Greg Daly
Ireland’s longest-serving diocesan bishop has raised the question of whether it is time to separate the religious and civil aspects of Irish weddings.
Speaking at a Limerick conference, Clonfert’s Bishop John Kirby told Austria’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn how “in Ireland there’s a very close link between civil marriage and Church marriage”, and asked whether the Church should acknowledge that the State’s understanding of marriage has changed.
“We are now performing marriages that are not quite what we intended 40 or 50 years ago,” he explained at the ‘Let’s Talk Family, Let’s Be Family’ conference in Mary Immaculate College, highlighting how the civil concept of marriage has been changed by “the introduction of civil divorce, and the more recent introduction of same-sex marriage as meaning exactly the same thing in civil law”.
Sacramentality
“I just wonder,” he asked, “would it be better for the Church in Ireland to distance itself from the civil understanding of marriage, and celebrate our marriages as a sacrament and emphasise the sacramentality of Catholic marriages?”
Observing that in most countries there is a growing gap between sacramental and contractual civil understandings of marriage, Cardinal Schönborn said the key difficulty with separating the two is that even civil marriages have ‘natural’ dimensions.
Asked by The Irish Catholic to expand on his concerns, Bishop Kirby declined to comment.
Dr Kirby’s question echoed concerns first raised by the hierarchy during 2013’s Constitutional Convention, when the bishops cautioned that any change to the definition of marriage in Irish law would create “great difficulties” which could bar clergy from carrying out their current civil roles as solemnisers of marriages.
Referendum
During the referendum campaign two years ago, a spokesman for the bishops repeated this concern, observing that the passage of the referendum would mean the Church’s view of marriage and that of the State would be “radically different”, adding, “it’s reasonable that the bishops may decide to separate the two”.
2015 saw 56.7% of the State’s 22,025 weddings being solemnised by Catholic priests, but in a Supreme Court ruling last month, Ms Justice Iseult O’Malley stated that following the introductions of no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage, the legal institution of marriage in Ireland can no longer be described in terms of traditional Christian doctrine.