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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]
Relations may be by consanguinity or affinity, meaning by blood or by marriage. On the marriage of cousins, Catholic policy has evolved from initial acceptance, through a long period of general prohibition, to the contemporary requirement for a dispensation. [78] Islam has always allowed it, while Hindu texts vary widely. [79] [80]
A marriage of two baptized Protestants, even if the church or churches they belong to and they themselves deny that marriage is a sacrament, and even if they contract marriage only civilly and not in church (they are not bound to observe the form that is obligatory for Catholics), [6] is a sacramental marriage, not a merely natural marriage. [7]
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.
On the other hand, a marriage celebrated in due form between a Catholic and an unbaptized person is invalid unless dispensation has previously been obtained from the competent church authority. [32] Other cases in which a marriage is both illicit and invalid are indicated in canons 1083 to 1094 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. [33]
Cases became so numerous that, in 1934, the Holy Office issued "Norms for the Dissolution of Marriage in Favor of the Faith by the Supreme Authority of the Sovereign Pontiff". These applied even when the baptized party was a Catholic who had married a non-baptized person after obtaining a dispensation so as to enter into a valid natural marriage.
For Peter Lombard and the school of Paris, marriage contracted by mutual consent alone is a true and complete marriage, absolutely indissoluble, and, between Christians, a sacrament. This second theory had the support of early Christian writers, received the approval of Sovereign Pontiffs, particularly of Alexander III, and soon prevailed.
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 ...