Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Marriage in the Catholic Church, also known as holy matrimony, is the "covenant by which a man and woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring", and which "has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptized". [1]
The Roman Catholic Church raised the minimum age of marriage to 14 years old for females and to 16 years old for males in 1917 and lowered the age of majority to 18 years old in 1983. The Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches states the same requirements in canon 800.
The Catholic Church considers the law of clerical celibacy to be not a doctrine, but a discipline. Exceptions are sometimes made, especially in the case of married male Lutheran, Anglican and other Protestant clergy who convert to the Catholic Church, [10] and the discipline could, in theory, be changed for all ordinations to the priesthood.
When a marriage of a Catholic takes place without following the laws and rites of the Catholic Church. Such a marriage does not even have the appearance of validity and, consequently, does not enjoy the presumption of validity. Coercion. This impediment exists if one of the parties is pressured by any circumstances to enter into marriage.
The oldest traditional wedding vows can be traced back to the manuals of the medieval church. In England, there were manuals of the dioceses of Salisbury and York.The compilers of the first Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549, based its marriage service mainly on the Sarum manual.
For a valid marriage, a man and a woman must express their conscious and free consent to a definitive self-giving to the other, excluding none of the essential properties and aims of marriage. If one of the two is a non-Catholic Christian, their marriage is licit only if the permission of the competent authority of the Catholic Church is obtained.
The Latin Catholic Church as a rule requires clerical celibacy for the priesthood since the Gregorian Reform in the late 11th century under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, but Eastern Catholic Churches do not require clerical celibacy for the priesthood and the Latin Catholic Church occasionally relaxes the discipline in special cases ...
The banns of marriage, commonly known simply as the "banns" or "bans" / ˈ b æ n z / (from a Middle English word meaning "proclamation", rooted in Frankish and thence in Old French), [1] are the public announcement in a Christian parish church, or in the town council, of an impending marriage between two specified persons.