Question: At my parish, we were blessed to have several adults baptized and enter into full communion with the Church this past Easter. But my question is, what happens with their marriages? Doesn’t a married person need their marriage blessed or “convalidated” once they become Catholic?
Answer: The short answer is that for most already-married people entering the Catholic Church, their marriage vows essentially “carry over” with them, and they don’t need to do anything special to have their marriage recognized by the Church.
As Catholics, we believe that “the marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of their whole life, and which of its own very nature is ordered to the well-being of the spouses and to the procreation and upbringing of children, has, between the baptized, been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament” (Code of Canon Law, Canon 1055, 1).
Still, marriage as an institution is as old as humanity itself and as such predates Jesus’ time on earth. Consequently, a person does not need to be Catholic or even Christian to have a valid marriage, provided that in their matrimonial consent they committed themselves to a union that would broadly match our Catholic understanding of marriage: namely, as a permanent, faithful, and exclusive union ordered fundamentally towards children and family life.
A marriage between non-baptized persons, or between one baptized and one non-baptized person, is called a “natural marriage.” In some cases this might be referred to as a “merely natural” marriage, to distinguish it from a sacramental marriage bond between Christians. A merely natural marriage is presumed valid and binding to a similar degree as a sacramental one.
Only Catholics are bound to “canonical form,” or marrying in a Catholic religious context for validity (See Canon 1108). Non-Catholics, even baptized non-Catholic Christians, for the most part do not have the requirement of marrying in any kind of religious ceremony. So, a non-Catholic could marry validly even in a purely secular ceremony before a justice of the peace – just as long as, once again, they intended to marry according to our basic understanding of what marriage is.
Where things sometimes get complicated are situations where the person who wishes to enter the Catholic Church is in a marital union that cannot be presumed valid. For instance, if a non-Catholic was divorced and remarried, we would presume the validity of the original marriage rather than the second and current union. A person in this situation would most likely need to approach the local marriage tribunal before they could progress further in their journey towards full communion.
But usually, these sorts of sensitive pastoral situations are hopefully resolved while the person is still being prepared to enter the Church.
Question: Some of my non-Catholic friends say that most of the Gospel is made up, as the earliest records show Jesus survived the crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene and moved away, leaving his disciples to carry on their new religious movement. They say the Church was well aware of all of this, but covered it up. I’ve never heard anything like this. Could you comment? (Indiana)
Answer: I have heard various statements like this in different contexts as attempts to supposedly refute Christianity. But in my mind, a basic knowledge of history and a bit of logical, common-sense reasoning makes such assertions seem far less plausible.
First of all, when your friends refer to “the earliest records,” my guess is that they are not specifying exactly which writings they have in mind. This is because the books and letters of the New Testament, as well as some of the writings of the early Church Fathers, are actually our “earliest records” with respect to Christianity.
The New Testament is generally considered to have been written roughly between the years A.D. 40-100, within the lifespan or at least the living memory of the apostles who knew Jesus while he still walked the earth.
While there are some pseudo-Gospels (like the so-called “Gospel of Thomas”) from the ancient world which describe radically different and often more fanciful versions of Jesus’ life story, these were not included in the compilation that would ultimately become the Christian Bible for a very good reason.
Namely, because the Fathers of the Church – who were much closer in time to Jesus’ earthly life than we are now – discerned that these works were not historically accurate.
Perhaps this discernment might be construed as “knowing and covering it up,” but I think that’s a bit of a stretch. In the Church’s early centuries there were many spurious Gospel-themed accounts in existence, but they had roughly the same status as “fan fiction” today.
Furthermore, aside from Judas, all of the original Apostles and many of the early popes and bishops either died as martyrs for the faith or endured comparable levels of persecution. It seems unlikely that these men would have been willing to suffer so intensely and give up so much if they themselves did not sincerely believe in the truth of what they were professing.
What would have been the Apostles’ motivation for making up a new religion if it meant that they had everything to lose but nothing in this world to gain?
The idea that Jesus survived the crucifixion seems improbable from a purely historical perspective, since it’s well known to historians that the Romans were very effective executioners.
The Gospel accounts themselves do not describe Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances as being emblematic of someone who suffered brutally but recovered. Rather, the Gospels describe Jesus as having been resurrected, brought from real death into a radically new kind of life. For example, the resurrected Jesus is able to enter locked rooms (Jn 20:19) and disappear in an instant (Lk 24:31).
Finally, if Jesus had been married in the normal human way, there would have been no reason for the Gospels to hide this fact. Marriage was generally understood in Jesus’ culture as the normal way of serving God and growing in holiness. The idea of celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven is something novel that Jesus introduces in the Gospels.
The Church does not teach that Jesus was holy because he was celibate; rather, the Church teaches that evangelical celibacy is holy because this was the new way of life that Jesus freely chose for himself.
Jenna Marie Cooper, who holds a licentiate in canon law, is a consecrated virgin and a canonist whose column appears weekly at OSV News. Send your questions to [email protected].