Luke and Elizabeth were married yesterday.
The young couple who met at Franciscan University (Steubenville) and were featured recently by Fathers for Good, entered the sanctuary together, faced one another, hand in hand, and professed the sacramental vows of matrimony before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, a priest of the Catholic Church and the people of God.
What God has joined, let no one separate, the priest said, echoing the words of Jesus about marriage.
I attended the wedding – held at St. Mary’s Church in New Haven – with my two young boys, and my 8-year-old was asking questions. We got to the church a bit late, and Father John Peter Cameron – the Dominican who edits the monthly prayer guide Magnificat – was already into his homily. Luke and Elizabeth were sitting side by side near the altar.
"Are they married yet?" my son whispered.
Thinking back to my own wedding 11 years ago, I couldn’t remember whether the homily comes before or after the exchange of vows. "I’m not sure," I said, "we’ll have to wait and see."
My response didn’t satisfy my impatient son, but I realized that it fit pretty well the state of marriage today. Oh, I have no doubt that my friends Luke and Elizabeth were truly married when they exchanged vows after Father Cameron finished the homily. Though young by modern standards, they were well-prepared and fully aware of the obligations they were taking on toward one another, the Church and society. The same cannot be said, sadly, of so many men and women marrying today, even within the Catholic Church. The high divorce and annulment numbers attest to this fact.
I used to think that the great number of Church annulments was due to liberal clergy and incompetent diocesan chanceries that simply rubber-stamped society’s trend toward divorce and separation. But after a couple of years as a seminarian (way back when) and 10 years working as a reporter for an archdiocesan newspaper, I got to see first hand how poorly formed and confused so many couples are when they come to the altar for marriage.
The Church requires that they come freely and with sufficient knowledge and intent of the will to assent to the vows that they exchange. So many couples today – living together or having multiple sexual partners in their past, and with a woefully deficient Catholic formation and understanding of the sacraments – simply do not meet the requirements of "informed consent" when they stand together before the priest.
At the wedding yesterday, my son asked me why Luke and Elizabeth were standing so near the altar, instead of in the pews. I told him that they were standing within the sanctuary because they were actually administering the sacrament of marriage to one another. The priest was a witness for the Church, but Luke and Elizabeth – exercising the priesthood of the laity that was conferred on them at Baptism – were actually the sacramental ministers.
This is an important fact. Marriage is not like the Mass, in which Jesus becomes present in the Blessed Sacrament ex opera operato, by the work of the one performing the eucharistic liturgy, i.e., the priest. The priest could be in the state of multiple mortal sins, he could be drunk, he could give no thought to the words of consecration, he could not even believe that Jesus becomes present in the Blessed Sacrament, but as long as he generally intends to do what the Church does and says correctly the words of consecration, he will "confect" the sacrament and Jesus will truly become present under the appearances of bread and wine.
Yet in the Sacrament of Marriage, the man and woman must meet a higher standard, in a sense. They must know what they are doing, be conscious and aware of the meaning of the words they exchange, believe that what they are saying is true, and fully intend to be bound by the sacrament. If one spouse, for example, is drunk at the wedding, there are strong grounds for annulment. If one does not intend to have children, despite saying that he will accept children from God, an annulment can easily be obtained later.
Many people do not know what a Church annulment really is. It is not a "Catholic divorce" or a concession by the Church that sometimes marriages go sour and spouses are better off starting over. An annulment (or declaration of nullity) is a recognition by Church authorities that at the time the marriage vows were exchanged (that is, at the time of the wedding itself) all the conditions of a valid marriage in the Catholic Church were not present. In other words, although the couple went through a marriage ceremony, and by all appearances were wedded for life, a true Catholic wedding did not take place. They were not, in fact, married.
But, again, let us not dwell too long on what can go wrong with marriage. Let us acknowledge what is undeniably right about marriage, especially when two young people like Luke and Elizabeth embrace the Catholic faith with fervor and desire with all their hearts to live this sacramental bond in love and truth.
Many blessings upon them!
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