- Feb 5, 2002
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Dr. Gregory Popcak recently suggested that a woman ignore the advice of her priest, who claimed that she should have sex with her husband despite his adultery.1 This priest said the woman was creating an “undue burden on her cheating husband and driving him away” because “sex is a ‘right’ of marriage.” Popcak argued that the reason sex (in this paper, sex is equated with intercourse) is a “right” in marriage is because this is the “right place for people to have sex” due to a lifetime commitment of faithful and fruitful mutual love.2Who is correct? What advice should a pastoral counselor offer regarding availability of marital sex in this and other difficult situations? These questions refer to conjugal rights (also called the marital debt). This paper defines Catholic conjugal rights and offers principles for application.
Conjugal Rights Defined
When a couple marries, they enter into covenant with each other in the Lord. More than a contract, a covenant is a sacred and mutual exchange of good, services, and persons.3 Covenant speaks to an accurate understanding of conjugal rights. This first section examines the biblical, historical, and pastoral aspects of Catholic marriage as connected to conjugal rights.
Conjugal rights were stipulated in the Old Testament. In The Mystery of Marriage, Perry Cahall explains that in the Old Testament a husband owed his wife a common life, physical provision, sexual intercourse, and respect; while the wife owed her husband similar rights, her primary obligation was “exclusive right to have intercourse with her” to protect the “identity of the [male] children” as his heirs.4 Although allowing the man to divorce his wife, the law of Moses protected the wife from arbitrary rule of her husband.
In the New Testament, Jesus restored marriage by instituting it as an indissoluble sacrament and identifying lust as a sin of the heart (Mt 5: 27-32, RSV).5
Historically, there is substantial recovery of the full meaning of conjugal rights together with doctrinal development. Within this short paper, only the most pertinent considerations are addressed, notably devaluation of women following the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Sr. Prudence Allen, in The Concept of Woman – Volume 3, traces the decline in women’s equality following the Protestant Reformation based on: (1) the literal interpretation of Scripture, leading to a change in marriage vows from mutual consent to one-sided obedience of the wife to the husband in Protestant and Catholic marriages; and (2) the requirement of men in theology, law, and medicine to study Aristotle, who theorized that because of a “defect in women’s nature her virtue was to obey, and man’s was to rule.”6 Women’s inequality in nature and marriage was not corrected until the twentieth century.7
The Second Vatican Council and teaching of St. Pope John Paul II on marriage and integral gender complementarity brought authentic development.8 The Second Vatican Council described married life as a “partnership.”9 Then, John Paul II, in audiences from 1979-1984 called Theology of the Body, explains that, with grace, couples can live in communion. He interpreted Ephesians 5: 21-33, firmly stating that St. Paul
does not intend to say the husband is the “master” of the wife and the interpersonal covenant proper to marriage is a contract of dominion by the husband over the wife . . . it is in her relationship with Christ — who is for both spouses, the one and only Lord — that the wife can and should find the motivation for the relationship with her husband . . . This relationship is nevertheless not one-sided submission. According to Ephesians, marriage excludes this element of the contract, which weighed on this intuition and at times does not cease to weigh on it. Husband and wife are in fact, “subject to one another,” mutually subordinated to one another . . . Love makes the husband simultaneously subject to the wife, and subject in this to the Lord himself, as the wife is to the husband.10
Ephesians 5: 21, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” summarizes right marital relations. Reverence and respect for each other emerges in and from recognition of equal dignity in the Lord.
Canon Law reflected this development. Cormac Burke, former auditor on the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, explained the difference between the 1917 and 1983 Code of Canon Law #1057, §2. The old code focused on “exclusive right over the body, for acts . . . suitable for the generation of children,” while the current code focuses on “an irrevocable covenant” by which the spouses “mutually give and accept each other in order to establish marriage.” Burke adds, “The object of consent is no longer presented as mere ‘right over the body, but as mutual ‘self-donation.’”11 Related to Popcak’s advice regarding conjugal rights, The Code of Canon Law #1151-1153 clearly specifies the right of the innocent spouse “to sever conjugal living” in the case of adultery, when in physical or spiritual danger, or if a spouse renders “common life too hard,” all presupposing due process of Canon Law and sound discernment.12
Continued below.
Conjugal Rights: Defined and Applied - Homiletic & Pastoral Review
Conjugal Rights Defined
When a couple marries, they enter into covenant with each other in the Lord. More than a contract, a covenant is a sacred and mutual exchange of good, services, and persons.3 Covenant speaks to an accurate understanding of conjugal rights. This first section examines the biblical, historical, and pastoral aspects of Catholic marriage as connected to conjugal rights.
Conjugal rights were stipulated in the Old Testament. In The Mystery of Marriage, Perry Cahall explains that in the Old Testament a husband owed his wife a common life, physical provision, sexual intercourse, and respect; while the wife owed her husband similar rights, her primary obligation was “exclusive right to have intercourse with her” to protect the “identity of the [male] children” as his heirs.4 Although allowing the man to divorce his wife, the law of Moses protected the wife from arbitrary rule of her husband.
In the New Testament, Jesus restored marriage by instituting it as an indissoluble sacrament and identifying lust as a sin of the heart (Mt 5: 27-32, RSV).5
Historically, there is substantial recovery of the full meaning of conjugal rights together with doctrinal development. Within this short paper, only the most pertinent considerations are addressed, notably devaluation of women following the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Sr. Prudence Allen, in The Concept of Woman – Volume 3, traces the decline in women’s equality following the Protestant Reformation based on: (1) the literal interpretation of Scripture, leading to a change in marriage vows from mutual consent to one-sided obedience of the wife to the husband in Protestant and Catholic marriages; and (2) the requirement of men in theology, law, and medicine to study Aristotle, who theorized that because of a “defect in women’s nature her virtue was to obey, and man’s was to rule.”6 Women’s inequality in nature and marriage was not corrected until the twentieth century.7
The Second Vatican Council and teaching of St. Pope John Paul II on marriage and integral gender complementarity brought authentic development.8 The Second Vatican Council described married life as a “partnership.”9 Then, John Paul II, in audiences from 1979-1984 called Theology of the Body, explains that, with grace, couples can live in communion. He interpreted Ephesians 5: 21-33, firmly stating that St. Paul
does not intend to say the husband is the “master” of the wife and the interpersonal covenant proper to marriage is a contract of dominion by the husband over the wife . . . it is in her relationship with Christ — who is for both spouses, the one and only Lord — that the wife can and should find the motivation for the relationship with her husband . . . This relationship is nevertheless not one-sided submission. According to Ephesians, marriage excludes this element of the contract, which weighed on this intuition and at times does not cease to weigh on it. Husband and wife are in fact, “subject to one another,” mutually subordinated to one another . . . Love makes the husband simultaneously subject to the wife, and subject in this to the Lord himself, as the wife is to the husband.10
Ephesians 5: 21, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” summarizes right marital relations. Reverence and respect for each other emerges in and from recognition of equal dignity in the Lord.
Canon Law reflected this development. Cormac Burke, former auditor on the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, explained the difference between the 1917 and 1983 Code of Canon Law #1057, §2. The old code focused on “exclusive right over the body, for acts . . . suitable for the generation of children,” while the current code focuses on “an irrevocable covenant” by which the spouses “mutually give and accept each other in order to establish marriage.” Burke adds, “The object of consent is no longer presented as mere ‘right over the body, but as mutual ‘self-donation.’”11 Related to Popcak’s advice regarding conjugal rights, The Code of Canon Law #1151-1153 clearly specifies the right of the innocent spouse “to sever conjugal living” in the case of adultery, when in physical or spiritual danger, or if a spouse renders “common life too hard,” all presupposing due process of Canon Law and sound discernment.12
Continued below.
Conjugal Rights: Defined and Applied - Homiletic & Pastoral Review
