Q: At my parish, we were blessed to have several adults baptized and enter into full communion with the church this past Easter. But my question is, what happens with their marriages? Doesn’t a married person need their marriage blessed or “convalidated” once they become Catholic?
A: The short answer is that for most already-married people entering the Catholic Church, their marriage vows essentially “carry over” with them, and they don’t need to do anything special or additional to have their marriage recognized by the Catholic Church.
As Catholics, we believe that “the marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of their whole life, and which of its own very nature is ordered to the well-being of the spouses and to the procreation and upbringing of children, has, between the baptized, been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament” (Code of Canon Law, Canon 1055, 1).
Still, marriage as an institution is as old as humanity itself and as such predates Jesus’ time on earth. Consequently, a person does not need to be Catholic or even Christian to have a valid marriage, provided that in their matrimonial consent they committed themselves to a union that would broadly match our Catholic understanding of marriage: namely, as a permanent, faithful, and exclusive union ordered fundamentally towards children and family life.
A marriage between non-baptized persons, or between one baptized and one non-baptized person, is called a “natural marriage.” In some cases this might be referred to as a “merely natural” marriage, to distinguish it from a sacramental marriage bond between Christians. But “sacramental” is not shorthand for “valid,” and a merely natural marriage is presumed valid and binding to a similar degree as a sacramental one.
Similarly, it is Catholics and only Catholics who are bound to “canonical form,” or marrying in a Catholic religious context for validity (See Canon 1108). Non-Catholics, even baptized non-Catholic Christians, for the most part do not have the requirement of marrying in any kind of religious ceremony. So, a non-Catholic could marry validly even in a purely secular ceremony before a justice of the peace — just as long as, once again, they intended to marry according to our basic understanding of what marriage is.
To give some practical examples, if two Protestants, who were both free to marry, married in their own church, as Catholics we would assume this was a valid marital union. If later on one or both decided to become Catholic, they would remain validly married, since the requirement to observe canonical form would not apply to them retroactively.
The same principle would apply for a married non-baptized person converting to Catholicism. If their marriage was valid to begin with, their baptism would not change this fact. However, if their baptism made it so that their marriage was now a union between two baptized persons, their marital bond would be “automatically upgraded” to a sacramental one, since “a valid marriage contract cannot exist between baptized persons without its being by that very fact a sacrament” (Canon 1055, 2).
While the validity of their marriage would not somehow increase with this “sacramental upgrade” — a marriage is either valid, or it’s not — they would now obtain more grace and their union would become a more effective path of growing closer to God.
Where things sometimes get complicated are situations where the person who wishes to enter the Catholic Church is in a marital union that cannot be presumed valid. For instance, if a non-Catholic was divorced and remarried, we would presume the validity of the original marriage rather than the second and current union. A person in this situation would most likely need to approach the local marriage tribunal before they could progress further in their journey towards full communion.
But usually, these sorts of sensitive pastoral situations are addressed and hopefully resolved while the person is still a catechumen involved with the OCIA process or otherwise still being prepared to enter the church.
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