CONCUBINAGE

Concubinage is the state in which a man and a woman live as if married without having received the Sacrament of Matrimony.

Concubinage is a crime (OF FORNICATION) before God, an abomination before the Church, and a public scandal before society.

CIVIL MARRIAGE

Since marriage is a Sacrament, its celebration among Christians lies completely outside civil jurisdiction.

In marriage between Christians, the contract cannot be separated from the Sacrament, because marriage is the very natural contract raised by Jesus Christ to the dignity of a Sacrament.

Therefore, for a Christian there can be no true marriage that is not a Sacrament.

For Christians, only religious marriage is valid, and whoever does not marry through the Church is not married. Consequently, for a Christian, so-called civil marriage is not a valid marriage and is null even when considered as a mere contract.

If one were to enter into it because it is obligatory or civilly necessary, it would be solely in order to give effect to its civil consequences.

The Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth, Pope Pius IX, stated this very clearly in an Allocution with these words:

“Every other union of man and woman, outside the Sacrament, entered into by virtue of any civil law whatsoever, is not marriage among Christians and is absolutely condemned.”

Therefore, Christians who are united ONLY civilly (in reality, in concubinage) and live as husband and wife live in a continual state of mortal sin. The same applies to those who, having contracted a religious marriage, resort to the INVALID civil divorce and supposedly “remarry” civilly. Those who live in concubinage must either marry through the Church or separate. Those who were religiously married, divorced, and then united “conjugally,” whether by “civil marriage” or otherwise, must separate from that false conjugal union. In both cases, if death overtakes them in that state, their souls will be condemned to hell for all eternity.

The children of Christians united only civilly are illegitimate before God, before the Church, and before persons of upright conscience.

Where the law so requires, the marriage must be registered in the civil registry in order to grant and secure civil effects for the married couple and their offspring.

But the Christian who is instructed in matters of religion, when registering in the civil registry, does not intend to truly contract marriage, but merely to fulfill a formality imposed by law for civil effects.

The law of civil marriage, in the form established in some nations as a substitute for true sacramental marriage, is contrary and offensive to the Catholic Religion.

It is an affront to Catholics to oblige them to perform a civil marriage as a substitute for the religious one, since they can recognize no true marriage other than the religious marriage.

Only an ignorant or impious Catholic (the impious person is no longer Catholic, but a renegade) can recognize civil marriage as a true marriage. The state could, with reason, require that once the religious marriage has been celebrated, it be immediately registered in the Civil Registry.

But the state cannot in any way, without offending the religious sentiments of conscientious Catholics, consider the act of civil registration as the celebration of marriage. Evidently, in secular—indeed atheistic—governments, civil marriage is considered true marriage even for believers.

Even in non-Catholic nations, if freedom of conscience were respected, the state should have no other requirement for Catholics than the registration of the marriage in the Civil Registry.