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Q u i c k Q u e s t i o n s
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This Rock
Volume 6, Number 4
 April 1995 
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Sanated or sanitized?
Q: I am a Catholic who was married outside the Church without a dispensation, so my marriage is invalid before God--a fact I very much want to correct. My non-Catholic spouse is unwilling to be married in the Catholic Church. Is there anything I can do?
A: Assuming that there is nothing like a previous, putative marriage that needs to be taken care of first (through a decree of nullity), and assuming that you both still have valid matrimonial consent, your marriage can be rendered valid using a canon law procedure known as radical sanation.
This term comes from the Latin phrase sanatio in radice, meaning "healing in the root." According to the Code of Canon Law, "The radical sanation of an invalid marriage is its convalidation without the renewal of consent" (CIC 1161:1). This means you do not have to go through a new marriage ceremony.
For a radical sanation to take place, several conditions must apply. First and most basically, "A radical sanation is not to be granted unless it is probable that the parties intend to persevere in conjugal life" (CIC 1161:3). If there is evidence the one or both of the parties intends anything less than a permanent marriage, radical sanation is ruled out.
Second, "A marriage cannot be radically sanated if consent is lacking in either or both of the parties" (CIC 1162:1). You and your spouse must have valid consent regarding your marriage, and this consent must exist simultaneously in the two of you. At some point you must have consented freely to the marriage in a way that did not exclude any of the essential properties of marriage (monogamy, fidelity, permanence, and openness to children). This consent is presumed to have been given in your marriage ceremony outside the Church unless there is evidence otherwise (CIC 1107), and the consent is presumed to exist at the present unless one party has indicated otherwise.
Third, any impediments that exist must be taken care of. Many of these can be resolved as part of the radical sanation itself. In general, "A marriage which is invalid due to an impediment or due to defect of legitimate form can be sanated provided the consent of each party continues to exist" (CIC 1163:1). This would apply in your case because your marriage was invalid due to a defect of form (you failed to get a dispensation for a marriage ceremony outside the Church).
Some impediments cannot be dispensed in this manner: "A marriage which is invalid due to an impediment of the natural law or of divine positive law can be sanated only after the impediment has ceased to exist" (CIC 1163:2). Examples of such impediments include having a previous marriage bond or total, permanent impotence (which is different from sterility). The first example can cease to exist if the previous spouse is dead or if one has obtained a decree of nullity to show that there never was a valid marriage in the first place.
If your spouse would have an extremely bad reaction to the sanation procedure, then, for the sake of domestic peace, he would not need to be told about it: "A sanation can be granted validly even when one or both of the parties are unaware of it, but it is not to be granted except for serious reason" (CIC 1164). The extreme reaction of your spouse could count as the serious reason needed for this.
Normally your local bishop would be the one granting the sanation: "In individual cases radical sanation can be granted by the diocesan bishop, even if several reasons for nullity exist in the same marriage, provided the conditions mentioned in canon 1125 concerning the sanation of a mixed marriage are fulfilled" (CIC 1165:2).
Chief among the latter is the condition that "the Catholic party is to declare that he or she is prepared to remove dangers of defecting from the faith and is to make a sincere promise to do all in his or her power in order that all the children be baptized and brought up in the Catholic Church" (CIC 1125). In other words, you must promise to remain a Catholic and to do what you can to see that your children will be Catholics.
Call your parish priest or the marriage tribunal at your diocese to investigate obtaining a radical sanation.
Q: I was baptized a Catholic but not raised in the Church. I have been studying Catholic theology intensely and very much want to become a practicing Catholic. Do I need to go through the whole RCIA process before I can begin receiving the sacraments and practicing the faith into which I was born?
A: No, you do not. RCIA--the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults--is for those who have never been initiated into the Catholic Church. You have received your basic initiation by virtue of your Catholic baptism. What you need now is to learn the Church's teachings (which you are already doing) and make your first confession and first Communion and to be confirmed.
Under canon law, you as an adult do not need to undergo formal instruction in order to make your first confession or first Communion; informal instruction is sufficient. In fact, "Sacred ministers may not deny the sacraments to whose who opportunely ask for them, are properly disposed, and are not prohibited by law from receiving them" (CIC 843).
You must know, understand, and accept the Church's teachings concerning confession and the Holy Eucharist. The person who teaches these to you does not need to be a priest or catechist, just someone who knows and will give you the straight story concerning the Church's teachings on these sacraments as found, for example, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (see numbers 1322-1498 in the Catechism, about 40 pages of material to study).
Once you understand and accept these teachings, you can go to confession--anonymously if you wish--and explain to the priest that you were raised outside the Church and that this is your first confession. You will need to confess all the post-baptismal mortal sins that you can remember, indicating to the degree possible the number of times or the frequency with which these were committed. This needs to be done before going to first Communion.
Because you will have learned and accepted the Church's teaching concerning the Eucharist, you can begin going to Communion like any other Catholic. No special permission is necessary. "Any baptized person who is not forbidden by law may and must be admitted to Holy Communion" (CIC 912). Basically, those forbidden by law are children who are too young, uninstructed, or improperly disposed (CIC 913-4), people under a penalty of excommunication or interdict (CIC 915), those who have committed a mortal sin since their last confession (CIC 916), those who have already received the Eucharist that day (unless they take an active part in a second Mass or if special circumstances apply [CIC 918, 921:2]), and those who have not fasted for an hour before going to Communion (CIC 919).
To receive confirmation, which you should do as soon as possible (CIC 890-1), you will need more instruction: "Apart from the danger of death, to receive confirmation lawfully a person who has the use of reason must be suitably instructed, properly disposed, and able to renew the baptismal promises" (CIC 889:2). For this instruction your parish may put you in an RCIA class for the sake of convenience.
You do not need to receive confirmation before beginning to go to confession and beginning to receive the Eucharist. Nothing in canon law requires that, and you may begin practicing those parts of a Catholic's sacramental life as soon as you have understood and accepted the Church's teachings concerning them.
Welcome back!
Q: Some Messianic Jewish congregations baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Ruach ha-Kodesh." Are these baptisms valid?
A: They probably are. Ruach ha-Kodesh is simply the Hebrew phrase for "the Holy Spirit" (Ruach = Spirit, ha-Kodesh = the Holy).
We already know that there is some flexibility in the translations of the terms used to refer to the Persons of the Trinity. For example, in English the Holy Spirit is often referred to as "the Holy Ghost" (especially in older works or in Traditional circles). It is valid to baptize using the term "Ghost" instead of "Spirit."
In Messianic Jewish congregations, a special sub-dialect of English is used in which Yiddish and Hebrew loan words are used as part of English speech. Thus if you were to attend a Messianic Jewish service, you probably would hear a sermon in English on Yeshua ha-Mashiach, which is Hebrew for "Jesus Christ."
As part of the daily speech they have been taught to use in church, many Messianic Jews naturally use Yeshua ha-Mashiach to refer to Jesus Christ and Ruach ha-Kodesh to refer to the Holy Spirit. It is part of their sub-dialect, just as "Holy Ghost" is part of a more traditional sub-dialect of ecclesiastical English and "Holy Spirit" is the mainstream usage within ecclesiastical English.
One can argue that Ruach ha-Kodesh is simply a term in an English sub-dialect, just as "Holy Ghost" is. English is a composite language made up of loan words from other languages in the first place. In fact, "Ghost" is from Old High German, while "Spirit" is a loan word from Latin, and "baptize" is itself a loan word from Greek.
Thus these baptisms are probably valid, even though, in the case of a Messianic Jew who becomes Catholic, a conditional baptism might be in order, just to make sure.
Q: In your two-tape set The Priesthood Debate, James Akin points out that Romans 15:16 applies the Greek term for priest (hiereus) to New Testament ministers, who are said to have "priestly duties." Why isn't this word applied to them more often in the Bible?
A: For the same reason it isn't applied more often to Jesus, the New Testament high priest--because most of these priests, like Jesus, were not from the tribe of Levi. In Jewish circles, the idea of a priest not being from Levi was absurd. Everyone knew God had given the priesthood to Aaron and his descendants (Ex. 28:1; cf. Num. 16-17).
Most Christian presbyter-priests were not from Levi, much less the Aaronic line, and it would have posed apologetic difficulties for Christians in Jewish communities to refer to their ministers as "priests." An ordinary, first-century Jew would snort at that idea, saying, "Oh, yeah. Your ministers are priests. They aren't even Levites!"
The early Christians faced the same problem when it came to the fact that Jesus is the New Testament high priest. Jesus was from the tribe of Judah, not Levi. A first-century Jew would scoff at that idea, too.
So when the Church was still largely Jewish, the priesthood of Jesus and his ministers was kept in the background, and the Greek word for "priest" was used for them only rarely. In that way non-Christian Jews would not automatically reject Christianity and could become familiar with it before being hit with the idea of non-Levitical priests.
Thus there is only one book--Hebrews--which directly refers to Jesus as a priest and only one book--Romans--which directly refers to his ministers as priests. Other books of the New Testament show Jesus and the presbyters doing jobs only priests can do, but the term hiereus is not used for them.
When Jesus' priesthood is directly stated, the author must go to great pains to justify the idea to Jews. Non-Christian Jews were arguing that Christianity could not possibly be true because Jesus could not be the high priest of the New Covenant. He was from the wrong tribe: He was not a Levite. To reclaim his Hebrew Christian readers, who were in danger of going back to Judaism, the author of Hebrews had to show that this fact did not matter.
That is the basic function of chapter 7. It is okay for Jesus to be a high priest because he was not a priest of the order of Aaron but of the order of Melchizedek (6:20), an order which was older than the Aaronic one (7:1), which did not require a special genealogy (7:3), which was superior to the Aaronic order (7:4-10), which was prophesied to arise again one day (7:11; cf. Ps. 110:4), and which required "a change in the law as well ... For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests" (7:12-14).
The writer wanted to keep his readers from going back to Judaism, and so he had to prove that "it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, unstained, separated from sinners, exalted above the heavens. Indeed, the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath [Ps. 110:4], which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect for ever" (7:26, 28).
Once the Church ceased to be mostly Jewish, this was no longer an apologetic problem. Gentiles did not have the idea that priests had to be from the tribe of Levi, so they could convert without this being an issue. Thus, after the Church became mostly Gentile, the priesthood of Christ and his ministers became more prominent.
Q: Is there any danger in my studying Eastern Orthodoxy and its history and beliefs?
A: That depends. For some people such study could induce confusion. Before beginning such independent study, why not wait for and read the series of articles that Fr. Ray Ryland is writing on Orthodoxy? The first appears in this issue. Over the next year about eight more articles will appear.
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