5. Remarriage of the Divorced

The remarriage of divorced persons can no longer be impeded by the refusal of the Church to perform the wedding ceremony, though she must disapprove such unions from the point of view of Christian ethics. Still less can she be prevented by the State from wishing to guard her conscience and to lend active emphasis to her Scriptural teachings on divorce. She must be the more earnest in this respect, since she no longer helps to contract the nurrisge by the wedding ceremony, the latter being [on the continent of Europe] simply a solemn recognition and declaration that the marriage in question is a union in conformity to the divine will, not so much in virtue of the motives with which it is contracted as with regard to objective requirements. This must be the basis of judgment whether the ceremony is to be granted or refused to the divorced; and for this very reason general principles can and must be established, their applicability to individual cases in which differences arise between the officiating clergyman and those who desire the ceremony being determined by the ruling of the Church.

5. Mixed Marriages: Mixed marriages are those contracted between persons of different Christian confessions, especially between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Since they render impossible that perfect harmony between husband and wife which is demanded by the ethical and religious concept of marriage, inasmuch as the family thus founded necessarily comes under the influence of two antagonistic churches, while almost insuperable difficulties arise regarding the religious training of the children, each Church must disapprove of them and dissuade its members from such marriages.

While this should be especially the case with the Roman Catholic Church, it has never regarded mixed marriages as illegal or as lacking sacramental character. Nevertheless, it fully applied the prohibitions of the early Church regarding marriages between Catholic Christians and heretics to marriages between Roman Catholics and Protestants, despite the fact that the latter were recognized by the State as members of churches on a par with the Roman Catholic Church, and without regard to the circumstance that these Protestant churches were essentially different from the sects to which the prohibitions in question referred. The Roman Curia accordingly maintained that an obstructing impediment based on general Church laws existed for mixed marriages between Roman Catholics and Protestants. A dispensation for such a marriage could be granted by the pope alone; and by him, generally speaking, only on condition that Protestantism was abjured by the Protestant party to the marriage, with the promise that all children born of the union should be educated in the Roman Catholic faith. Moreover, the full applicability of Roman Catholic canon law to such marriages was asserted on the ground that Protestants belong by baptism to the Roman Catholic Church and are

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lawfully subject to its statutes. Under certain circumstances a temporary exception was made from the strict execution of these principles by express papal favor or "dissimulation." The abjuration of Protestantism was the point least insisted upon, but special stress was laid on the assurance that the children should be educated in the Roman Catholic faith. On principle the Roman Catholic Church always endeavors to prevent mixed marriages altogether, and then at least to render them difficult; but in any case where it assists in their contraction, it expresses its disapproval of the desecration of the sacrament of marriage which it sees in every mixed union. Absolute prevention, however, even from the point of view of its own law, is possible only where the Tridentine Decree on the contraction of marriage has either been promulgated or is practised without formal promulgation. On the other hand, where the pre-Tridentine canon law is authoritative in this respect, a ratum matrimonium may also be brought about by informal consent, even though the Church should refuse to cooperate. Difficulties may always be raised by the special conditions made in case a dispensation, either compulsory or voluntary, is asked. Disapproval may be expressed by refusing the banns and by withdrawing active assistance in declaring the consent of the parties to the marriage, the cooperation of the Church thus being restricted to the so-called passive assistance outside the Church and without priestly vestments, or at least by refusal to celebrate the nuptial mass with its benediction, or by omitting the simple benediction connected with the marriage ceremony. Where more or less sweeping exceptions to these principles are made, they are due to a desire to avoid greater evils to the Church. Toward the end of the eighteenth century mixed marriages were very mildly treated by the Roman Catholic Church; but in the nineteenth century she revived the full severity of her strict principles, the modifications conceded by Pius VIII. for the archdiocese of Cologne (1830) and for Bavaria (1832), or by Gregory XVI. for Austria (1841) being merely temporary.

According to the present legal status, the pope, or the bishop as his delegate, removes the impedimentum mixtæ religionis. The Roman Catholic ceremony is required, except in countries to which the declaration of Benedict XIV. (Nov. 4, 1741) for Holland and Belgium has been extended. ¹ The priest gives merely assistentia passiva. The grant of dispensation presupposes the fulfilment of certain conditions. The Roman Catholic party promises to attempt the conversion of the Protestant, while the latter is pledged to make no such effort; both are bound to bring up all their children in the Roman Catholic faith and are required to waive an Evangelical marriage ceremony. By a decree of the Inquisition (June 17, 1864), the Roman Catholic ceremony in addition to the Protestant is inadmissible. If the Roman Catholic ceremony is desired after the Protestant, the priest is to perform it, but must impose some penance on the Roman Catholic party. Should the priest bear that the parties intend also to have the Evangelical ceremony, he is to dissuade them, although emphasis is not to be laid so much on this point as upon the other conditions, especially the one referring to the education of the children. In the constitution "Provide" of January 18, 1906, Pope Pius X. decreed for Germany that mixed marriages of Catholics with non-Catholics not consummated according to the Tridentine Decree are subject to penalty, but valid, also that marriages of non-Catholics among each other in Germany are not subject to the Tridentine Decree for their validity. The State has repeatedly objected to the Roman Catholic regulation of mixed marriages; but through the introduction of the obligatory civil marriage the question has lost its acute character so far as the State is concerned, and has become primarily a controversy of the different confessions. The contraction of a mixed marriage after the divorce of the Protestant party would necessarily be considered absolutely unlawful by the Roman Catholic Church, even did she not consider Protestants bound by her laws, since according to her dogma the marriage union existing between two who have been baptized can not be dissolved by a judicial separation. Even did she concede the legal right of divorced Protestants to contract a new marriage, she could never allow her members to contract a marriage with those who, according to Roman Catholic belief, are still bound together by a former marriage. Only in case the divorce is found by a Roman Catholic ecclesiastical court to have affected a marriage which was null and void, can the Roman Catholic Church allow such a mixed marriage.