Toward Easier Mixed Marriage

ECUMENISM

"Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder," intoned the Rev. Claudius Miller, an Episcopal minister, at the wedding last month of Susan Ekberg, an Episcopalian, and Patrick C. Barker, a Roman Catholic. The words were from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and the wedding took place at St. Genevieve du Bois Catholic Church near St. Louis. A Catholic priest officiated jointly with Father Miller, and Susan promised that she would bring her children up as Catholics.

This unique marriage took place with the blessing and approval of St. Louis' Joseph Cardinal Ritter and his good friend, Missouri's Episcopal Bishop

George Cadigan. Bishop Cadigan, who is close to the Ekberg family, interceded with the cardinal when Susan insisted on having a priest of her faith at the ceremony, and Father Miller helped work out a ceremony that used prayers from both the Catholic and Episcopal rites. At the wedding the Catholic priest, the Rev. Dom T. Leonard Jackson of St. Louis' Benedictine Priory, read the exhortation from the Roman ritual, blessed the ring, and officiated during the exchange of vows according to the Episcopal rite. Father Miller delivered an invocation, pronounced the couple man and wife, and recited over them the Prayer Book blessing.

Sarum Ceremony. All this was legal in Catholic eyes because Father Jackson was the official witness of the sacrament. And there was no problem about using the Prayer Book form of marriage: it in fact derives from the Sarum rite used in the pre-Reformation English church.

The Ekberg-Barker wedding was the first of its kind in the U.S., although similar experiments in ecumenical marriage ceremonies have taken place in the methodically unity-seeking Netherlands. Last April in Amsterdam, for example, a Dutch Jesuit and a Lutheran minister presided over the wedding of the minister's daughter to a Catholic boy in a Lutheran church. Dutch Catholic Bishop Willem Bekkers of 's-Hertogenbosch has twice allowed Reformed pastors to assist Catholic priests at mixed marriages; the couples promised only to bring up their children as "Christians."

Protestant Warnings. Such ecumenical experiments may well prove one way to end a continuing source of Catholic-Protestant conflict. Catholic canon law requires that the children of all mixed marriages be brought up as Catholics and that the Catholic partner work "prudently" for the conversion of his spouse. It does not even recognize the validity of any mixed marriage that is not celebrated before a priest. Despite such off-putting rules, roughly one-fourth of all Catholic marriages in the U.S. and Germany involve a non-Catholic partner--and there are thousands of other Catholics who, breaking canon law, marry Protestants before ministers. Many Protestant leaders, including the Church of Scotland Assembly and Germany's Evangelical Church hierarchy have warned against mixed marriages so long as the strict Catholic rules prevail. A number of progressive Catholic bishops have asked Rome to change the rules on mixed marriages, and the fourth session of the Vatican Council will probably outline the norms to be allowed a pontifical commission of cardinals that is now revising canon law, last codified in 1918. The progressives argue that the marriage rules involve ecclesiastical rather than divine law, and that the sacrament is actually administered by the couple rather than the priest, who is merely an official witness. Thus there is no Catholic doctrinal bar against Catholics' marrying Protestants before non-Catholic clergy.

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