My good friend is
an enterprising woman, married with two sons. Not that these characteristics
distinguish her in any way. But that she is a committed practicing Catholic is
why I believe she and many like her in the Catholic Church merit relief from
the oppressive doctrine that prohibits Catholics from receiving the Holy
Communion if their marriages are yet to be “blessed” in church i.e. they have
as yet to receive the sacrament of holy matrimony or in more plain
language, they have not exchanged vows in front of the church congregation yet.
Note I said their marriages, which means they are married. Curious isn’t it?
Some people
believe there is an easy way out. After all being Catholic is not an obligation
so people like my friend could very well go and be something else. But since an
existence without controversy yields no change I prefer for people such as my
friend to hang in there and just like Cardinal Martini, keep hammering the fact
that change must happen. Who knows?
Thing is, in our
context legal marriages may be contracted either under Customary Law or under
Marriage Ordinance. Traditional (customary) ceremonies adopt different flavours
depending on the particular ethnic group(s) involved but essentially they
retain similar features. The suitor through his family, requests the hand of
the bride. When the suitor’s intentions are accepted, a date is set for
exchange of bride price and gifts from the suitor’s side for the bride from the
other side. The bride’s family then fetes the two families and their friends – there’s
music, food, words of near wisdom etc. etc. etc and man and wife begin the journey
of bliss or doom. Marriage by ordinance in contrast can be quite a dry affair
without the added after party. The two intended appear with witnesses at appropriate
location, mumble some words of commitment and sign off!
By way of ritual,
the traditional marriage is certainly more meaningful (I say so), engaging,
rich, colourful, public and legally recognized. My bias is apparent but the
truth is marriage by ordinance seems to require the agreement of the two families (only possible in the customary marriage)
in the union as prerequisite!
So why the
Church’s obvious distrust of or is it aversion to the traditional marriage and for
which reason it strongly promotes the sacramental topping, in the absence of
which it takes further steps to debar legally married Catholics from coming to
the Lord’s table? Two reasons have been suggested; first is that those whose
marriages are not “blessed” in church are “living in sin”. The church says no
sex before marriage; remember? So in the eyes of the church traditionally
married couples are just people cohabiting and doing what married people do. I
say boo to that. Second the church frowns on polygamy (I do too) and customary marriages are potentially polygamous. By
insisting on the church blessing (which supposedly commits a person to
monogamy, if one turns a blind eye to what happens in real life) and
instituting “punitive” consequences otherwise, the church hopes to keep up the
pretext of monogamous relationships among its flock. Never mind that many
traditional marriages are and remain monogamous while a percentage too great of
the so called church marriages are “openly” polygamous.
My axe falls
partly on a society that instinctively assumes inferiority of its own culture
in relation to others. Take for instance those who tend to say they are
attending “engagements”, or say their relative is being “engaged” when indeed
the ceremony referred to is that of marriage! There is no such thing as
engagement in our marriage custom. The so-called “engagement” activity which
rests heavily on two people and whatever they care to “engage in” does not even
come close to what we call “knocking”. Knocking is a prelude to the marriage
ceremony proper which put simply involves emissaries from the suitor’s family going
to make enquiries about a woman’s availability for marriage to the bridegroom
hopeful. Call it the application stage. Is this anything like engagement?
I believe our
traditions with respect to marriage are too meaningful for the Pope to turn his
nose at. If I was my friend I would go right ahead and eat up the bread each Sunday
and see who stops me. After all many so-called engaged and yet to be married
couples pretending not to be having sex (actually in many cases it’s the Church
pretending they are not) are having their fill.
