The Matter Briefly Summarized

69 bis. To contract into a few words the things which it has pleased us to debate sincerely, from the sole pursuit of truth, we judge that the question concerning the natural capacity for marriage of those who labor under perpetual sterility, or in whom there is a perpetual cause why they lack offspring or why their copulations are infertile, can be resolved only with difficulty a priori, as they say, or by mere reasoning. If the end, not only primary but sole, of the institution of matrimony or of conjugal copulation were the procreation of children, every copulation of those who are unable to generate offspring would have to be called disordered (or referable to no honorable end), and consequently, as the Reverend Father Arendt says most excellently, the matrimonial contract would lack an essential object, almost as between two persons of the same sex. But now, since matrimony and its use complete the individual human being and are also a remedy for concupiscence, it is not repugnant to reason that matrimony be admitted between those who, capable of copulation but not of generation, can direct its use toward secondary ends. Yet it can also be conceived that access to matrimony is reserved only to those who, by using marriage, can also seriously intend the primary end. Who, then, will decide the dispute? Unless we are mistaken, only proven tradition. Now this has led us to our conclusions: a) the replies of the Holy See, which, to say the least, favor the marriage of an excised woman; b) the classical Doctors, who, almost down to our age, excluded from matrimony only those impotent for copulation; c) the marriage of aged persons of every age. Now the presumption in favor of capacity for copulation remains at every age; but the presumption of capacity for procreation is destroyed by a contrary natural presumption. The process of natural involution is such that: a) at a certain age, especially on the part of the woman, there is certainty, morally speaking in the strict sense, of impotence for generation - for example, a woman who marries at eighty years of age; b) even earlier, there exists a natural presumption against capacity. And what use is it to adduce the rarest cases in which conception has happened at an advanced age? Even if they are true, moral laws are founded upon those things which occur per se, not per accidens. Hence, if you object that a natural presumption is not destroyed except by contrary certainty, we shall deny it: it is destroyed also by a contrary natural presumption. c) The easier explanation of the use of marriage permitted at every time and granted also to those who are called impotent.

If we wish to compare the opinions with one another in the order in which we proposed them: a) In favor of the first, or more recent and stricter opinion, there is the perfectly logical process, or consistency in principles; but against it there are the perversion of the classical notion of sterility and the impediment of impotence, and opposition to the replies of the Holy See. b) The second opinion, which becomes more common day by day, can allege perfect congruence with the centuries-old notion of the impediment of impotence and with the replies of the Holy See. Against it can be objected a defect of consistency, since it dispenses the woman, but not the man, from an element which is essential to generation.

The opinion of the Reverend Father Arendt has this advantage, that it joins the fidelity of the traditional notion of impotence with the logical process of the first opinion. But it too labors in explaining the recent replies of the Holy See and the ancient Doctors, none of whom, certainly, thought to add to the words by which St. Bonaventure declares that a woman can be separated from her husband because of a defect of potency for intercourse, but not because of a defect of potency for generation, this distinction:

"I suppose the defect to arise from an accidental, not an organic, cause."

Nor can several practical opinions which are admitted by the supporters of Dr. Antonelli's system be approved by us. They call a eunuch impotent because he cannot supply sperm; but they call sterile a man who is not a eunuch and who can pour forth only fluid without sperm. They affirm that interruption of the vas deferens produces impotence if it results from section, but only sterility if it results from obstruction by which it is occluded. Gasparri, De matrimonio, I, no. 586, establishes the principle of sterility very differently.

Wherefore, all things having been considered, we think it must be said simply in this way, with every other distinction suppressed: All those who can truly perform natural carnal conjunction are capable of marriage on the part of the body. For through this conjunction performed in stable matrimony, sufficient provision is made for the fitting multiplication of the human race, although in some this effect is lacking. Bodies apt for copulation are the remote matter of the contract and of the Sacrament.