Au In the beginning was the Word
 

1. - Questioning continues, in one or other way, in our time: What is marriage and the sacrament of marriage?. Is the Christian marriage a signal for the world?. Is God’s original project obscured?.  Is divorce licit in any case?.  Which is Jesus position?. What does it mean to marry in the Lord?

2. - In the first centuries, it is said in the Letter to Diogneto (in the middle of the II century), Christians marry like everybody else, for instance, in the Jewish or in the roman way. They accept the imperial law, as long as they do not go against the Gospel. Wedding is celebrated in the Lord (1 Co 7,39), like any other event in the life, in the community, without any special ceremony.

3. - In the Jewish world (se Gn 24; Tb 7,9; Jn 2,1.12) the wedding is a familiar business. It is not celebrated in the synagogue, but at home. Celebration includes prayer and blessing. The fiancés or spouses (from the latin sponsus, from spondere, to solemnly promise) are mutually compromised (Dt 22,23; Mt 1, 18).

4. - In the roman world three ways of engaging in marriage are contemplated. The confarreactio (with wedding pie), the oldest way, includes ceremonies with legal and religious character. In the imperial epoch this type of union hardly takes place. The actual way to engage is the coemptio (a rite symbolizing the wife purchase) and the usus (use, simply cohabitation after the mutual marriage consent). The consent (consensus) constitutes the essential point of the marriage engagement. The Digesta says: “It is not the sexual union what constitutes the marriage, but the consent”. (35,1,13). As such, no particular rite neither a magistrate presence is required. Civil power only adds the acknowledgment of the marriage existence and, in some way, the protection of the marriage consent with certain conditions.

5. - Saint Ignatius of Antioch (about year 107) invites the Christians to marry “with the bishop’s knowledge, in order to have a marriage in agreement with the Lord and not only by desire” (A. Policarpo 5,2). Tertulianus (about 160-220) comments the grace to marry in the Lord: “ How will we be able to exalt so great happiness that a wedding like that, a marriage that unites the church, confirmed by the oblation, marked by the blessing, announced by the angels, ratified by the Father?…. The two children of the same Father, servers of only one God; nothing separates them, neither the spirit nor the flesh” (Ad uxorem 2,9).

6. - From the century IV to the XI the ecclesial character of the wedding celebration is underlined and it is well established that ceremonies are not compulsory to validate the union. The first testimony that talks about a nuptial blessing truly liturgical comes from pope Damasus epoch (366 – 384) and it is found in the works of the False-Ambrose. The deep influence of the roman right is shown, according with which only the consent is strictly necessary for the wedding, whatever be its way of achievement. Pope Nicholas I (year 866) says to the Bulgarians who consult him over the essential way of the marriage: “It is enough, according to the laws, the mere consent of those which its union takes place. In the marriage, if that mere consent is missing, any other thing, even celebrated with coitus, has no meaning” (DS 643)

7. - It is in the following centuries when the church claims lawful competence on the weddings and establishes that the consent and the consequent delivery of the nuptial token shall expressly take place in the presence of the priest (centuries IX – XI), in the church or, more often, at the church’s gate, like several rituals of the centuries XI – XIV indicate. With that, what in previous times was executed by the father or the tutor, is now performed by the priest, with formulas like the following: “ I deliver to you N. like spouse” (Meaux ritual), and “I unite you in marriage” (Trent Council, Roman Ritual).

8. - The II Letran Council (1193) includes marriage among the seven sacraments. The Trent Council, reacting against the reformers asserts, defends, not only the sacramental character of the Christian marriage, but also the right of the church to regulate it, proposing a uniform canonical way, to guarantee the validity or the sacrament and to avoid its clandestineness and impediments. Roman Ritual (1614) meant the codification of the medieval practices of the marriage celebrated before the Church, taking into account the laudable practices and customs of the several regions.

9. - In the old Canonical Code (1917) the marriage´s canonical form is imposed to the baptized or admitted in the Catholic Church, although, afterwards, they had left it (c. 1909). In the new Canonical Code (1983), the formal abandonment carries with it lack of compulsion of the canonical way, when the two contracting parts found themselves in this situation; given that, marriage contracted by them without a canonical form, will be, before the church, a true marriage if it has the due conditions (c. 1117).

10. - The II nd Vatican Council requests to revise the wedding rite in order to better express the sacrament grace and the duties of the spouses (SC 77). The new Marriage Ritual (1969 and 1990), articulates its formulation, in or out the Mass, in the frame of the Word celebration, in four moments: the questions, the consent, the blessing and delivery of the rings, the faithfuls prayer. The traditional blessing prayer of the wife is extended to the husband.

11. - The Gospel sends us to the original God’s project. According to it, husband and wife are called to become one flesh (Gn 2,24). Such is the paradisiacal and original marriage figure in a world that, when coming out of God’s hands, is good, human and habitable, a garden (2,8). Relationship between husband and wife is harmonious and transparent: both the man and his wife were naked and were not ashamed (2,25). Diversity and reciprocity of man and woman are presented like God’s image (1,27); fertility, like a blessing: Be fruitful and increase in number (1,28); conjugal love, like loneliness redemption: I will give him a helper (2,18). Nevertheless, something very deep provokes the loss of this figure, the malediction, disaffection, segregation, abandonment.

12. - Gn 3 narration is applicable to any couple. It is also for to day. Man and woman, in its deepest mistake, avoid God’s presence. They hide themselves. God uses to walk through the human history garden. But they believe that God is not interesting in order to live, that God in envious, enemy of their happiness and of his life: Your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil (3,5). God appears not only like an illusion, but also like a lie, an oppression of which is necessary to get free. So that, the couple rejects God, but with this action the only thing they get is to close themselves the way driving to the tree of life (3,24). They stay out of the garden, out of the wonderful world, full of happiness and life, which God had created for them. Alliance rupture between both is already shown in the accusation (3,12). Own responsibility is not assumed. Love relationship is transformed in a strength  a domination relationship. Woman does not feel herself like the home queen, but its slave. She lives maternity like a weight, with pain. Work world appears like hard, spiny, slavish. Before the fact of the death husband and wife become hopeless.

13. - In the biblical experience, marriage is God’s word, from whom all true love comes. Love can originate under apparently incidental circumstances, but in which the believer acknowledges God’s hand. Abraham’s messenger follows this path, according with the epoch’s practices, when he is sent to negotiate Isaac’s wedding with Rebecca: He blesses the Lord, who placed him in the good path (Gn 24,48). This is also done by the fiancée family: “This is God’s doing”(24,50). The same happens with Tobias. Tobias is a exile. His meeting with Sara, providential. Distance between both, immense. The way, very long and risky. Rafael’s mediation cannot be paid with money (Tb 12,2). God recommends marriage: God will bless you and may give you his mercy and peace (7,12). It is sung in Psalm 127: Unless God builds the house, in vain do its builder stay wake.

14. - Gospel contemplates the marriage under original God’s project perspective. Conjugal union is love’s alliance. Man has now to leave father and mother, and be joined to his wife and the two will become one body. (Mt 19,5). Jesus gives back to the marriage original perfection, he charges against the evil in its root. The matter is not only to avoid committing adultery (Ex 20,14), but to love each other with all the heart and for ever, with a love that no flood can extinguish (Song 8,6-7). Fidelity is a heart’s problem. The heart is the root that needs to be cured. (Mt 15, 19-20). If it is done in this way, the couple will be a signal in the middle of the world. And it will be said: Look, those does not divorce, his love does not die.

15. - To Jesus, any marriage is indissoluble. It is written in the prophets: Do not betray the wife of your youth. I hate divorce. (Mal 2,15-16). John the Baptist, paid with his life to tell Herod: It is not right for you to live with your brother’s wife (Mk 6,18). At that time, like now, divorce problem is critical. The Old Testament recognizes it (Dt 24,1). Discussion on which cases it can be applied takes place in the two large schools of the epoch. That of Rabin Shammai admits divorce only in case of adultery; Hillel school adds: “ and due to any other thing that can disturb the husband”. This said, Jesus calls to conversion to those who does not accept indissolubility, but he does not annul the marriage.

16. - To test him, id est, to verify that he teaches the official doctrine, some Pharisees ask him: Is a man allowed to divorce his wife for whatever reason?; Jesus refers to God´s original project: Let not one separate what God has joined (Mt 19,6). The Pharisees reply: Then, why did Moses command us to write a bill of dismissal in order to divorce? Jesus replied: Mosses knew your stubborn hear, so he allowed you to divorce your wives, but was not so in the beginning. Therefore, I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, unless it be for infidelity, and marries another, commits adultery. (Mt 19, 8-9). Infidelity (in greek, porneia) is referred to illegal unions, forbidden by the law (see Lv 18-19 and Acts 15,22-29). Disciples understand, with difficulty that for Jesus there is not any exception. So, they say to him: If that is the condition of a married man, it is better not to marry. Jesus tells them: Not everybody understand what you have just said, but only those who have received this gift (Mt 19, 10-11).

17.-   There is not any exception in Mark’s evangel either (Mk 10, 11-12). Same happens in Luke´s evangel. The man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and the man who marries a woman divorced by her husband also commits adultery. (Lk 16,18). In John’s evangel Jesus says to the Samaritan woman: You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband (Jn 4, 18), On his part, Paul summarizes Jesus position like follows: I command married couples (not I but the Lord) that the wife should not separate from her husband. If she separates from him, let her not marry again, or let her make peace with her husband. Similarly, the husband should not divorce his wife.  (1Co 7, 10-11).

18. - And what about the so called Pauline exception?. The first author who interprets Paul’s passage (1 Co 7, 12-16) like “Pauline exception” is the pseudo-Ambrose, at the end of the IV century. The ascription to Saint Ambrose (and to saint Gregory Magnus) of such interpretation favoured its introduction in the western Church. Pope Innocent III, at the end of century XII, recognizes it officially. But Saint Paul only speaks of the possibility of a new marriage in case of death of one of the consorts. (1Co 5,38; see CDC, cc. 1141.1150).  If problems of difference in faith are present, Saint Paul exhorts to the part that is a believer to avoid initiating the separation, since the believer sanctifies the other consort. Said in other words, your children (not baptized) would be impure, but now they are saints. But, if the non-believer part wants separation, let him do it, since the brother or sister are not slaves (translation of saint Jerome, century IV). The purpose is not to bear a slavery condition: the Lord called us to live in peace. Saint Paul exhortation ends: since, do you know, woman, if you will save your husband? And what do you know, husband, if you will save your wife?.

19. - Hermas in his Pastor shows that for the Church of the Ist century and the beginning of the IInd repudiation declared licit by the Jewish is a separation after which new marriage would be adultery. During first centuries, adultery means communion rupture, it is to say, rupture of the relationship with the community (1Co 5,9-11). Community follows the Gospel: it is not imposed upon anyone; it is there for those who wish to follow it. And the rest?. Saint Paul says: Why am I going to judge to people outside the community? Are not those in the community the ones that you judge? The outsiders, God will judge them. (1Co5,12-13).

20. - Large Christian churches are tested against Jesus message: do they overcome it? Or, better, do they annul God’s word with their own tradition?. For instance, Gregory Naciancenus, Constantinople bishop (330-390), maintains the “condescendence” proper of Eastern Church: “First marriage is according to the law, the second is tolerance and indulgence, the third is evil” (PG 36, col.292). Secular practice of the eastern Churches dissolves marriage due to adultery and other causes. Mathew sentence is bad interpreted (19,9). Divorce sentence is pronounced “in virtue of the sacred canons and the imperial laws” In the Reformation churches, divorce because of adultery or abandonment is admitted. And among us, certain canonical practices remember those of the rabbinic schools of Jesus times and reveal a lack of conversion to the Gospel.

21. - According to Vatican Council II, the innermost conjugal community of life and love is established by the matrimonial alliance, it is to say, by the couple personal and irrevocable consent: “From the human act, by which the spouses mutually give and receive themselves, is born, even before the society, an institution confirmed by the divine law. This sacred bond, in attention to the couple and the children goodness, as well as that of the society, does not depend of the human free will” (GS 48). Love between husband and wife is manifested “in several ways according to the honest practices of the people and the times”(GS 49)

22. - Normal marriage is elevated by Christ to sacrament. Christ comes out to the meeting of the Christian spouses and stays with them so that they love each other with fidelity and to strengthen their mission like spouses and parents (GS 48) The Lord comes to heal their love and to improve it “with the special gift of the grace and the charity” (GS 49). Such love overcomes the purely erotic dimension. The Eros is not able to maintain for a long time any human relationship, unless that, when it shuts up, other forces support it: the forces of fidelity, love, trust.

23. - Christ sacrament is lived in community. Christ makes himself one flesh with it: This is a very great mystery, and I refer to Christ and the Church (Eph 5,32). It is in a community where it is easier to live in the Lord the original God’s project upon husband and wife. It is in a community where it is easier to acknowledge the living God who walks by this world garden. It is in a community where the faith in ordinary life is fed. The spouses can unite to others “friendly associations” to help each other (PO6). With his fidelity and love, the couple evangelise among a society that suffers the “divorce epidemic” (GS47).

24. - The decision upon the number of children corresponds to the couple. It is a matter of responsible parenthood. The spouses “are co-operators of the Lord Creator’s love and his interpreters”. So, they will accomplish his mission with human and Christian responsibility, and with mild reverence towards God they will both strengthen, in common agreement and effort, to assume a right judgement, taking care of its own personal good and also that of their children, already born or still to come, discerning material and spiritual times circumstances and life situation, and, finally, taking into account the goodness of familiar community, temporal society and the Church”. The spouses “may find themselves in situations in which the number of children, at least for some time, can not be incremented”, “there are some that dare to give immoral solutions to these problems”, “life from its conception must be safeguarded with extreme care; abortion and infanticide are execrable crimes” (GS50-51).

25. - Certain matters that needed a more diligent investigation were entrusted by Paul VI to a Commission for Population, Family and Natality Studies, so that, when it finished its task, the Pope could deliver his judgement. During its study, the Commission, composed by 75 experts (theologians, moralists, doctors, psychologists, sociologists, married couples), resided in the Spanish College in Rome. The Commission slowly carried out its task.  At the end, the majority judged that natality artificial control had the same morality that natural control, with the basic condition of not being abortive or that clinically it were not counter indicated (because of causing any damage to the woman or the fetus).

26. - One aspect is the Genesis general commandment: Be fruitful and increase in number (Gn 1,28) – or a prophetic call to the countries growing old due to its scarce natality – and a very different thing is the principle according to which any matrimonial sexual act must be open to fecundation; if it is not made so, “a grave fault” is committed (Pius XII, Casti Connubii, 1930, DS 3717; see Pius XII, Speech to the Congress of the Italian Union Matrons, AAS 43, 1951, 835 – 854). According to this principle, natural control (once known by the science) should be forbidden too, since it has the same purpose. But this is not what Saint Paul says, when he establishes an ample criterion upon sexual relationship of a married couple: The wife is not the owner of her own body: the husband is. Similarly the husband is not the owner of his own body: the wife is. (1 Co 7,4).

27. - Rigorism of the conservative position (they prepare heavy burdens: Mt23,4) could be understood if the old Aristotle biology were still professed, stating that masculine semen would contain the whole possible man (homunculus), while the woman would be passive in the generation (she would be only “reception container”). If this were so, any matrimonial sexual act closed to conception could be compared to abortion. But we now know that new human being begins with the feminine ovule fecundation.

28. - The 25th of July 1968, Paul VI published the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, choosing the minority position and accepting only natural control. Deception was great, since other thing was expected. In a pastoral letter, the bishop Luciani, later pope John Paul I, said to the people of his dioceses: “I confess that, although without writing it, I had an intimate hope that the existing very grave difficulties could be overcome and that master’s answer, who talks with special charisma in the name of the Lord, could agree, at least in part, with the hopes of many married couples, once constituted an adequate pontifical commission to examine the matter” (29-7-1968).

29. - It is evident an evolution about marriage fecundity. If in a given moment the greatest worry was referred to the techniques legitimacy (which way could we use to avoid having more children?), programming exigency is advancing (do we have a child now or is it better to wait?), together with the apparition of another ways of fecundation, such us adoption, reception, social activity, collaboration servicing the Gospel (such us Aquila and Priscilla, Acts 18,2-3).

30. - Religious marriage is requested by people in very diverse situations: “It is convenient to separate those persons with a living faith (personal, active), from others with a superficial faith (infantile, inherited, non-personal), and also from those dechristianized (that have lost the faith or it has no influence in their life). These circumstances can be present in a couple, in equal or different form in each one of them, creating complex situations that must be taken into account in the celebration and in the previous catechesis” (RM 10)

31. - Like in Cana, we can count on Jesus presence and to do what he tell us to do (Jn 2,1-12). We can celebrate the wedding with ancient wine, law symbol. The wine is perhaps scarce and it is finished during the banquet. We can be referred to the purifications tinajas. It can appear, in some way, the obsession for the guilt or the necessary purification. The tinajas can be empty (the old ritual does not work) and it is necessary to fill them for the water bath and the word (Eph 5,26). Finally, we can see water transformation into wine, true Gospel signal.