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.

The Church holds that the spouses themselves are the ministers of the sacrament. The priest or deacon who presides is a witness, not the one who confers it; what makes the marriage is the consent the two exchange. From this follows a long body of canon law about what can flaw that consent — coercion, deception about a defining fact, a settled intention against children or against permanence — and the corresponding judgment, the declaration of nullity, which finds that no sacrament ever came into being. This is the technical sense behind the common phrase “Catholic annulment”: not the ending of a marriage but a ruling that the thing supposed to be indissoluble was never validly there.

Scripture is read in support of the doctrine rather than as its literal source. The Gospel saying that what God has joined no one should separate, and the passage in Ephesians comparing husband and wife to Christ and the Church, are taken as warrant; the formal count of marriage among the sacraments, however, is a development of the medieval and later Church. The sacramental status was affirmed against the Reformers at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, which fixed both the teaching and the requirement of canonical form — that a Catholic marry before a priest and witnesses for the union to be valid.

The doctrine’s hardest practical edge is the treatment of the divorced. Because the bond is held to persist while both spouses live, a Catholic who divorces and remarries civilly is, in the Church’s judgment, still bound to the first spouse, and the second union irregular; the question of whether such a person may receive communion has been among the most contested in modern Catholic life. The Eastern Orthodox churches, sharing the conviction that marriage is sacramental, came to a different settlement, permitting remarriage after divorce under a discipline of penance — a reminder that indissolubility, while ancient, has not been held identically across the Christian East and West.

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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