Question Corner: What is church teaching on openness to kids in marriages between older adults?

Q: As a divorced, over-50 Catholic man with an annulment, I met a Catholic woman my age with the same history of divorce and annulment. After dating for a while we began to talk about marriage and went to see our priest. He asked if we were open to the idea of having kids. We both blurted out: “No!” and laughed, saying that now that our kids from prior marriages were all grown and gone, it’s our time now. The priest countered with: “I’m sorry but if you’re not open to the possibility of having kids I can’t marry you.” Is this the church’s policy on senior adult marriages or just his?

A: In order to marry in the Catholic Church, a couple does need to be at least open to life in principle — but it is not a requirement that children necessarily be foreseen as a realistic possibility in the intended union.

Traditionally, in our Catholic theology of marriage we speak of marriage involving three essential “goods”: the good of fidelity; the good of permanence; and “the good of children,” although the technical Latin term for this (“bonum prolis”) encompasses both the bearing of children as well as their upbringing and education.

The intrinsic relationship between marriage and parenthood is further underscored in Canon 1055 of the Code of Canon Law, which defines marriage as a “covenant by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of their whole life, and which of its own very nature is ordered to the well-being of the spouses and to the procreation and upbringing of children.”

Yet at the same time, it is understood that ultimately children are a gift from God. Not every couple is physically capable of having their own biological children, regardless of their age or desire for a family. Because of this, fertility is not a requirement for a valid marriage, and thus the church does not require married couples to bear children in actual fact.

The church is also aware that childbirth and childrearing can be very demanding, and therefore for appropriately serious reasons it can be morally licit and compatible with a valid marriage for a married couple to use acceptable practices (like Natural Family Planning or other forms of informed, timed abstinence) to delay children for a period of time.

What the church does require is that married couples be at least open to the possibility of children in their union overall. Of course, this kind of “openness” can take the form of a couple eagerly trying for a family as soon as they leave for their honeymoon. But it can also look like, e.g., a couple prudently choosing to delay parenthood for a few years while they finish their professional training — just as long as, if they found themselves with a surprise pregnancy, they would still be willing to welcome their child with joy, even if it was not in line with the original timing they had planned.

Similarly, a couple can meet the canonical requirement of being open to life if they would lovingly accept a child that was a result of a “miracle pregnancy,” or pregnancy that was wildly improbable from a medical standpoint.

Obviously, I was not present in your meeting with your priest, so I don’t know exactly what was said. But if your comment to the priest had been something to the effect of: “Given our ages, my fiancée and I are not expecting more children, and to be honest we are looking forward to having this time to ourselves,” then that should not have any major cause for concern on the priest’s part. But if you had said something more along the lines of: “Neither of us feel like raising any more kids, and we are planning to use birth control to make sure that doesn’t happen,” then the priest was likely correct to decline to marry you.

Jenna Marie Cooper, who holds a licentiate in canon law, is a consecrated virgin and a canonist whose column appears weekly at OSV News. Send your questions to CatholicQA@osv.com.

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