Canon Law Or Catechism?

A reader writes:

I wanted to comment on this section [i.e., Marriages in Church] but did not want to contradict what you have stated.

Don’t worry about contradicting me. That wasn’t a Rule 20 post, so there was no "e-mail me if you want to object to my answer" rule in effect.

I do have a question, why did you cite the Cannon Law and not the Catechism also?

CCC 1621 – 1624 give a good idea of where we are obliged  to get married and why.

We, ordinary lay people, do not have access to the Cannon Law nor do we always understand it.

Why didn’t you include the CCC in your answer?

Well, the truth is that I was writing late at night and didn’t think to look in the Catechism, but there’s a deeper reason than that.

Part of my philosophy is going straight to the source documents
whenever possible. That’s why I quote from these documents regularly
when I’m writing and thus "show my work" (as my math teacher used to
insist), rather than simply giving the answer and expecting the reader
to just trust me. I’ve seen a lot of people–particularly clerics and professors–just say "This is the way it is" without giving the questioner a way to follow-up on the answer and verify that it’s correct.

I don’t have a clerical collar–or even a degree in the relevant fields–and so I have no institution endorsing my answers (particularly when I’m writing here on my blog). They have to stand or fall on their own merits, and it’s a lot easier on me–and builds confidence on the part of the reader–if I simply quote the relevant documents up front so that the reader can see for himself what they say. He is then in a position, or a better position, to evaluate whether the answer I am drawing from them is correct. It’s part of how I try to build and maintain a reputation for accuracy and reliability.

This approach means that I need to cite the most relevant, most authoritative documents I can, and in the case of the legal obligation of Catholics to celebrate sacramental marriages in Catholic churches, the most relevant and authoritative document is the Code of Canon Law. It is this document that creates the obligation in the first place.

It’s true that the Catechism is more familiar to most readers, but it is not a legal document and does not create legal obligations for the faithful. Instead, it is a teaching document that is meant to impart doctrine.

I thus cite the Catechism when I’m handling doctrinal questions, and I cite the Code when I’m handling legal questions.

Sometimes I provide links to the source documents on the Vatican’s website, though these two documents are so well-known and so often-quoted on my blog that I often assume that readers will know how to get to them if they want to look up the context of the parts I’ve quoted. That may be a bad assumption on my part–particularly in regard to new visitors to the blog–but I already spend more time than I should on the blog, and not adding a link to these two documents every time I quote them is an extra time-saving step for me.

This is probably a good place to link to them, though, so new readers will have a jumping-on point, so:

HERE’S THE CATECHISM

and

HERE’S THE CODE.

And as an added bonus,

HERE’S THE COMPENDIUM.

So–in keeping with my time limits–once I’ve identified the most relevant and authoritative documents to quote, I just use them and don’t generally have the luxury of quoting other documents in addition (something that would only cause my blog posts to expand beyond their current lengthy lengthiness anyway).

Thus I didn’t bother looking in the Catechism.

Had I done so, I might not have quoted CCC 1621-1624 in my answer, anyway. Of these paragraphs, the most relevant one is 1621, but it has some limitations in addressing the question. First, it only addresses the custom in the Latin Rite. That’s not too much of a limitation, though, since the person asking why marriages are celebrated in churches likely had the Latin Rite’s practice in mind. Second, and more significantly, the paragraph doesn’t really talk about why Latin Rite marriages are celebrated in churches. It talks about why they are celebrated (normally) in Masses.

If I used this as the basis of my answer, I wouldn’t have dealt with the situations of marriages which aren’t celebrated during Mass but nevertheless are celebrated in Catholic churches, and I wouldn’t have been able to appeal to the fact that the relevant canon in the Code of Canon Law draws a distinction between sacramental and non-sacramental marriages (which is highly important to answering the original question) since the Catechism doesn’t go into that.

I also would have had to extend the discussion by sketching the chain between normally having weddings during Mass and normally having Masses in churches. It was just a lot simpler to go straight for the spot in the Code where it says you’ve normally got to have sacramental marriages celebrated in churches.

That being said, CCC 1621 can shed extra light on the reasoning behind the law, and it’s worth looking at in that regard–as additional insight on the law, but not as law itself or as an exhaustive answer on the reasoning behind the law.

Hope this helps!