Q. I was in a wedding rehearsal and the priest took the couple through all the vows for the wedding to be the next day. But he used the full wording and they answered everything, so were they really married Friday night and not Saturday?
A. There are three elements required for the sacrament of marriage to be celebrated validly in the Catholic Church. First, you need a bride and groom: without one man and one woman, both of whom are free to marry one another, a marriage cannot be contracted validly. Second, you need a bishop, priest, or deacon (who has the proper authority) to receive the vows in the name of the Church and at least two witnesses. Third, you need consent expressed in the vows themselves. Unless the bride and groom actually make the promises intrinsic to marriage in some external way, no marriage exists.
As you correctly point out, all three of these conditions appear to have been present at the rehearsal the evening before the actual marriage. There was a bride and groom who were (presumably) free to marry one another, a priest, several witnesses, and the statement of the vows. Does this mean that the bride and groom actually got married on Friday night?
At the heart of this question is the concept of consent. The sacraments, marriage included, are not magical acts which produce their effects simply by uttering a string of words while performing a certain action. Their validity is always tied to the intention of the minister of the sacrament, who must on some level intend to perform the sacrament. This means that no one can perform a sacrament by accident without meaning to do it.
To give a perhaps strange and extreme example, imagine a priest who has the habit of sleepwalking. He makes his way to the kitchen during the night while still sleeping, grabs a piece of bread from the cupboard and mutters the words “this is my body.” Does the piece of bread turn into the Eucharist? The answer is no: our somnambulant priest cannot be said to intend anything, since personal agency for concrete actions is removed when we fall asleep. The sacraments are not mechanical, but occur only when someone means to celebrate them “on purpose.”
The same is true for marriage. Matrimonial consent is defined in canon law as “an act of the will by which a man and a woman mutually give and accept each other through an irrevocable covenant in order to establish marriage.” This is just a more technical way of saying that you cannot get married on accident: you have to know what it is, choose it, and state your choice externally in the vows.
So, the real question is whether or not the bride and groom intended by an act of the will to consent to marriage that Friday night when they said the same vows that they would repeat on Saturday. I cannot say what was going on inside of them as they rehearsed their vows on Friday night. However, I would guess that if, at the rehearsal dinner following the practice, you approached them and asked them to describe what they had been doing as they said the vows on Friday, they would probably respond with an answer like, “we were practicing our vows that we were going to exchange on Saturday” or “we were running through the vows so we would be ready for the big moment tomorrow.” Furthermore, if you asked them what day they were planning on getting married, they would probably both respond “tomorrow.” If this is the case, then it would be clear that they had not intended with an act of the will to get married on Friday night, even if they had said the exact words they would repeat the next day.
This question was answered by Father James Morin, vice chancellor, Diocese of Lincoln. Write to Ask the Register using our online form, or write to 3700 Sheridan Blvd., Suite 10, Lincoln NE 68506-6100. All questions are subject to editing. Editors decide which questions to publish. Personal questions cannot be answered. People with such questions are urged to take them to their nearest Catholic priest.
