce the Vows all alone. They are now married in the sight of God. This is normally forbidden, to prevent one partner from simply denying it afterwards).

Protestants have secularised, and hence trivialised, the whole life of the Christian. The Faith is a book with an unfathomable number of pages to turn. The Protestants stop on page one.