Marriage in the Catholic Church

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Marriage in the Catholic Church is, in that Church’s teaching, one of the seven sacraments: the lifelong, exclusive union of one baptized man and one baptized woman, ordered toward the good of the spouses and the bringing up of children, and raised — in the Catholic reading — to a sign of the covenant between Christ and the Church. What distinguishes it from a civil contract is not the ceremony but the claim attached to it: that the bond, once validly made and consummated, cannot be dissolved by any human power.

Nicolas Poussin’s “Marriage,” from the second series of the Seven Sacraments (1647–1648), showing matrimony as one of the seven sacraments — Nicolas Poussin, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A sacrament among the seven

The count of seven sacraments — baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, the anointing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony — is itself a settled list only from the high Middle Ages; Peter Lombard’s Sentences in the twelfth century fixes it, and it is dogmatically affirmed at the Council of Florence in 1439 and again at Trent. Within that frame each sacrament is held to be an efficacious sign: not a symbol that merely points to grace but an act through which grace is conveyed. Marriage occupies a peculiar place in the list. It is the only sacrament whose matter is the lives of two ordinary persons given to each other, and the only one most Catholics will receive that is not first an encounter with the ordained. It belongs, with holy orders, to what the tradition calls the sacraments at the service of communion — directed less to the sanctification of the one who receives than to the building up of others, the spouses toward each other and toward the children of the union.

Right wing of Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments Altarpiece (c. 1440–1445), with matrimony shown between ordination and the anointing of the sick — Rogier van der Weyden, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The classic statement of its end runs that matrimony is ordered to two goods at once: the good of the spouses themselves, their mutual love and help, and the procreation and raising of children. The Catechism of the Catholic Church opens its article on marriage by gathering both into a single sentence — the matrimonial covenant by which a man and a woman establish a partnership of the whole of life is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring, and this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ to the dignity of a sacrament. The two ends are not ranked against each other in the present teaching; an older manualist tradition that named procreation the primary end and mutual help the secondary was deliberately set aside by the bishops at the Second Vatican Council, whose constitution Gaudium et Spes describes the conjugal love and the fruitfulness as bound together, neither subordinate to the other. The Flemish Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx, who helped draft that text, had argued through the same years that marriage is first a human reality — a secular bond that all peoples make — taken up and made transparent to grace, not a sacred rite imposed on an otherwise profane act.

The spouses are the ministers

The most distinctive claim the Church makes about this sacrament concerns who confers it. In the Latin tradition the ministers of marriage are the spouses themselves. The priest or deacon who presides does not marry the couple; he receives their consent in the name of the Church and blesses it, but the sacrament is made by the two who exchange it. This is why a Catholic theology of marriage rests its whole weight on consent. The medieval canonists put the matter in a formula that has governed the law ever since: consensus facit nuptias — consent makes the marriage. Not consummation, not the blessing, not the cohabitation, but the free act by which each gives and accepts the other as spouse. The twelfth-century debate between the schools of Paris and Bologna — whether present consent or consent followed by consummation constitutes the bond — was resolved by Pope Alexander III in favor of consent, with consummation adding only the further note of absolute indissolubility.

From the centrality of consent follows the entire architecture of the law that surrounds it. If the bond is built on a free and entire act of the will, then the question of validity becomes the question of whether that act was truly free, truly informed, and truly directed at marriage as the Church understands it.

Raphael’s “Marriage of the Virgin” (Sposalizio, 1504), depicting the exchange of consent and the joining of hands before the priest — Raphael, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A long body of canon law treats what can flaw consent — coercion or grave fear imposed from outside; deception about a quality of the other person directly intended and capable of gravely disturbing the partnership; ignorance of what marriage even is; and, most subtly, a simulation in which a person says the words while secretly excluding one of marriage’s essential properties: its permanence, its exclusivity, or its openness to children. A man who marries intending from the start to keep the door open to divorce, or to bar all offspring, withholds in the will what the words profess, and the consent — though outwardly perfect — is hollow.

Nullity, not divorce

Where such a flaw is found and proven, the Church issues a declaration of nullity. This is the technical reality behind the common phrase “Catholic annulment,” and the phrase misleads. A declaration of nullity is not the ending of a marriage. It is a judgment that the marriage supposed to be indissoluble never validly came into being — that something essential to consent was absent on the day, so that what looked like a sacrament was not one. The distinction is not a lawyer’s evasion; it is the only move the system allows itself. Because the Church holds a valid consummated marriage to be beyond any human power to dissolve, it cannot grant a divorce in the civil sense without contradicting its own central claim. What it can do is examine, after the fact, whether the bond was ever there. The diocesan and Roman tribunals that hear these cases are courts of fact about the moment of consent, not courts of release. A couple may have lived together for decades and raised children; if the original consent is shown to have been radically defective, the tribunal finds that the sacramental bond never existed, however real the shared life was in every other sense.

The same logic explains certain dissolutions the Church does permit, which are not exceptions to indissolubility but applications of its limits. A marriage that is valid but not yet consummated may be dissolved by the pope; a marriage between two unbaptized persons, or between a baptized and an unbaptized person, may be dissolved under the so-called Pauline and Petrine privileges in favor of the faith. None of these touches the case the doctrine most fiercely guards: a ratified and consummated sacramental marriage between two baptized Christians. That bond, the teaching holds, no power on earth can break.

Scripture, the medieval count, and Trent

The doctrine reads Scripture in its support rather than deriving itself line by line from the text. The Gospel saying — what God has joined together, let no one separate — is taken from the dispute over divorce in Mark and Matthew, where Jesus sets the permanence of the union before Moses’ concession of the writ of divorce, grounding it in the creation account of the two becoming one flesh. The other pillar is the passage in Ephesians that likens the love of husband and wife to the love of Christ for the Church and calls the union a great mystery — mysterion in the Greek, rendered sacramentum in the Latin Vulgate, a verbal bridge on which much of the later sacramental reading would lean. From these the tradition draws the nuptial image that runs through its whole self-understanding: the marriage of the baptized as a living sign of a prior and greater covenant.

The formal numbering of marriage among the sacraments, however, is a development of the medieval and later Church rather than an apostolic given. It was not without resistance — some twelfth-century theologians hesitated to grant a sacrament that conferred grace to an act so bound up with the body and with human contract. The settlement that prevailed treated the natural bond of marriage as the very thing Christ had elevated, so that for the baptized there is no marriage that is not also a sacrament. When the Reformers of the sixteenth century denied that matrimony was a sacrament in the proper sense — Luther calling it a worldly thing, however holy — the Council of Trent answered directly. Its twenty-fourth session, on 11 November 1563, declared in its first canon that anyone who says matrimony is not truly and properly one of the seven sacraments instituted by Christ, but invented by men and not conferring grace, is anathema. A later canon defended the Church’s teaching that the bond cannot be dissolved on account of one party’s adultery and that neither party may marry again while the other lives.

The Council of Trent in session, depicted in a contemporary painting held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Trento; its twenty-fourth session (1563) defined matrimony as a sacrament and reformed the canonical form of marriage — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The same session issued the decree known by its first Latin word, Tametsi (“although”), which fixed the canonical form of marriage. Before Trent a marriage made by the bare consent of the parties, with no priest and no witnesses, was valid though illicit — the clandestine marriage that had bred endless disputes over whether a couple was in fact married and whether a later, public union was bigamous. Tametsi required, for validity in the places where it was promulgated, that a Catholic marry before the parish priest (or a priest he delegated) and two witnesses. The reform did not change the principle that the spouses are the ministers and consent the substance; it changed the public form in which that consent had to be given, so that the fact of a marriage could no longer be hidden or denied.

The hardest edge: the divorced and remarried

The doctrine’s sharpest practical consequence is the situation of the divorced. Because the bond is held to persist while both spouses live, a Catholic who obtains a civil divorce and remarries without a declaration of nullity is, in the Church’s judgment, still bound to the first spouse, and the second union objectively irregular. Whether such a person may receive communion — the body and blood of Christ at the Mass — has been among the most contested questions in modern Catholic life. In 1981 John Paul II, in Familiaris Consortio, reaffirmed the practice of not admitting the divorced-and-remarried to Eucharistic communion, on the ground that their state of life objectively contradicts the union of love between Christ and the Church that the Eucharist signifies; reconciliation opening the way to communion, he wrote, was possible only for those who repented and undertook to live no longer in contradiction to indissolubility — in practice, as brother and sister. In 2016 Francis, in Amoris Laetitia, declined to reduce the pastoral care of those in irregular situations to the single question of communion and opened a path of accompaniment and discernment, case by case, that some read as continuous with the earlier teaching and others as a quiet departure from it. The argument over those pages is, at bottom, an argument over how a doctrine of an unbreakable bond meets the broken lives of the people who hold it.

East and West

The Eastern churches share the conviction that marriage is sacramental and that its bond is meant to last, yet they came to a different settlement on its failure. Eastern Orthodox Christianity recognizes that a marriage can die, and grants — by what it calls oikonomia, the prudent dispensation of the household of God, exercised in mercy toward human weakness — a divorce and the possibility of remarriage. The second and third unions are not celebrated as the first: they are blessed in a distinct, penitential rite from which the crowning and the more festive prayers are withdrawn, replaced by petitions for forgiveness. The bond is not declared never to have existed, as in the Western nullity; it is acknowledged to have been and to have ended, and a new beginning is permitted as a concession to mortal frailty rather than as a right. The two disciplines proceed from a shared sacramental premise to opposite procedural conclusions — the West refusing on principle to dissolve what was validly made, and asking instead whether it was ever made; the East allowing dissolution as an act of mercy while marking the second marriage with penance. Trent’s canon, framed with care, condemned those who said the Church errs in teaching indissolubility — not the Greek practice itself, a restraint the council kept deliberately. Indissolubility, ancient as it is, has not been held in identical form across the Christian East and West.

Scholarship and the texts

The primary documents stand close to hand. The decree and canons of the Council of Trent’s twenty-fourth session (1563) give the dogmatic core and the Tametsi reform of form in a single sitting; H. J. Schroeder’s translation (1941) remains the standard English text. The teaching in its modern synthesis is set out in Article 7 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), and the law of consent, impediments, form, and nullity is codified in Book IV, Title VII of the 1983 Code of Canon Law (canons 1055–1165). On the theology, Edward Schillebeeckx’s two-volume Marriage: Human Reality and Saving Mystery (Sheed and Ward, 1965; British title Marriage: Secular Reality and Saving Mystery, OpenLibrary record) traces the bond through the Old and New Testaments and the history of the Church East and West, and remains the landmark modern study of the sacrament as a human reality raised to grace. On the modern dispute, the magisterial sources are John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio (1981) and Francis’s Amoris Laetitia (2016); on the historical-critical question of how far Trent itself meant to close the door on the Orthodox discipline, recent work — E. Christian Brugger’s monograph The Indissolubility of Marriage and the Council of Trent (Catholic University of America Press, 2017) — argues that the council dogmatically taught absolute indissolubility while framing its canon’s wording to avoid condemning the Greek practice. For the comparative ground beneath all of this — how marriage is made across the traditions, and how the Christian rite sits among them — see Marriage Rites.

What the sacrament asks of those who enter it is, in the tradition’s own terms, a consent that means more than it can foresee: a promise made once that binds through whatever follows. The ceremony is brief. The claim made about it is not.

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