The Catholic understanding of marriage is built on the Catholic understanding of grace.

Changing Discipline Changes Doctrine, Again

By Jacob W. Wood

In a recent piece on the Synod, I argued that sometimes a change of Church discipline cannot not happen without a change in Church doctrine, and that since Church doctrine about Communion for Catholics who have obtained a civil divorce and remarriage does not change, Catholics should not expect Church discipline to change either. Today I would like to suggest that the same holds true with the Marriage Pledge proposed by Ephraim Radner and Christopher Seitz, and hosted by First Things. It is not possible for Catholics to embrace a pledge whereby clergy refuse to acknowledge civil recognition of marriages performed in churches. Even though the pledge aims to send a clear witness about Christian marriage to society, the practice it proposes entails something contrary to what Catholics believe about the sacrament of holy matrimony, and about the relationship between human law and natural law.

It would be impossible to trace all the lines of argument in the recent explosion of material on this proposal, so I will focus on one small point which gets right to the heart of the matter. Recently, Edward Peters responded to Matthew Schmitz’s claim that separating the “simultaneous enactment [of the] civil contract with the sacrament of marriage” would “protect” the Church’s witness to the Christian nature of marriage. In an important but passing point, Peters observed that Catholics could not willingly embrace this because Catholics believe that the first exchange of matrimonial consent (which Schmitz would presumably have done in a Church) creates both the civil contract and the sacrament (Canon 1055.2). But just because Peters references canon law doesn’t mean he’s not talking about doctrine. There’s infallible doctrine lurking under that Canon.

The Catholic understanding of marriage is built on the Catholic understanding of grace. Catholics believe that receiving grace does not destroy your humanity and then remake it; it restores the humanity you already have and makes it better—purified and healed from sin, elevated to friendship with God and enriched with God’s heavenly gifts. Nowhere is this idea more true than in the sacraments. A sacrament is not a magical symbol dropped out of the sky, which changes us into something other than who we are. In each of the seven sacraments, God takes some ordinary human activity (like washing or eating), and perfects it so that he can perfect us through it. That’s part of how God helps us understand the truth of Genesis 1: “God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good.”

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