Marriage Involvement

A reader writes:

About 5 or 6 years ago my friend started coming back to Church.

[One of her Catholic daughters pursued] a relationship with a divorced father of two and is now getting married. Mom disapproves of the marriage because he is divorced and it is not a Catholic wedding but she has accepted their plans because she know there is nothing she can do about it and does not want to ostrasize her daughter from her.

The question is, can she at all participate in any plans with the wedding or will this come accross as a approval? They asked her to find a blessing to be read at the begining of the ceremony. I thought that seemed a little unusal since the daughter knows how her mother feels. The mother has been praying alot and attending mass alot in order to bring about a change of heart in her daughter.

I could not recommend her involvement in this wedding. There are two problems with it:

  1. The gentleman is divorced and, since you don’t mention him having received an annulment, I presume he doesn’t have one. That being the case, he must be assumed to be actually married to his first wife and thus not free to marry your friend’s daughter.
  2. Since the daughter is a Catholic who, so far as you say, has not defected from the Church by a formal act, she is bound to observe the Catholic form of marriage or obtain a dispensation from it. Since you don’t mention a dispensation, I assume that she doesn’t have one. If that is the case then the marriage will be invalid due to lack of form.

The marriage thus looks to be invalid on two grounds, and I cannot recommend the participation of individuals in any marriage presumed to be invalid as their involvement constitutes a kind of false witness.

On the other hand, if the gentleman has received an annulment from the Catholic Church and if the daughter has obtained a dispensation from form then the marriage will be presumably valid. In that case, her participation would be perfectly legitimate.

Hope this helps!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

3 thoughts on “Marriage Involvement”

  1. *Sigh*, why do people have to put others in situations like this where they have to choose between not showing up to the wedding (and coming out of it looking like a prude), and violating their consciences by showing up? This sort of thing is happening all the time these days, to myself and to other people I know as well.
    Heck, sometimes you don’t even know there’s a problem until you’ve already shown up to the wedding and brought a gift.

  2. I’m still confused. What constitutes a formal act of leaving the church? I have friends who do not consider themselves to be Catholic anymore and attend another type of Christian service or are not attending any type of service (but are honestly searching for truth). In either case, is their marriage valid?

  3. I’ve been placed in this kind of situation now, as well. While I know I can’t attend the “wedding” of my cousin, what about the reception and/or sending a gift? My wife (who is a non-Catholic Christian) wants to, but I feel uncomfortable about both. However, as one who suffers from OCD, manifested often as scrupulosity, I often feel uncomfortable about a lot of things that aren’t really immoral, so I can’t really trust my judgment in this case.

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