Most marriages today are invalid, Pope Francis suggests

Rome, Italy, Jun 16, 2016 / 02:56 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pope Francis said Thursday that the great majority of sacramental marriages today are not valid, because couples do not enter into them with a proper understanding of permanence and commitment.

“We live in a culture of the provisional,” the Pope said in impromptu remarks June 16. After addressing the Diocese of Rome’s pastoral congress, he held a question-and-answer session.

A layman asked about the “crisis of marriage” and how Catholics can help educate youth in love, help them learn about sacramental marriage, and help them overcome “their resistance, delusions and fears.”

The Pope answered from his own experience.



“I heard a bishop say some months ago that he met a boy that had finished his university studies, and said ‘I want to become a priest, but only for 10 years.’ It’s the culture of the provisional. And this happens everywhere, also in priestly life, in religious life,” he said.

“It’s provisional, and because of this the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null. Because they say “yes, for the rest of my life!” but they don’t know what they are saying. Because they have a different culture. They say it, they have good will, but they don’t know.”

He spoke of his encounter with a woman in Buenos Aires who “reproached” him. She said that priests study for the priesthood for years and can get permission to leave the priesthood to marry and have a family. For the laity, this woman said, “we have to do the sacrament for our entire lives, and indissolubly, to us laity they give four (marriage preparation) conferences, and this is for our entire life.”

Pope Francis said that marriage preparation is a problem, and that marital problems are also linked to social situations surrounding weddings.

He recounted his encounter with a man engaged to be married who was looking for a church that would complement his fiancée’s dress and would not be far from a restaurant.

“It’s social issue, and how do we change this? I don’t know,” the Pope said.

He noted that as Archbishop of Buenos Aires he had prohibited marriages in the case of “shotgun weddings” where the prospective bride was pregnant. He did this on the grounds there was a question of the spouses’ free consent to marry.

“Maybe they love each other, and I’ve seen there are beautiful cases where, after two or three years they got married,” he said. “And I saw them entering the church, father, mother and child in hand. But they knew well (what) they did.”



Pope Francis attributed the marriage crisis to people who “don’t know what the sacrament is” and don’t know “the beauty of the sacrament.”

“They don’t know that it’s indissoluble, they don’t know that it’s for your entire life. It’s hard,” the Pope said.

He added that a majority of couples attending marriage prep courses in Argentina typically cohabitated.

“They prefer to cohabitate, and this is a challenge, a task. Not to ask ‘why don’t you marry?’ No, to accompany, to wait, and to help them to mature, help fidelity to mature.”

He said that in Argentina’s northeast countryside, couples have a child and live together. They have a civil wedding when the child goes to school, and when they become grandparents they “get married religiously.”

“It’s a superstition, because marriage frightens the husband. It’s a superstition we have to overcome,” the Pope said. “I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity, but there are local superstitions, etc.”

“Marriage is the most difficult area of pastoral work,” he said

 

I am so shocked at reading this. And no doubt the Holy Father is saying what he has found in his Priestly life.

Surely if the Ten Commandments are taught and practised, girls and boys will learn 6th thou shalt not commit adultery and at an early age girls learn that a man won't buy a cow if he gets his milk for free.

 

Me too. I guess I have no idea what the current state of marriage and the priesthood is like outside of the United States. Just in speaking with young women here, I was shocked to hear that many think nothing is wrong with pornography. I used to think that it was a man's vice but now women are so deadened to the harm it causes that it is considered a relationship enhancer.

 

If most marriages were invalid then clearly the Sacrament of Marriage is a failure and we would be better doing away with it as a disasterous mockery.

However I do not believe most marriages are invalid, because as St Paul indicates and Vatican 2 affirmed that the moral law is written on men's hearts.

The Holy Father by what he said is taking an ax to the Sacrament of Marriage, cutting away its very foundations. I will not go into a rant about this. Either you believe what I write or not. Suffice to say that anyone who defends what the Holy Father said on this matter could only be morally insane.

I would never say the Holy Father himself is morally insane because that would not be a nice thing to do. But I do wonder. I really do.

Romans 2:14-16

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) 16 This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.


https://renewedhopeministry.com/2014/03/09/moral-conscience-gods-law-on-our-hearts/

In the depths of his conscience man detects a law which he does not impose on himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience can when necessary speak to his heart more specifically: ‘do this, shun that’. For man has in his heart a law written by God. To obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged (cf. Rom 2:14-16)” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes, 16).

 

https://w2.vatican.va/content/bened...ents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20090129_rota-romana.html

"First of all, there is a need for a new and positive appreciation of the capacity to marry belonging in principle to every human person by virtue of his or her very nature as a man or a woman. We tend in fact to risk falling into a kind of anthropological pessimism which, in the light of today’s cultural context, would consider marriage as practically impossible."
- Benedict XVI

They cannot both be right...

 

Now let me see if I can put this in a nutshell, in a way people can readily understand.

The Holy Father is saying the the large majority of Catholics who read this are not really married at all and that by definition your chidlren are illegitimate.

Now is this a good thing for the Pope to say or a bad thing? Does it support the sacrament of marriage or does it undercut it? Does it support the family of does it undercut the very floor on which the family stands?

Again no rants. I am beyond ranting. But it is as simple as that. I am flabbergasted. Appalled, horrified. Write the script yourself.

 

If no Cardinal speaks out agaisnt this , I give up. We are lost. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

 

In case you missed it, the pope also claimed,

“I’ve seen a lot of fidelity in these cohabitations, and I am sure that this is a real marriage, they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity, but there are local superstitions, etc.”

So now fornication and adultery create the real, actual grace of a sacramental marriage and in fact constitute, ipso facto, a real sacramental marriage? We're actually going to consider cohabitation to be a grace filled sacrament?!? And the only thing preventing it is "superstition"???

When can we raise the question of a pope embracing heresy and sacrilege and how to deal with it?

 

Just pray for the Pope, all the clergy and for the entire Church. Plenty of people here talk about the tribulation to come when in truth the tribulation has been here for years and the rate at which it is gathering pace is making us sit up and take notice. Sr. Lucy of Fatima nailed it in 2008: http://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=40873

CrewDog would say that it is all part of God's divine plan. I don't believe that it is God's plan for sacramental marriage to be relegated to history and replaced by any two people having sexual relations for longer than a few months, a few years or very many years so long as they don't plan on having sex with anyone else until one of them has a change of heart. Sadly, that's what supposed enlightenment has given us. God didn't plan it but he knew it would happen. It is the result of human failings and a culture of self-interest that the Church has failed to tackle for many years before Pope Francis was even a bishop.

This particular train wreck started way back in the days when a select few could afford to enlist the aid of canon lawyers to make their cases for annulments which scandalised many and eventually led to an annulment system that is well down the road to being little more than the "Catholic divorce" often mocked by non-Catholics. What we got was a gradual chipping away at the Sacrament until we have reached this stage where the Vicar of Christ is telling us that people who are not married have a real marriage with the grace of marriage.

What I'm seeing here is the second of a three part "pastoral development" regarding people in "irregular situations". The first was the remarried divorcees, the second is heterosexuals living together outside marriage, and the third will be homosexual unions. I'm surprised it is happening so fast. I thought it would take a few years of turning a blind eye to divorce before we got to this stage but perhaps the speed is required to test the waters before the third and most likely to be resisted development is adopted.

 

Comment I just saw from a priest:

"If it is sacramental it is valid. If it is invalid it's not Sacramental. That's precisely how the Church adjudicates a declaration of nullity, because it was not valid, which in the case of two baptized persons means that it was never a Sacrament.

"please, help me to understand. I'm not being cheeky. I honestly don't understand the statement "most sacramental marriages are invalid.""

 

Wow... Are we sure this isn't a bad translation / out of context?

 

Source: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/most-marriages-today-are-invalid-pope-francis-suggests-51752/

Context:
He was saying that a lot of couples get married civilly then after a couple years get their marriage blessed in the Church. So he's claiming that although greater than half of sacramental marriages are not valid, folks that get married first in a civil ceremony then sacramentally years later had a grace giving sacramental marriage all along.

Perfectly clear because everything this pope says is simple and easy to understand, according to some of his defenders here. Right?

 

The Pope is one who at least isn't hiding from the reality in most cultures these days. To pretend otherwise is rejecting the facts of the day and doesn't have a care for those so infected with this "diabolical disorientation" that they'll do nothing more to change the projection. There is definitely a fear (among so many fears these days....even of each other) of commitment. Cultures that are extremely poor with class systems leave even their traditionally raised men with fear of not being able to continue to support or live up to what is expected of him....esp. in "macho" cultures...so they hide this fear via having "families" outside of marriage without the emotional pressure. People have to experience such other cultures to speak to these realities. While the wealthier and more stable cultures were the main examples for good marriages in the past, even then those in those other conditions had the culture of mistresses on the side while being "married" at the same time.

This isn't something new....it's just that we have a non-European Pope who has had a totally different pastoral life serving in such poor, unstable, "superstitious" cultures which, btw, also must be served and understood because they too, believe it or not, are also loved in the same way as all by God. Children in such cultures are just trying to survive and don't even have time to attend catechism classes, often times few and far between anyway, to learn what the ideal is.....and girls fall for anyone who they think might be able to support them or give them more than they have. Is that a "marriage"?? Sometimes such an "arrangement" might last and show a devotion, but in such cultures if that happens usually such an "arrangement" is believed not then to need a religious anointing. Sorry, but those are the facts of such humiliating living standards and the Pope has every right and responsibility to recognize such lives of the poor. There may be the requisite ceremonies but there is no free willed total commitment. And he acknowledges the fault of the growing culture everywhere that forces a lack of that "forever" commitment. And that forced cultural ignorance influences the efficacy of the free will. It's becoming totally foreign to the young. The very fact that Pope Francis speaks to not anointing "shot gun" marriages shows how he respects the truth and sacredness of authentic marriage. How many priests could care less about the circumstances of the couples they agree to pronounce the anointing of marriage upon...esp. if they are wealthy and seem then at least to be economically prepared to maintain a household. And yet do those as well understand the forever commitment? I would say the divorce statistics or just the trend of living together these days describe such a fear of commitment and self sacrifice that the Pope is speaking to. People who are shocked by a Pope to actually recognize such reality look like those who pretended shock that there was gambling going on in the known back room gambling casino! Again, he's showing a truthful respect for authentic marriage in acknowledging the sham "marriages" and pretend "marriages" that have been only a facade. I doubt if he's speaking to those who would venture to a forum such as this one since they already have the prerequisites to know the truth of real marriage in God's eyes or have been formed in such families that show such examples to them. He, like the God he serves, is looking for ways to help people before it's too late whether others think it's worth while or not....or who expect the same kind of perfection from those whose shoes have not even been tried on (if they have shoes to begin with) much less walked in. Stop teaching only the legalisms and begin to treat the sickness of the cultural fears growing within the young that drive them to make wrong choices.

 

On the contrary, claiming a civil marriage is sacramental and capable of conferring grace is indeed something new. Fornication and adultery do not and cannot ever under any circumstances confer grace.

Notice the effort to paint dire situations which make "black and white" principles of Catholicism into anything but?

This attempt to replace hard and fast truth by an appeal to situational ethics was condemned by Pope BXVI when he rejected completely relativism as incompatible with the Faith.

This papacy has been a continual effort to enthrone the Jesuit model of situational ethics (moral relativism) in every segment of Catholic life.

 

I'm not so sure he is saying that. I think he is saying that couples who go though a civil marriage or who simply make private vows before God are conferring the Sacrament on each other which wouldn't be completely contrary to Church teaching. The marriages could be Sacramental but not valid in the eyes of the Church.

 

I don't beleive the teaching of the Church is that marriages outside of the Church are sacramental. Marriages between two Christians contain a supernatural reality which non Church mariages do not possess. That is why we call them Sacramental . They are outer signs of the supernatural reality. The danger is that we might blur the line between the two by supposing that thsi supernatural reality takes place in marriages inside and outside the Church, that they are in a sens both equivalent in some sense when they are not.

'A Supernatural Institution
In the Catholic Church, however, marriage is more than a natural institution; it was elevated by Christ Himself, in His participation in the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-11), to be one of the seven sacraments. A marriage between two Christians, therefore, has a supernatural element as well as a natural one.
While few Christians outside of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches regard marriage as a sacrament, the Catholic Church insists that marriage between any two baptized Christians, as long as it is entered into with the intention to contract a true marriage, is a sacrament'

The Mark and Effect of the Sacrament
The spouses are the ministers of the sacrament of marriage because the mark—the external sign—of the sacrament is not the wedding Mass or anything the priest might do but the marriage contract itself. This does not mean the wedding license that the couple receives from the state, but the vows that each spouse makes to the other. As long as each spouse intends to contract a true marriage, the sacrament is performed.
The effect of the sacrament is an increase in sanctifying grace for the spouses, a participation in the divine life of God Himself.
The Union of Christ and His Church
This sanctifying grace helps each spouse to help the other advance in holiness, and it helps them together to cooperate in God's plan of redemption by raising up children in the Faith.
In this way, sacramental marriage is more than a union of a man and a woman; it is, in fact, a type and symbol of the divine union between Christ, the Bridegroom, and His Church, the Bride. As married Christians, open to the creation of new life and committed to our mutual salvation, we participate not only in God's creative act but in the redemptive act of Christ.'

http://catholicism.about.com/od/beliefsteachings/p/Sac_Marriage.htm

When the HolyFather siad that, '..they have the grace of a real marriage because of their fidelity', he appears to me to be blurring the lines and implying that cohabitation has a sacrametnal effect, that these couples too partake in the supernatural reality of Sacremtnal Marriage when this is not of course the case.

The question of curse at once arises that if cohabiting couple spartake in these supernatural graes in the same way as those married in the CHurch then why go to the toruble of a CHurdch marriage in the first place?

 

How many people make private vows before God?

I would say it would be a very small number.

Neither is God mentioned in civil ceremonies as far as I am aware.

I call civil marriages 'paper' marriages because people sign their names in pen on an earthly parchment. And paper can be easily torn up.

Without God then you have a bad marriage in my opinion because you ignore the author of marriage if you do not include God.

But every sacramental marriage includes God. The couple make promises to God. So true marriage is trinitarian because it involves man, woman and God. This is the path to grace and holiness to include God and ask His blessings and grace so that the two can become one flesh.

4 And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?6 So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”7 They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?”
8 He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery.”10 His disciples said to Him, “If such is the case of the man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

 

The grace of the sacrament of Matrimony
1641 "By reason of their state in life and of their order, [Christian spouses] have their own special gifts in the People of God." [LG 11 # 2] This grace proper to the sacrament of Matrimony is intended to perfect the couple's love and to strengthen their indissoluble unity. By this grace they "help one another to attain holiness in their married life and in welcoming and educating their children." [LG 11 # 2; cf. LG 41]
1642 Christ is the source of this grace. "Just as of old God encountered his people with a covenant of love and fidelity, so our Savior, the spouse of the Church, now encounters Christian spouses through the sacrament of Matrimony." [GS 48 # 2] Christ dwells with them, gives them the strength to take up their crosses and so follow him, to rise again after they have fallen, to forgive one another, to bear one another's burdens, to "be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ," [Eph 5:21; cf. Gal 6:2] and to love one another with supernatural, tender, and fruitful love. In the joys of their love and family life he gives them here on earth a foretaste of the wedding feast of the Lamb:

How can I ever express the happiness of a marriage joined by the Church, strengthened by an offering, sealed by a blessing, announced by angels, and ratified by the Father?... How wonderful the bond between two believers, now one in hope, one in desire, one in discipline, one in the same service! They are both children of one Father and servants of the same Master, undivided in spirit and flesh, truly two in one flesh. Where the flesh is one, one also is the spirit. [Tertullian, Ad uxorem. 2, 8, 6-7: PL 1, 1412-1413; cf. FC 13]
​

The grace of the sacrament of Matrimony
1641 "By reason of their state in life and of their order, [Christian spouses] have their own special gifts in the People of God." [LG 11 # 2] This grace proper to the sacrament of Matrimony is intended to perfect the couple's love and to strengthen their indissoluble unity. By this grace they "help one another to attain holiness in their married life and in welcoming and educating their children." [LG 11 # 2; cf. LG 41]
1642 Christ is the source of this grace. "Just as of old God encountered his people with a covenant of love and fidelity, so our Savior, the spouse of the Church, now encounters Christian spouses through the sacrament of Matrimony." [GS 48 # 2] Christ dwells with them, gives them the strength to take up their crosses and so follow him, to rise again after they have fallen, to forgive one another, to bear one another's burdens, to "be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ," [Eph 5:21; cf. Gal 6:2] and to love one another with supernatural, tender, and fruitful love. In the joys of their love and family life he gives them here on earth a foretaste of the wedding feast of the Lamb:

How can I ever express the happiness of a marriage joined by the Church, strengthened by an offering, sealed by a blessing, announced by angels, and ratified by the Father?... How wonderful the bond between two believers, now one in hope, one in desire, one in discipline, one in the same service! They are both children of one Father and servants of the same Master, undivided in spirit and flesh, truly two in one flesh. Where the flesh is one, one also is the spirit. [Tertullian, Ad uxorem. 2, 8, 6-7: PL 1, 1412-1413; cf. FC 13]​

 

Anyone else in a state of shock?

I have woken this morning to this thread and feel I am in some sort of weird parallel universe.

Is this all really happening before our eyes? The dismantling of marriage.

What is next?

I suspect it will be the embracing of the rainbow alliance.

 

Well Bobby, I honestly hope I have misunderstood it all. As an ordinary Catholic layperson with no theological qualifications whatsoever I kind of feel, more than a little on a back foot. But I decided some time ago simply to og by common sense and my common snese tells me the whole thing is totally crazy.

I would love to hear the thoughts of someone like Cardinal Sarah or Burke, soemone I trust. Someone very learned and Holy. A Cardinal who stands in the shoes of the Apostles. But they seem so quiet. But they are in a difficult postion, I understand.

Like you I think I have travelled to Planet Bizarro.