No commitment, no marriage – Pope

Pope Francis has a lot of thoughts on the sanctity of marriage. “Because they say ‘yes, for the rest of my life!’ but they don’t know what they are saying”.

Pope Francis was asked about the crisis of marriage and how to help young Catholics learn about sacramental marriage.

Pope Francis said that the great majority of contemporary marriages are not valid during a question-and-answer session at the Diocese of Rome’s pastoral congress on Thursday.

The Vatican press office, publishing a transcript the next day, adjusted the pope’s words to read, “A part of our sacramental marriages are null because they (the spouses) say, ‘Yes, for my whole life, ‘ but they do not know what they are saying because they have a different culture”.

While the pope has pushed for more understanding from the church over divorce and gay marriage, he’s always stuck closely to Catholic principles. “I am at a loss to understand how anyone … could seriously assert that human nature is suddenly so corrupted and Christ’s sacraments are now so impotent as to have prevented “the great majority” of Christians from even marrying!”

In his eyebrow-raising comments about marriage, Pope Francis recalled a time he was archbishop in Buenos Aires when he’d prohibited marriages in the case of “shotgun weddings” – cases in which the bride was pregnant. This was taken by many as confirming interpretations that the exhortation opened the door to allowing Communion for divorced and remarried couples – something which the Church has always forbidden. “And I saw them entering the church, father, mother and child in hand”.

He said the Church needed better marriage preparation programmes.

People do not appreciate that marriage is supposed to be “indissoluble”, that “it’s for your entire life” and can sometimes be hard, he said. “But they knew well (what) they did”. The rule of thumb when the validity of sacraments, whether it be marriage, the Eucharist or the priesthood, is concerned, is to assume validity unless something clearly contradicts that.

According to the Code of Canon Law, “For matrimonial consent to exist, the contracting parties must be at least not ignorant that marriage is a permanent partnership between a man and a woman ordered to the procreation of offspring by means of some sexual cooperation”.