Sharings

Dear Editor,

The column on weddings (“Bulletin Inserts” ML 27:7) could have provided greater background. So many people are frustrated by the various rules regarding weddings but no one seems to offer an explanation for them.

The requirements that weddings be celebrated in church, with witnesses and no barred doors, after a series of three public announcements (banns) of the pending marriage arise from the fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

These rules were designed to reduce the likelihood of a bride being virtually kidnaped or privately coerced (and often later abandoned with children without any legal means to prove that she was married and that the husband had paternity responsibilities), among other things. In many respects, it provided some greater legal protections for women in the medieval marriage mart. The rules arose at the time of the great flowering of legal reforms in the High Middle Ages, reforms largely led by the Church of Rome.

Like most reforms, of course, their reforming aspect became blurred and obscured with the passage of time and legal ossification. While most weddings in the United States might not benefit from the intent of these rules, it might well be that there are some areas of the world where they still fulfill that intent.

Karl Saur
Melrose, Mass.

ML
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