It is not reflection – least of all, ‘ethical’ reflection – the first thing that the reality of a wedding should arouse. Faced with such a profoundly human event – and so ‘festive’ – joy and the corresponding congratulations to the newlyweds must be the first and most important reaction. I do not want to break such a forceful rule. So go ahead my congratulations to such cheerful and distinguished newlyweds: a Carrie Symonds, 33 years old, y a Boris Johnson, 56 years old.
But, in that beautiful event there is a fact that has not gone unnoticed by some Catholic sensibilities: it’s been two months since Boris got divorced from Marina Wheeler with whom he was married by the Anglican Church in 1993 and with whom he has four children. What’s more, before Boris himself was married with Allegra Mostyn-Owen (1987) although some time later the marriage was declared invalid. Converted as a young man to Anglicanism, Boris is now baptized a Catholic. For her part, Carrie, a baptized Catholic and a practitioner, came to the wedding as a single. The cohabiting couple formed by Boris and Carrie baptized their first child in the Catholic Church on September 12.
Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, now husband and wife, on May 29
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For Catholic sensibilities a bit narrow, there are two pieces of information in the above mini-story that cause uneasiness: the premarital coexistence before the Catholic wedding and the existence of a divorce from the marriage celebrated in the Anglican Church. I think that for a refined Catholic sensibility today there is only one question left: Why has the Catholic Church accepted the celebration of the sacrament of marriage of a couple in which one of the two people is divorced from a previous Christian wedding?
The last question is the object of my ethical reflection, for which, trying to imitate the wise scribe of the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 13, 52), I take out of my chest old and new criteria.
The old criteria
In the multidimensional reality of marriage, it is necessary to combine three fundamental ethical references and consequently inalienable:
The anthropological reality, full of meanings and, in principle, common to all humans. It is governed by what was previously called natural law and which, more appropriately, is today called anthropological condition.
The socio-legal institution of marriage, which conveys and ensures the realization of the values of anthropological reality: it is what is usually called Civil marriage.
The religious dimension with which the anthropological reality and the socio-legal institution are interpreted and lived. In some religions – specifically, in the Catholic Christian religion – this religious dimension has developed so much that it has given rise to its own legal system (canonical marriage), which has tended to dominate the entire broad field of marriage.
The new criteria
Faced with understandings of other times, the current Christian-Catholic vision of marriage, especially with the support of the apostolic exhortation ‘Amoris laetitia’ (2016), tends to reorganize the dimensions of marriage in a tighter way.
1. The understanding of faith does not weaken but rather supports and fulfills the anthropological reality of marriage. From which the full consistency of civil marriage is deduced, a necessary reality for the believer and a common reality for all.
2. In the religious dimension – Christian, in our case – han de the theological and spiritual aspects prevail over the legal ones. Furthermore, there are many of us who wish that in the Christian realization of marriage the legal elements should tend to disappear in order for a new theological-mystical paradigm of marriage to emerge.
3. The reality of marriage corresponds to fidelity in conjugal love and stability in the socio-legal institute. But the absolute indissolubility of the conjugal bond is not a requirement of that fidelity and that stability.
Three doubts
I am sure that, on May 29 at Westminster Cathedral, the priest Daniel Humphreys was an official witness of a Catholic wedding with all the legal requirements. Of what I’m not sure is one of these three things:
– That public opinion has captured the integration of the religious dimension with the anthropological reality.
– What Christian ecumenism has been favored between Catholics and Anglicans.
– That Catholics we have agreed to the fully Christian reality of a marriage in which one of the people involved comes with the experience of a divorce.
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