Why
The Church Cannot Marry the Impotent ( Catholic and Proud )
September 20, 2014
When some people learn that the Catholic
Church cannot (or as they usually phrase it “will not”) marry those who are
impotent, they express shock or outright indignation.
Isn’t this discrimination against the disabled?
Why does someone need to be able to have
sex in order to get married?
Before I explain why the Church cannot
marry the impotent, I want to outline exactly what the Church teaches on this
subject.
According to the Code of Canon Law in section
1084:
§1. Antecedent and perpetual
impotence to have intercourse, whether on the part of the man or the woman,
whether absolute or relative, nullifies marriage by its very nature.
§2. If the impediment of impotence is
doubtful, whether by a doubt about the law or a doubt about a fact, a marriage
must not be impeded nor, while the doubt remains, declared null.
§3. Sterility neither prohibits nor
nullifies marriage, without prejudice to the prescript ofcanon 1098.
So what does this mean?
Antecedent and perpetual impotence refers
to the inability to have vaginal intercourse both before the marriage begins
and throughout the entire duration of the marriage.
Absolute impotency is the inability to have
intercourse with anyone while relative impotency is the inability to have
intercourse with one’s spouse.
In the latter case, the impotent person is
theoretically able to have intercourse with someone else.
Impotency is not an impediment if it can be
treated with medication or items that allow intercourse to occur.
But if it is untreatable (as well as
antecedent and perpetual) it “nullifies marriage by its very nature” or it
makes the marriage invalid.[1]
Two Common Misinterpretations
It’s important to remember that what I
described above does not mean the following:
1. If a person becomes impotent during his marriage
the marriage is now invalid. As long as the marriage was consummated at some
point prior to the impotence, the marriage is not rendered null.
Impotence must be antecedent and perpetual
in order to be an impediment.
2. If someone is
infertile they can’t get married.
Impotence refers to the inability to have
sexual intercourse while infertility or sterility refers to the inability to
procreate.
For example, a healthy woman who has a
hysterectomy is infertile but not impotent. In contrast, a woman who has a
vagina that cannot accommodate the male member is impotent but she may still be
able to become pregnant through illicit means like artificial insemination or
IVF.
This means she is not infertile even though
she is impotent.
Paragraph 3 of canon 1084 makes it clear
that the inability to produce offspring is not an impediment to marriage.[2]
What is an impediment to marriage is the
inability to have vaginal intercourse.
A Sample Case
“Why shouldn’t the impotent be allowed to
have the same kind of happiness the rest of us have in marriage?” asks the
critic.
In order to put this question in the proper
light, let’s examine another couple and see what would be the most
compassionate way for the Church to respond to their marriage.
Imagine that Gene and Clara get married but
soon discover that they are unable to have sexual intercourse.
Despite all of their best efforts to treat
the problem, the impotence remains, and the two are never able to have sex.
They decide that a marriage without the
possibility of sexual intercourse is not really a marriage at all, and they
want out.
How should the Church
compassionately respond to Gene and Clara?
One way the Church cannot respond to this
problem is by granting Gene and Clara a divorce.
The reason they can’t is because divorce is
impossible.
Just as you can’t separate the ingredients
of a cake after you’ve baked it, you can’t separate a man and a woman after
they’ve been validly and sacramentally married. Jesus
clearly said of married couples, “they are no longer two but one flesh.
What therefore God has joined together, let not
man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6).
The Marriage That Never Was
However, the Church can grant Gene and
Clara an annulment, or a declaration that they were never validly married in
the first place. The partner who is not impotent would then be free to leave
the current bond, if he or she desired, and marry someone else.
There are several kinds of impediments
to marriage, but the bottom line is that an impediment exists when a couple
lacks a necessary prerequisite to marriage.
For example, “shotgun weddings” where young
people are coerced by their parents to marry due to something like an unplanned
pregnancy are not valid because the couple has not freely chosen to marry
(canon 1103).
Marriage is the full, free, and total gift of
self to another person for life.
Without freedom you can’t have marriage, so
these kinds of “marriages” can be rendered null, or invalid, if a person in the
bond seeks an annulment.
But, just as marriage has to be free, it also
has to be a full and total gift of self, which includes the bodily gift of self
through intercourse.
Since Gene and Clara were not able to give
themselves to one another in this way both prior to their wedding and forever
after making their wedding vows, they had no way of keeping those vows.
Can’t Have it Both Ways
Indeed, the claim “they should be free to
be just as happy as the rest of us are in our marriages” used to defend
marrying the impotent is what justifies allowing Gene and Clara to have an
annulment due to impotency.
The potent partner has the right to the
full gift of self through marital intercourse, or the right to be “as happy as
the rest of us are in marriage.”
As a result, the Church declares their kind
of marriage to be null or invalid so that the potent partner can be free to be
in a marriage where the gift of self is possible.
But now we have a problem for those who
believe that the Church should allow impotent couples to marry.
If the Church allows Gene and Clara to have
an annulment then the Church can’t turn around and validly marry another couple
that has exactly the same impotency Gene and Clara’s union had.
The Church would be lying if it said this
other couple could be validly married in spite of impotence when impotence was
the reason Gene and Clara’s marriage was rendered invalid.
If one condition renders couple A’s
marriage to be invalid, and couple B has that exact same condition as couple A,
then couple B’s marriage would also be invalid. This is simple logic that the
Church can’t just “ignore.”[3]
Now let’s look at some common
objections to this teaching:
“What about Mary and Joseph? If sex is so
important to marriage, then how can you say they were truly married when the
Church teaches that Mary was a virgin her whole life?”
If a couple mutually agrees to not engage
in sexual intercourse (or have what’s called a
Josephite marriage), then that marriage is
valid because they are able to consummate the marriage (which is not the case
in impotent unions).
But it is also dissoluble, since the two have
not become “one flesh.” (Canon 1142)
For a marriage to be valid a couple must
only be able to have sexual intercourse — they don’t have to actually engage in
sexual intercourse.
“So you’re telling me that a 20-year-old
war veteran who has his genitals mutilated while serving our country can’t
marry his sweetheart when he comes home?”
We should always empathize with those who
suffer from disabilities and help them cope with the loss of a major bodily
function.
But in recognizing that impotence is an
impediment to marriage, the Church does not deprive this young man, or anyone
else, of many of the goods he seeks that can be found in a marital
relationship.
He and his sweetheart may still promise to care
for one another and share life’s joys and trials together, provided they don’t
have a sexual relationship.
Indeed, if they were unable to engage in
sexual intercourse, then why would they need to marry at all?
One objection is that through marriage the
couple, especially a young couple, can live together and have a non-sexual
relationship without causing scandal.
But while this is a noble goal it can’t
overcome another difficulty.
Such a cohabiting situation would be a
near-occasion of sin for a couple that is striving to lead a non-sexual
relationship, which includes abstinence from all forms of sexual arousal.
Of course, a critic might say that there is
nothing wrong with these behaviors provided they occur among married people.
Therefore, the Church should marry an
impotent couple so that they can licitly engage in sexual activity they are
physically able to enjoy such as passionate kissing, fondling, mutual
masturbation and oral stimulation.
But the problem with this argument is that
these acts don’t become moral just because a couple gets married.
It is intercourse, not marriage itself,
that justifies sexually arousing activities — even though it is marriage that
allows a couple to have sexual intercourse.
For example, if a married couple engages in
arousing activities like mutual masturbation, then they must complete the act
through intercourse or they will have sinned.[4]
Activities like oral stimulation and mutual
masturbation are like “freeway on-ramps” that get us up to speed in order to
complete the marital act.
Reducing sex to only these activities is
like reducing eating to only chewing and tasting food without digesting it.
It distorts the purpose of these acts and
takes them out of their proper orientation towards being a total gift of self
through life-giving love (i.e. sexual intercourse).
The Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith said in Persona Humanathat,
“the deliberate use of the sexual faculty
outside normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts the finality of the
faculty.
For it lacks the sexual relationship called
for by the moral order, namely the relationship which realizes "the full sense of mutual self-giving and human
procreation in the context of true love." (9)
In fact, we have a moral obligation to not
place impotent couples in situations where they will be tempted to engage in
sexual behaviors that do not lead to intercourse. Such an occasion of sin will
certainly arise if we say they are married and are now free to “act like” a
married couple.
“Marriage
is more than about sex you know.
What about the promise to love and cherish one
another?
What about being friends and weathering the
storms of life together?
Leave it to Catholics to make everything
about sex.”
It’s true marriage is more than sex just as
singing is more than making noise.
But you can’t sing if you can’t make noise
and you can’t be married if you can’t have sex.
Why?
Well ask yourself this — What makes marriage
different than any other kind of friendship or family relationship?
The answer: Sex !
In any other kind of relationship it would
not be strange to choose to live together (roommates or widowed sisters might
do that), to love one another, or to care for one another even for the duration
of one’s life (some adult children do this for their parents).
But it would be strange to be in a
friendship that involved sex and just plain gross to be in a family
relationship that involved sex.
Sex within marriage, on the other hand, is
not “strange” because marriage is the only kind of relationship where two
people fully give their entire being, including their physical selves, to one
another.
Ironically, it’s because our culture makes
everything about sex that this objection prevails.
Even faithful Catholics have been
indoctrinated to believe that sex is “no big deal.” It’s just the kind of thing
that can happen when you have too many margaritas.
But this is
incorrect.
When a
man and woman marry they pledge their whole being, body, mind, and soul to the
other person.
While friends can share experiences and
family can share genetic history and kinship bonds, only in marriage do two
people completely share one another.
Other relationships may change and fade away
over time, but only in marriage do two people literally, not figuratively,
become one flesh.
The couple’s reproductive systems,
incomplete on their own, become complete through intercourse since they are now
ordered towards the good of procreation. This is similar to how a person and a
transplanted heart become one body, despite having separate DNA, because both
parts are now ordered towards a public good (keeping the person alive).
Likewise, in the marital act the man and
woman become one not just because they both have pleasurable feelings, but
because they are both ordered towards the public good of procreation.
Even if procreation does not occur, they are
still ordered towards that good as well as the good of unity itself (which is
good both for them as a couple and good for any children they might create).
Simply put, the world’s most intimate and
complete declaration of love, marital union, is incomplete without the
corresponding physical act that fully expresses the desire for total
self-giving, or sexual intercourse.
Without the possibility of intercourse the
“one flesh” goal of marriage can’t be achieved, and that is why the
antecedently and perpetually impotent cannot marry.
Conclusion
We should help anyone who struggles with
impotence see that they can have many of the goods in life that married couples
enjoy.
Goods like friendship, confidants, and even
tender physical affection.
We should also help them see how the
universal call to chastity, whether it’s for the disabled, those who desire
marriage but have not found anyone to marry, or even for the happily married,
is a good thing.
The graces God gives us in living a chaste
life in service of him outweigh any physical goods we might deprived of in this
life — goods of which we will not give a second thought to in the life to come.
See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_impediment
Sursa : http://catholicsay.com/why-the-church-cannot-marry-the-impotent/
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