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S i d e b a r
Quick Lesson in Canon Law
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This Rock
Volume 18, Number 4
 April 2007 
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Canon Law acknowledges a number of impediments to marriage. The three dealing with family relationships are:
- Consanguinity deals with the possibility of marriage between blood relatives. Nowadays, brothers and sisters and first cousins may not marry.
- Affinity deals with the possibility of marriage between a person and the relatives of his or her spouse (presuming the bond with the spouse has ceased to exist, usually by death).
- Public decency (some medieval authors called it quasi-affinity) deals with the possibility of marriage between one person and the relative of another with whom the first person has been engaged or has had an unconsummated marriage.
Both affinity and public decency were at issue in Henry’s divorce.
So far as affinity is concerned, Canon Law today forbids marriages between persons related by affinity in the direct line (that is parent to child.) So, if my wife dies, I can’t marry her mother, but I could marry her sister. Interestingly, the Church allows that such a second marriage (to my wife’s sister) might, in fact, benefit my children—that is, in the event of their mother’s death, the Church is open to the possibility that it could be better for my children to have their aunt, whom they know, as their new mother. In the sixteenth century, the impediments of affinity were more restrictive. A man could not marry his dead brother’s widow without a dispensation from this Canon Law.
The question is what kind of dispensation was required. Catherine testified that the marriage between her and Arthur had never been consummated. Henry accepted the testimony and later said that he found Catherine a virgin. Thus, a dispensation of quasi-affinity or public decency would have been sufficient. In other words, the first marriage was never consummated, but for the sake of public appearances, a dispensation to marry should be granted.
One more detail about affinity in the Canon Law tradition: Marriage is the consent of the partners to be conjugally united. If they are baptized, it is also a sacrament. Consummation expresses the intimate sense and purpose of the marital consent. Consequently, the Church held that any act of intercourse, whether conjugal or illicit (as in fornication or adultery), created a relation by affinity among the relatives of the persons involved. Thus, a man who fornicated with a woman was not free later to marry her sister. This restriction no longer exists in Canon Law, but it did in the sixteenth century.
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