THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3513, 12 July 1921, Page 21

THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS.

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE. A V APfVfflKj A

By

A A AiXWLAJCrIA. J. MacGregor, M.A., M.L.O.

V Up to this point the writer has had in view the two objects of justifying, his action in promoting the reform of the law of o'ivorce, and suggesting reasons why the sacerdotal churches should cease to have any part in the legal celebration of marriage. He now proposes in this final article to direct the attention more particularly to the latter of those questions. I refer in tSie first place to statements made by two Anglican bishops—Dr Julius, Bishop of Christchurch; and Dr Sedgwick, Bishop of Waiapu. According to a report published in tile Press some years ago, Bishop Julius, in a sermon preached in the Cathedral, said: The Roman Catholic Church wisely declared that marriage between a member of one communion and a member ot another communion was really null and void. Pie did not agree with the methods adopted. ... If a Roman Catholic marries one of our daughters he becomes cither unfaithful to his Church or has no real religion, and in heart regards the woman as not truly his wife. The following is a passage from a pronouncement by Dr Sedgwick quoted with (qualified) approval by Bishop deary: I view with considerable misgiving the large and growing number of marriages that are performed at the Registrar’s Office, and I would request my clergy to preach from time to time on marriage, its sanctity and its indissolubility; and to hold before the young the fact that Holy Matrimony presupposes marriage by the priest in Goa’s House. Now, those two prelates have, as such, no more authority to marry people than the man-in-the-street. The only authority they have is derived from an Act of Parliament, and yet here we have one of them declaring that there is an essential difference between a marriage “performed” at the Registrar’s Office and one “solemnised” by a priest in God’s House ! And we have another prelate proclaiming his approval of a doctrine of the Reman Cat noli c Church that a marriage between a member of that Church and (say) a Methodist, although it has been legally •“performed" belore a Registrar, or (say) a Methodist minister, is null and void ! One wonders how long the non-saeerdota! churches ar©. going to submit to such a state of tilings in Now Zealand —that marriages such as those described by the I Yorkshire vicar, when “solemnised” by j some curate in “God’s House” are “Holy Matrimony, whilst the marriage of some i highly respected couple “performed” in the j home of the bride is something quite different ; and how long Parliament will contmue to license as deputy-Registrars prelates or priests who consider it their duty “to resist. tile laws of the State when those laws, in their opinion, clash with the laws ot their church,” or as they call them, “the laws of God,” laws derived from the Council of Trent. In England, with its State Church, one can at least understand such references to “laws of the Church,” but in New Zealand it is simply intolerable that any church or any prelate or priest should teach or preach in such terms as to lead simple people to think that there can be a “law” that nullifies the law of Parliament. In taking up such an attitude they seem to be following the example of English prelates. As an instance of such an attitude let us take the following sentence, written by the Bishop of Worcester, apropos of the Deceased Wife's bister Marriage Act: “Serious questions will arise as to how the Church must receive those who have violated what is still the Church's law, which the Church must maintain on behalf of the divine ordinance of marrigao.” Here wo see a church that is ready to bless with every ceremony the union of double first cousins, condemning as incestuous the marriage .of a man with his wife’s sister, in the one case following the civil law, and in tee other the Cation Law —an Erastian compromise thoroughly characteristic of the Church of England. Presumably this law also is a “law of God”—fit company for the law of Indissolubility > Dealing more particularly with the question whether the law should not be so amended a? to require all marriages to ba celebrated before a Registrar, I propose now to direct special attention to the attitude of t!ie Roman Catholic Church, and to suggest that suoh a change is the only real remedy tor certain evils commonly believed to arise from that source. Jn the parliamentary session- of last year an enactment was passed containing tile following provisions : Every person commits an offence against this Act and is liable to imprisonment for one year or a fine of one hundred pounds who--(a) Alleges that any persons lawfully married aio not truly and sufficiently married; or (b) Alleges that the issue of any lawful marriage is illegitimate cr born out of wedlock. What led to the proposal to add such a provision to a Bill then before the Legislative Council -.vas the fact that “A Catechism of Christian Doctrine” used by the Roman Catholic Church in the instruction of children was brought under the notice of a committee of the Council, containing (inter alia) the following proposition stated as the answers to certain questions: A Catholic and a non-Catholio who presume to go through the form of marriage before a non-Catholio minister or before the civil Registrar do not contract a valid marriage; that is to say, they are not married at all. By way of explanation of this statement it was pointed out to the committee that, the question and answer occur under the general heading “Iho Sacraments,” and that all the answer means is, that the parties to suoh marriages are not regarded by the Church as “sacramentally” married—an explanation, of which it is obviously impossible to render intelligible to children, or indeed to anybody who is not versed in the subtleties of Catholic casuistry and theology. Indeed, it would probably be impossible to get Roman Catholics generally to 1 relieve, or at any rate to realise, that a priest aa such has no authority what ever to celebrate a marriage in New Zealand. The probability is tnat most people,

non-Catholics as well as Catholics, regard the religious service as the very essence of marriage, when, as a matter of fact and of law, it is something quite superfluous. Now, prelates of the Roman Catholic- Church have proclaimed their determination to ignore and defy this law of Parliament, and certain (High) Anglicans have expressed approval of this attitude. My present object is merely to direct the attention of the nonCatholio people of New Zealand _ to the question whether the priests or ministers of any church that requires or allows them to question the validity, in any sense _ whatever, of marriages celebrated according to law, should be authorised by the State to perform any legal function at all in the celebration of marriage The proposition quoted above is given in the Catechism as an answer to question on the subject of “mixed marriages.” In a Lenten nastor.al letter issued by Dr Grimes, Roman Catholic Bishop of Christchurch, the following passages occur: The State may, and does, legislate as to the conditions required for the legal rights and obligations of the contracting parties (to a marriage); it can neither make nor annul the tie once pronounced by the Church, acting in the same name and with the authority of Christ. . . . On and after next Easter Sunday (1908) no marriage of any Catholic (be he or she a nominal or oven an apostate Catholic) will bo valid unless contracted before the parish priest or the bishop. Hitherto, when a Catholic in this dominion,‘as in the whole of Australia, was wicked enough to contract marriage with another Catholic, or even with a nonCatholie, before the civil registrar or an heretical minister, the marriage was valid, though sinful and entailing ecclesiastical censures. But from next Easter any such marriage contracted by a Catholic either in a registry office or before a nonCatholic clergyman will be null and void; in other words, the parties will, in the sight of Gcd and his Church, still remain unmarried. Prior to Easter, 1908, such marriages were regarded as perfectly valid even by the Catholic Church. How, then, has this change been brought about? Not by an Act of Parliament, but by the promulga tion in New Zealand of a decree (known as “Ne Temere”) “issued. by the order and with the authority of his Holiness Pius X.” The object of that decree was to bring into operation, throughout the British Empire, the decree of the Council of Trent, issued in 1563. The reason why this law had not been promulgated in England and Scotland and in other Protestant countries is thus stated in a Roman Catholic book: —“The Church did not find it possible to insist upon the rigour of this legislation in all countries, owing to strong opposition. Indeed, in many countries it was not found advisable t*> promulgate the decrees of the Council of Trent at all. . . Even in countries where the decree had been published serious difficulties arose. As a consequence, Pope Benedict XIV*, choosing the lesser of two evils, issued a declaration concerning marriages in Holland and Belgium in which ho declared mixed unions to be valid, providing they were according to civil law.” In Breslau, a Catholic place, it met with so much opposition that it was withdrawn, and in Germany also it was withdrawn in 1909 for the same reason. If strenuous opposition had been shown in Now Zealand we would probably have been saved from those evils that led to the passing of the enactment of 1920—evils such that, in the words of the (Anglican) Primate of all Canada, “ imperil the sanctity and security of home life” —evils the existence of which in New Zealand appears to have been so well known to members of the Legislative Council that they considered it unnecessary to hear evidence regarding them. Although the Catholic Church condemns mixed marriages, yet with characteristic astuteness and worldly wisdom it has devised, means of turning them to its own advantage. It grants a dispensation to the Catholic party to such a marriage, but the dispensation is made subject to certain conditions, of which the most important is tnat all the children born of the marriage i shall be baptised and brought ujs in the Catholic faith, and a verbal promise is usually required from the Catholic that ho (or she) will endeavour to bring the nonCatholic into the true Church. The possibi Tries of mischief involved in such schemes are infinite, but they serve the interests of tne C hurch, whilst the hideous dogma that outside tne Roman Catholic Church there is no salvation, gives to the whole the semblance of a lofty religious motive. • But it is not my purpose to enlarge upon j i'P on ,l.h o attributed to this system. | My object i s to suggest that the law 'should j be so altered as to require all marriages I toffie celebrated at the Registrar's Office By way of contrast to the attitude of the Catholic Church and of the High Church section of the Anglican Church (which seems to comprise nearly all the bishops and a largo proportion of the clergy) I quote a paragraph from a straightforward pronouncement made bv a General Conference of the Methodist Church of Canada:— The Methodist Church has always maintained ,and must continue to maintain the supremacy of the civil law in determining tne conditions upon which the marriage contract may be legally made, and what is involved in its faithful fulfilment.. that we deny the right of any church, our own or any other,' to declare invalid or cast doubt upon, the validity of any marriage solemnised according to law. Contrast with this bold and straightforward pronouncement the timorous and temporising attitude of the Presbyterian Church of Otago and Southland on the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act, an attitude unworthy of any Church: “The Synod resolves that, without committing the Church to an approval of such marriages, it shall be left to the individual conscience of ministers and members to determine, what course they shall follow in celebrating or entering upon, any such marriage, as they shall give account to God.” What is lo be said as to the moral and spiritual leadership of a church that leaves its ministers and members without guidance on such a question as this and also on the question of divorce for desertion? How much better it would be to admit, as even Bishop Gove did at one stage of his career, that it is impossible to base the law of marriage and divorce upon Scriptural texts. Even Mr Gladstone, a High Anglican and the champion of indissolubility, admitted that, as a civil form of marriage had already been introduced into the law, the religious aspect of the question was not conclusive, and that divorce could and ought to be dealt with from a purely secular point of view; that laws should not be made to square with particular tenets of tho Scrip-

tures. “With regard to the great question of the indissolubility of marriage,” he said, “we have had too much dogmatism.” Saint Augustine, who has generally been regarded as the pillar ol the doctrine of indissolubility and whose utterances have been looked upon os oracles, admits that, after writing two treatises upon marriage and divorce according to the Scriptures, he durst not flatter himself that he had succeeded in clearing up the very knotty points involved. It is related of him that, on being consulted on the question whether the conduct of the handsome wife of a man who was in prison for refusing to pay his taxes amounted to adultery according to the Scriptures. r,e found himself unable, alter referring to all the texts on the subject-, to give a decision, grid said he would leave everyone to form his own judgment. The saint cut the Gordian knot by declaring lor absolute indissolubility, and the Presbyterian Church iiad better either do likewise, or follow the example of the Methodist Conference, instead of trying to construct a law on cabalistic texts of doubtful authenticity. Now, it must .surely strike anyone who considers the subject dispassionately as a remarkable fact, that the same Legislature which has considr red it necessary to place upon its statute Look a law designed to prevent Roman Catholic prelates and priests from “alleging’’ that persons lawfully married are not truly married, should continue to license such prelates and priests to marry people, especially when they declare their intention to ignore and defy the law, and when most of the members of Parliament believe that very great evils arise from the teachings aimed at. Now, it is perfectly well known that, although tile enactment referred to purports to be quite general in its terms, it was aimed specially at one particular church, because of the great evils referred to: but it would probably be impossible to get Parliament to enact a. law dealing with that particular church. It, would seem, therefore, that the only effective way of dealing with the problem would be to require all marriages to be celebrated before a Registrar; and the probabilities are that Parliament would never enact such a law except with the consent of those churches that take up a position. similar to that of the Methodist Church. Are the true Protestant nonsJcerdotal churches sufficiently in earnest on thi3 subject to bo prepared to surrender their own privileges in connection with tho solemnisation of marriage, and to support the passing of an Act requiring all marriages to be celebrated before a civil Registrar, and making it a criminal offence for any priest to perform a merely religious ceremony of marriage before the celebration of the civil marriage ? By so doing they would not only apply the real remedy for the evils complained of, but would render the marriage ceremony held after the civil marriage a really impressive religious rite instead of being, as it is now in most cases, a mere formality and an occasion for vulgar display and extravagance. There would then bo no excuse for the absurd display and consequent expense now associated with the ceremony, as such accompaniments would be out of place. Here is a tost of sincerity and disinterestedness.