Question IV

GRATIAN. PART I. No one can take as wife the widow of his wife’s co-father. Hence Pope Nicholas writes to Solomon, bishop of Constance:

Your Holiness asks us whether any man can have two co-mothers, one after the other. In this matter he ought to remember that it is written: “The two shall be in one flesh.” Therefore, since it is established that a man and woman are made one flesh through marriage, it clearly follows that the man is constituted co-father of the woman whose co-mother the wife taken in marriage appeared to be. For that reason it is clear that the man cannot be joined in union to the woman who was co-mother of the woman with whom that same man had been made one flesh.

Likewise from the Council of Chalcedon. If a father and son, or two brothers, have lain with one woman; or if someone has lain with a mother and daughter, or with two sisters, or with two co-mothers, let him perform penance for eight years according to the ancient and more humane determination.

Likewise Innocent to Exsuperius, bishop of Toulouse. If either one of a married pair receives the son or daughter of another from the sacred font, holds the child for chrism, or imparts the mystery of Christianity, both wife and husband become coparents of the infant’s parents, because man and woman have been made one flesh.

PART II. GRATIAN. To the contrary it is found in the Council of Tribur, c. 47:

One who has a spiritual co-father, whose son he received from the washing of the sacred font, and whose wife is not his co-mother, may, after his co-father has died, take the widow as wife if she has no nearness of consanguinity. For what then? Can those whom no carnal kinship and no spiritual generation separates not be joined?

Likewise from the letter of Pope Paschal II to Bishop Reginus. No reason or authority appears to prohibit a surviving husband, after his wife’s death, from being joined in marriage with his wife’s co-mother. For spiritual kinship is not equated with kinship of the flesh, nor does one pass through the union of the flesh to union of the spirit.

PART III. GRATIAN. But it must be noted that it is one thing to know carnally someone’s co-mother and another thing for a woman left behind by someone to become someone’s co-mother. That authority of Pope Nicholas and of the Synod of Chalcedon prohibits from being joined in marriage to his wife’s co-mother the man who rendered the marital due to his wife after she became the co-mother of that woman. But that authority of the Council of Tribur permits those to be joined in marriage in the case where his wife, after she is left by her husband, becomes the co-mother of that woman, and is not known carnally by her husband after the relationship of coparenthood. It is asked, moreover, whether a wife ought together with her husband to receive a child in baptism. Concerning these matters Urban II writes thus to Vitalis, priest of Brescia:

That a wife ought not to receive a child in baptism with her husband is found to be prohibited by no authority. But so that the purity of spiritual paternity may be preserved immune from every blemish and infamy, we have decreed it worthy that both should by no means presume together to aspire to this. But because one who married two co-mothers or two sisters committed an expiable crime, great penance ought to be enjoined upon him according to the measure of the fault.

GRATIAN. But that saying of the Council of Tribur, “One who has a spiritual co-father, etc.,” is understood to have been said before this prohibition; or the wife is understood to be a co-mother not from the same child as the husband, but from another.