DC Archbishop: Marriage About Procreation

[davidinalameda]

Marriage is about procreation. It would be nice if someone would inform Hugh Hefner’s current fiancé since it appears that he has gone beyond just shooting blanks to shooting dust. One would swear that he was one of the living undead. This is, of course, the position of the Roman Catholic Church, and it flies in the face of not only recent tradition, but also the majority of Christian teaching over the centuries when marriage was more about making sure who got the property when father dropped dead of the rusty arrow sticking out of his chest than it was about making sure that children were born.

Procreation only really entered into the union in order to make sure that father had someone to hand over the property to, usually after the Church took its cut. Procreation was also a wonderful thing because while the first son went off to inherit the property, the second son went off to get his limbs chopped off in some foreign land that everyone was trying to convert to Christianity, and the third son went off to the priesthood where he was either fooling around with the local barmaids or buggering the young acolytes who wanted to join the priesthood.

Ok, so not all of them were quite that bad, but it is certainly interesting to read Chaucer, especially the parts about the ‘quaint’ in relation to priests, clerks, clerics, and so forth.

So, perhaps if Archbishop Donald Wuerl had spent more time learning the actual history of his own Church rather than the propaganda that they love to push on people, he might have learned a thing or four about marriage. After all, one has to really wonder why a group of people who claim to not be all that interested in marriage are so big on pushing people to conform to their definitions of marriage. It is like the Nun’s Priest in Canterbury Tales discussing the institution of marriage. How is a priest who talks only to nuns suppose to know the first thing about marriage.

http://lezgetreal.com/2010/12/dc-archbishop-marriage-about-procreation/

[Angry Dragon]

1. They came out with a ruling just the other week

The catholic church decided that anyone that wanted to get married in the church had to undergo a fertility test to determine if they were able to bear children. If the tests came back negative then the church would not let the people be married in the church and they might even consider excommunication because they could not produce more catholics.

[ShadowLiberal]

2. The ArchBishop seems to forget that the church already changed the rules of marriage centuries ago

At one point in the article the ArchBishop says "don't force us to change the definition of marriage", what he seems to forget is the Catholic Church had no choice centuries ago but to change the definition of marriage.

You know how marriage is supposed to be 'till death do us part', that was the only way to end a marriage, until culture changed and people demanded the right to divorces. The Catholic Church ferociously fought divorce for ages, they excommunicated anyone who dared to ask for a divorce. There was one King of England, I believe King Henry the 4th, who wanted a divorce, so the Pope excommunicated him, and the king was forced to journey to Italy to beg for forgiveness, he was in danger of being overthrown by his people if he didn't get unexcommunicated.

But then generations later King Henry the 8th and the Pope had the same fight over divorce, but this time King Henry the 8th won by starting up his own church, that would allow divorce, and the people went along with it, all converting to his new church (you had to be the same religion of the king back then). The catholic church started to lose more and more followers elsewhere because of the divorce issue.

Eventually the church finally saw the writing on the wall and gave up their fight against divorce, and created annulments their followers had to get for the church to recognize their divorce, and they had their own rules for getting an annulment.

With culture continuing to change, the Catholic church is going to have to give in on gay marriage to eventually, it's very short sighted right now how they close down all their services except worship at the church if forced to recognize gay couples/marriage.