Case 21. Multiple Impediments

Caius, while his wife Caia was still living, attempted marriage in a Protestant church with Titia, a relative of Caia in the third collateral degree, who herself indeed was married. A few years afterwards, when both Caia and Titia’s husband had died, Titia approaches Thomas, a confessor, to set everything in order. During confession she relates that she lived as a concubine for an entire year with Sempronius, a relative of Caius in the second collateral degree, and bore him a son. Thomas therefore asks:

1. How many kinds of the impediment of crime are there; what conditions are required for incurring it; and when does it become double?

2. If an impediment public by itself but secret by accident is disclosed in the tribunal, must its relaxation follow the rules of the internal or external forum?

3. What dispensations are required in the case, and in which forum must the matter be treated?

4. What absolutions from censures must be given in the case?

[From cases to be solved in the Diocese of Liverpool, 1899–1900.]

1. What is the impediment of crime; what conditions are required for incurring it; and when is it double?

Generally the impediment of crime is said to be threefold; adultery, homicide, and both together. With adultery there must be a promise of marriage or attempted marriage with the adulterer; with homicide when committed by one party there must be physical or moral co-operation of the other party; when there is both adultery and homicide, the other conditions are not necessary that the impediment may exist between the parties. If both parties are married in the first case; if the spouses of both are killed in the second; and if in the third there is adultery with the promise of, or attempt at, marriage, and the machination of the other party in the homicide, there will be two impediments.¹

1 Manual of Moral Theology, vol. ii, 313.

2. If an impediment is per se public, but secret per accidens, ought its dispensation to follow the rules of the internal or external forum?

It should follow the rules of the external forum: “ It is received in common jurisprudence that an impediment is to be held altogether public which, although actually occult, can at any time be made public and proved.”²

2 Gasparri, De Matrim., vol. i, n. 251.

3. What dispensations are required in the case and in what forum should the case be treated?

Titia is the affinis of Caius in the third degree; we presume that the attempted marriage was consummated and so there is a double impediment of crime between them ( adulterium cum attentato matrimonio ); Titia is the affinis of Caius in the second degree on account of her illicit intercourse with Sempronius. All these facts are publicly known, so that the whole case must be treated in the external forum, and dispensations be obtained from the above impediments.

4. What absolutions from censures should be given in the case?

Caius and Titia incurred the censure of excommunication inflicted on heretics and their abettors on account of their attempting marriage in the Protestant Church, for to receive a sacrament in a non-Catholic place of worship is presumed to be an act of heresy. They will, then, need absolution from this censure.