"Many marriages are not good; they do not please Our Lord and are not of God." (Fatima) What was meant by this phrase? Whilst reading Pope Gregory's encyclical Marari Vos (1832) he defends sacramental marriage whilst warning against non-sacramental marriage - 12. Now the honorable marriage of Christians, which Paul calls “a great sacrament in Christ and the Church,”[15] demands our shared concern lest anything contrary to its sanctity and indissolubility is proposed. 'They should be aware that those marriages will have an unhappy end which are entered upon contrary to the discipline of the Church or without God’s favor or because of concupiscence alone, with no thought of the sacrament and of the mysteries signified by it'. I think here Pope Gregory is referring to all non-sacramental religious marriages and civil marriages. For example, in 1845 in Ireland a civil marriage law was introduced that meant that people could enter into a civil marriage outside of the Church context by getting married in a registry office (registry marriages in England from 1836 and Scotland from 1855). Now we have reached the absurd situtation where marriage is so denegrated that society allows abominable 'marriages' to take place. If our Blessed Lord and Our Lady were less than pleased in 1917 I think we can see the reasons why chastisement is coming for this 'perverse generation'.
A former priest in my parish put this quotation on his signboard: “If God isn’t in it, it isn’t a marriage.”
We need only count all the broken and abusive marriages to measure the truth of Pope Gregory's statement.
I have always felt in the modern era say after the sexual revolution, a very high number of marriages were not valid because young couples were not very Catholic, not very well catechized and very immature. I can speak personally to this with my own previous marriage. We didn't know anything even though we were raised in the church. We weren't practicing Catholics and yet were still married in the church. Our marriage was a disaster from the start and there was never much if any room for God in it. After 16 months of the annulment process, I was just annulled back in June on these exact grounds of too immature to be married and not properly educated to the beliefs of the church as to what marriage is. I am now engaged again to a wonderful Catholic woman who understands the importance of God at the center of everything. I even started off our marriage that way by proposing with just she and I in the adoration chapel have Jesus with us and involved from the start. We followed the proposal with confession, rosary and mass all in the same day. God will be always present in our soon to be marriage like He is supposed to be in all marriages.
