Fr. Rob posted yesterday about the challenge of preparing couples for marriage that won’t abide by Church teachings on pre-marital sexual relations. I don’t have any of my own wisdom to impart, but rather the wisdom of a couple of priests I know who speak about this pastoral predicament as Fr. Rob does.
It might be true that every Catholic has a right to be married in the Church. They don’t have a right to a fantasy bridezilla and frankengroom wedding. Couples get caught up in the worldly specialness of that special day. But what makes it a “special day” anyhow? It’s not the flowers, the accoutrement, the photos, the cake, the patriarch of the family singing “My Way” during the Preparation of the Gifts, the bride being showered with attention, or the bridal party getting hammered at the reception. It’s the Sacrament. A couple must understand the grace of the Sacrament in order to avail themselves of it. I’d think that being in a state of mortal sin would be a terrible impediment to this. Matrimony, like the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, confers God’s grace in a manner that is accepted by the recipient at once but discovered anew in the challenges of Christian living. As Pete Vere and Fr. Rob have stated, pre-marital sexual relations are a factor in most, if not all, annulment cases. Fr. Rob is right, this isn’t a coincidence, this is a case where the couples where not open to the grace of the Sacrament.
Not only must the couple be open to the grace, they must understand what marriage is. It’s a covenant, not a contract or a convenience. I realize the alliteration is making me sound like a Catholic Jesse Jackson, but you faithful members of tribus noster know what I’m talking about. A covenant establishes a life-long relationship, not a civil arrangement. To quote Scot Hahn, “Contractual relations usually exchange property, exchange goods and services, whereas covenants exchange persons. So when people enter into a covenant, they say, ‘I am yours and you are mine.’ So God uses the covenant to enter into a relationship with those whom he created in his own image: humanity and all human persons…” and “Based on the scholarship of countless scholars over the decades, covenant can be properly understood . . . to be a sacred family bond.”
Back to my first point – being married in the Church doesn’t mean that a couple is entitled to their own Big Fat Greek Wedding. I know one priest who has told couples that if they insist on creating scandal for themselves by living together before the wedding, that he will not allow them to create scandal for the Church by performing the wedding in front of a large assembly of friends and family. He tells them they will be married in the chapel or the Sacristy in front of two witnesses and that is all he can do under the circumstances. Does this approach really change the minds and hearts of couples in marriage prep? I don’t know. I’ll ask him what the couples’ reactions have been to this. I think the biggest hurdle here is that they might not understand or accept what the source of the scandal is.