CONSUMMATION LAW MAKES MARRIAGE NONSENSE


Code of Canon Law 1061
 
A valid marriage between baptised persons is said to be merely ratified, if it is not consummated; ratified and consummated, if the spouses have in a human manner engaged together in a conjugal act in itself apt for the generation of offspring. To this act marriage is by its nature ordered and by it the spouses become one flesh.
 
The law of the land and the Church decree that the wedding vows do not marry any couple until they have sexual intercourse. The once suffices and is called consuming the marriage.

Objections:
 
What is consummation? Penetration. Ejaculation without condoms. Mutual orgasm? Any of these. All these? It is possible that no consummation takes place until the sperm of the man unites with the egg of his wife when their bodies become one in the sense of producing a new life. The definition of consummation is arbitrary. It's very biological.
 
The Church says that sex should always end with the man ejaculating inside his wife's vagina. The Church allows different sexual positions. It lets the husband and wife decide how they will have sex as long as they do not use contraception and the sex ends with the penis ejaculating in the wife's vagina. It seems that if the husband does not have an orgasm inside his wife then the marriage is not consumed until he does. The Church sets up a criteria of morality that is based on biology and not love. The result is that the husband and wife consume marriage but they do not consummate their love! Marriage is about law and not love. In Catholicism, it is about clerical power.
 
Why stop with saying the husband must ejaculate in his wife's vagina to consummate the marriage? Why not say that the wife must have an orgasm with him just as he has his orgasm? Marriage proclaims that the Church should have the right to discriminate against men who can't have orgasms. No wonder the vast majority of marriages result in the male acting superior to the female and in the past wives were mere slaves of their husband.
 
The Church says that the language of sex is that you wish to be with the person you have sex with forever. It says that is the message sex communicates. If sex does that then ejaculation does that even more. The Church says it is a sin for the man to withdraw from the woman to ejaculate outside her. If the purpose of this is that the man prefers to do it and not to avoid conception then it is still a sin. The Church says the withdrawal turns the sex into a lie. The Church reasons that man declares by sex that he wants his woman completely and then he contradicts this by not giving her his seed. Teaching such as this imply that it is a sin for a man to have sex if he cannot ejaculate.
 
In Catholic law and many other legal systems, penetration of the female genitals and ejaculation would be necessary for valid consummation for penetration and holding anything back can’t be much of a consummation. Condoms prevent valid consummation for the male and female body parts are separated by the condom. It might be thought that since nothing is more intimate than a sperm uniting with an egg that a marriage is not consumed until pregnancy. Then they are really one flesh more than they would be by sex alone.
 
Why are witnesses to the ceremony so necessary to have a real marriage when nobody witnesses the marriage being activated? There is only a potential marriage until the the consummation.
 
A woman who is just married will now feel she cannot change her mind and refuse to have sex with her husband. It puts pressure on her that could amount to her being degraded by forcing herself to have sex.
 
Consummation isn't clearly and therefore legally mentioned in the vows so how could the vows be binding? They have no legal force.
 
A loveless physical union on the wedding night matters more than a couple who can't have sex but whose hearts are so close that they are almost one.
 
The Roman Catholic Church demands that sex must result in the woman being inseminated. Ejaculation without a condom can be dangerous for the woman, AIDS, HIV, Hepatitis C and so on. It is easier for a woman to catch one of these diseases or any venereal disease than it is for the man who has sex with her. Catholic marriage with its consummation law and its requirement of insemination is certainly discriminatory against women and degrades women. It is a feminists nightmare. It shows more concern for men than women. It is the degradation of woman under man.
 
The marriage is valid if the man runs off in the morning leaving an abandoned wife just because he had sex with her.
 
People who can't have sex - any way or the required Catholic way - are denied the happiness of marriage.
 
Consummation implies that the wife will not own all that the man owns until she has sex with him. This is prostitution.
 
The rite of marriage does not say explicitly anything about consummation so this leads to a defect of intention which nullifies the vows. It is said that the word husband or wife means lawful sexual partner for it is used in the vows. The vows would be no good if they did not mean that when the consummation is what validates marriage. But that is not made clear.
 
The vows cannot bind in matrimony when they do not clearly include a promise to have sex at least once. The bodily union is what the vows are for and it is only one bodily union at that. It is not enough to mean that by the promise to love and obey – it has to be said out loud to have any legal force. Marriage vows not spoken are not vows at all so all marriages are invalid. When nobody accepts, “I’ll care for you forever” as a valid formula for a marriage vow it is being admitted that the words must be clear and be witnessed to as well. The Jews never asked for a vow from the bride and yet the Church pretends to believe in their marriages including the marriages of the apostles and prophets and the Virgin Mary.

Religion and the state say that a marriage is valid if the couple agree to copulate and mean to be husband and wife even if they don’t like each other and even if one partner runs off with somebody else as soon as the marriage is consumed. So physical sex is what makes the union binding and not how much they love one another or how compatible and committed they are. If the bridegroom gets shot dead after the ceremony to save his wife the marriage is a potential marriage though the husband proved his sincerity and love in a unique and tragic way. To say that sex seals the union and makes it a real marriage is insulting. Sex becomes more a means of making the contract bind than about love. It is demeaning to tie yourself to one person over one sex act and to ask to be condemned if you don’t keep the marriage deal which really says: “We are tied together for life because of one sex act”. This is not a union of any real love of any kind. If the couple love each other they are blind to what marriage is.

Some would say that consummation is the union of hearts as well as bodies so there must be some kind of love between the husband and wife for the marriage to be real. But if we are sinners all the time as Christian religion maintains then there is no real love. Sin defiles all you do and makes it evil. God can’t bless marriage and marriage is not possible if we are sinful. It follows that Christian marriage is always null and void.
 
You can marry somebody that is repulsive to you and make the sacrifice to do good to them for the rest of their lives. The Church says that love is sacrifice so marriage is holier and more loving for though the partner is not loved emotionally or even liked he or she is loved as in action and is being valued more than an emotionally loved partner. As we are all natural egoists, there is no such thing as a union of hearts. There are only two people each of whom is only out for themselves who are only together for the gratification of the ego. To get married the husband has to need the wife and the wife has to need the husband. To need another person means you will try to blackmail them by refusing to be happy if they don’t stay with you and do many things you want. That is not love. Marriage is not a union of hearts but only a veneer. It is like trying to unite people as people just by tying them up together. It looks as if there has been some success but there has not been any.

If a man was too drunk to know what he was doing when he consumed his marriage then the bride can still get the marriage annulled because he did not consume the marriage right. He was not responsible when he was on another planet. So consummation has to be a deliberate physical act. If marriage were really a covenant of love the intention would be what really counts. In love, it is the will to do good not the physical ability that matters. The doctrine of consummation makes love useless unless the man succeeds in getting an erection. Marriage is therefore what many would call immoral. To avoid this it has to be the desire to copulate that is made to matter. Thus an impotent man can contract a true marriage.

The Church does not really believe that sex is needed to validate a marriage. It only pretends that it does. The Church holds that sex says, "I give you all that I am for life". Yet it allows annulments on the basis that when the man and woman took their wedding vows there was some doubt about the validity of the vows. Then it chooses to focus on the vows and not on the vow constituted by sexual intercourse. It annuls the marriages on vows that are less important than the physical vow made through sex. Also, the Church says that if a Catholic marries and some doubt arises about whether the other person was validly baptised that the Catholic can divorce and get married again in the eyes of the Church. The Church holds that only marriages between men and women who are baptised properly are unbreakable except by death. In that case, it allows sex until the mind is made up to separate and divorce! If sex does not say "I give you all that I am for life" then it has nothing to do with validating a marriage.
 
An annulment is a declaration that a marriage never really took place.
 
Annulments are given on the assumption that marriage is nothing more than a couple of vows that only becoming binding with a single sex act even though all believe that marriage only starts with the vows and you do not say them once and for all but you live them and express them through your marriage. So the husband and wife are making the vows by sign-language all the days of their lives. So logically even if the marriage vows were not meant the marriage could still become real without them for the vows are repeated anew every minute of marriage and are as valid as wedding vows made by a deaf-mute though nothing is said.
 
The Bible regarded marriages as valid though the wife made no vows and often the woman just went to live with the man on the wedding day and there was no ceremony at all (Genesis 24:67, Isaiah 61:10, Matthew 1:24).
 
Though Joseph and Mary were considered married without sex having taken place the Roman Church would annul such a marriage. And Mary like most brides of her day would have been underage – another ground on which the Church can grant an annulment.
 
The Church has annulled lots of marriages and has won infamy for doing so for it is clear that it can annul nearly any marriage when it puts its mind to it. The disagreement about the grounds for annulment that exists in the world of lawyers and theologians is frightening. No marriage is safe. Can anybody be blamed for wondering if they are married at all? The married couple may know best if their marriage should be annulled so it seems there is nothing to stop them ending the marriage even without a church declaration of nullity.

 

Granting an annulment for non-consummation of a marriage or for a person being drunk or insane when they took the vows is one thing but the Church has added to these limitations. You can get an annulment now if you were brought up in a dysfunctional family or had not been ready in your mind for marriage. Anybody could say they were not ready for marriage. And nobody can prove that they were telling the truth. This threatens all marriages for even if the limits to the damage to marriage that divorce can do are few there is no stopping point at all- and if a place is made it is just a nasty big inconsistency and does not make the practice good or fair. The fact is, if you know that marriage is hard means staying together for life and get hitched and don’t say that you didn’t mean your vows at the time you should not be believed later on in life when you look for an annulment on the grounds of mental reservation. If the Church loved killers she would permit declaring them innocent if they claimed to have acted insincerely when they murdered just like the person whose marriage is annulled has. Annulments have a long and expensive pile of work behind them. Where is the logic in the almost endless wait for the declaration of nullity when all they really have to go on is a person’s claim to have not meant the wedding vows?  Nobody can prove the person is being truthful. The reason is money. The Church makes money out of the annulments.

 

The Church always taught that marriages which were not consummated can be annulled. Nowadays it claims to still believe this as much as ever but has added in the idea of psychological non-consummation. An example of it is when the husband and wife consume their marriage but the husband is not in love with her but with somebody else so anything he does with his wife in bed it is the other woman he is really making love to for it is just her in his mind and heart. As PJ McGrath noted, for a religion to change doctrine and become more liberal and then claim that it has never changed doctrine for the wording, “A marriage that is not consummated can be declared to be a non-marriage” describes its current position as well as its past position is just the same kind of lying we are accustomed to from politicians (page 100, Believing in God). A famous example of such obfuscation is in the Catholic doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church at all. The Church recently changed the meaning of Church to include anybody earnestly seeking after God even an atheist or idolater as long as they were sincere. The Church in the past certainly never went that far. To say that there is no salvation outside the Church as the Church means it now makes no sense for the word Church doesn’t mean anything if any sincere seeker can be part of it. The word Buddhism doesn’t describe anything if even somebody who has never meditated in their life or heard of Buddhism can be a Buddhist nevertheless.
 
Conclusion
 
The consummation law is vicious and nasty and proves that marriage is just making promises that fail to do anything to validly make a woman belong to her husband and vice versa.



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