Man's Part in Marriage

It has the very noble part of giving rise to every particular marriage. Every marriage is created by mutual consent, and that consent no other human power can supply. (Canon 1081, §1.)

It must be free. Each of the two parties must really wish to contract marriage, and to contract it with a certain determinate person.

If the consent were given under the influence of grave fear resulting from a human action, the marriage would be void, at least by ecclesiastical law.

Because fear from any other cause (unless, indeed, it were so excessive as to interfere with the deliberation which is essential to any human act), for example the emotion arising from some misfortune, from a storm, an earthquake, an illness, the thought of the punishments of the future life, does not nullify marriage nor any other contract.

Because the invalidity or nullity of the marriage by the natural law is less evident; it is a disputed question.

Consent can change some of the accidental terms, such as the agreement to live in such or such a place, but it can alter neither the nature of the contract nor the essential laws which govern it, because these are fixed by the law of God. The nature of marriage [says the Encyclical] is entirely independent of the free will of man, so that if one has once

contracted matrimony he is thereby subject to its Divinely made laws and its essential properties.¹

¹ P. 23.

If the mistake were purely interior it might be implicitly corrected by the preponderant intention to contract marriage, but, as the Encyclical states, citing St. Thomas,¹ these things are so contained in matrimony by the very marriage pact that if anything to the contrary were expressed in the consent which makes the marriage, it would not be a true marriage.

¹ Sum of Theology, III, Supplement, question 49, article 3, body.

By matrimony the souls of the contracting parties are joined and knit together more directly and more intimately than are their bodies, and that not by any passing affection of sense or spirit, but by a deliberate and firm act of the will; and from this union of souls, by God's decree, a sacred and inviolable bond arises.¹

¹ P. 23.

Lawful authority has the right and even the strict duty to forbid, prevent, and punish those shameful unions which are contrary both to reason and nature, [for example adultery, the corruption of children, etc., but] to take away from man the natural and primeval right of marriage is beyond the power of any human law.¹

¹ P. 23.

In the case of baptized persons, who in consequence of their baptism are subject to the authority of the Church, the peculiarly sacred character of their marriage has this consequence, that the Church alone can create impediments or sanction those which the civil law may have established. In the case of unbaptized persons, one may admit the competence of the civil authority, not as merely secular, but because for those persons the authority of the State is by

the very necessity of the case extended, with certain limitations, into the field of religion and morality.¹ The activity of the State as such should be restricted to regulating the civil effects of marriage: the tenure of property, the order of inheritance, the registry of births.

¹ Dermine, La doctrine du mariage chrétien, p. 28, note: “In pagan countries, marriage is regulated by the State, not as a civil but as a religious institution.”

Because positive human law, while it may for the common good establish regulations for the use of a right, has no authority to suppress the right itself which is given by nature. Now nature, in bestowing upon human beings the power of generation, allows the normal use of that power. In other words, the office of a human lawgiver is to adapt the order of nature to varying circumstances and to supplement its general decrees by more definite provisions; but he cannot subvert or contradict that order, as he himself is subject to it.

There follows from them this beautiful conclusion, that the sacred partnership of true marriage is constituted both by the will of God and the will of man; from God comes the very institution of marriage, the ends for which it was instituted, the laws that govern it, the blessings that flow from it, while man through generous surrender of his own person, one to another for the whole span of life, becomes, with the help and cooperation of God, the author of each particular marriage, with the duties and blessings annexed thereto from Divine institution.¹

¹ P. 24.