In this intriguing clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin to tackle a unique question about the validity of marriage for conjoined twins. Jimmy explores the complexities of sacramental marriage in light of the Church’s teachings, emphasizing that while there’s no official doctrine on this matter, it opens the door for thoughtful discussion within Church authorities.
Transcript:
Cy: Mexican conjoined twin Carmen Andrade married her boyfriend. Her twin sister Lupita approved of the marriage despite identifying as asexual and aromantic and despite the fact that they share the same reproductive system. How would that work with the conjoined twin not being part of the sacraments since they share a body?
Jimmy: Okay, so the first thing to say is the Catholic Church does not have an official teaching on this. There is no document you’re gonna find on marriages of conjoined twins. Now, that’s not to say the Church couldn’t come up with something. This is a question that would naturally fall into the purview of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, or potentially the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. But thus far, I’m not aware of any Church document, any magisterial document that addresses this issue.
And so when that happens, we have to fall back on the principles of Catholic moral theology to form an opinion. And that’s all I’m claiming here is an opinion. Here’s how I would work through the issue.
In terms of Catholic moral theology, the first thing to say is that the Church regards, and this is a teaching, the Church regards matrimony as a human right. Consequently, everybody has the right to get married unless something prevents that right from being exercised. So the presumption is in favor of marriage being valid and thus possible.
But there can be things that can overcome that. Like I mentioned, you can’t find someone to marry you. Well, then you can’t get married. On the other hand, fortunately, you know, there are like 7 billion humans out there, which means about three and a half billion of them are possible marriage candidates, at least at some phase in their life. So there’s lots of good fish in the sea, as they say.
But in this case, we have one marriage partner who’s a young man. He’s normal. He is not conjoined to anybody, so there’s no issue on his side in terms of the ability to get married. The issue comes with his fiancée, who he did marry, who is named Carmen. The issue is that Carmen is conjoined. It looks like they’re conjoined at kind of at the chest level with her twin sister, Lupita.
Okay, well, Carmen and Lupita are two distinct persons. They may share parts of a body, but they are nevertheless two distinct persons. You know, Carmen may have one set of opinions, Lupita may have another set of opinions. And Carmen then wants to marry this gentleman, and so she’s able to exchange matrimonial consent with him, and he’s able to exchange matrimonial consent with her.
So under ordinary circumstances, if you have two distinct individuals who exchange matrimonial consent, they’re going to be married. So it’ll be a valid marriage. It may be natural or supernatural, depending on whether the parties are baptized, but it’ll be a natural marriage.
The question is, is there anything that could block the marriage from coming into existence? And here it seems to me there are two potential sources of concern. The first one is that Lupita is almost certainly going to be privy to activity that would occur between the husband and Carmen that is normally private.
And, you know, there are ways you could try to shield or block from some of that, but I doubt they’d be 100% effective. And so if Carmen marries this gentleman, then he and she are both going to be exposed to what’s effectively an eavesdropper on their marital intimacy. And that’s something that is a source of concern. A lot of people would say, “Ooh, ick, I don’t want someone eavesdropping on my marital intimacy.” And that’s an entirely appropriate, understandable response.
But the question is going to be, is it sufficient to overcome Carmen’s right to get married? And so there are situations where things happen that are not ideal and that are unpleasant. And so I can see easily someone saying, “Well, this is not an ideal situation, and this is an unpleasant situation.” But is that lack of idealness? Is that lack of pleasantness sufficient to overcome Carmen’s right to get married?
And I would be hard pressed to say it fundamentally overcomes it and means Carmen can never get married. I’d also note that Lupita supports Carmen getting married, so that’s not a source of concern here. And so if you’ve got one sister saying, “I don’t have a problem with this,” and the other sister saying, “I want to exercise my right to get married,” the mere discomfort of the situation is something that I would be hard pressed to say is going to overcome Carmen’s right to get married.
Now, the other source of concern is the mention that the two siblings, the two conjoined twins, share the same reproductive system. And that’s important for two reasons. One of them is, you know, having children—whose child will they be? Carmen’s or Lupita’s? But it also is of concern because in order to validly get married as part of matrimonial consent, you have to consent to the right to intimate relations with the person you’re marrying.
And that implies that you have the ability to engage in intimate relations with the person you’re marrying. You don’t have to actually do it. There are what are known as Josephite marriages where the parties agree, “Okay, we’re giving each other the right to have intimate relations with each other, but we’re never planning on using that.” That would be what’s called a Josephite marriage after St. Joseph. And those are valid. They’re not consummated, but they’re valid.
Well, okay, so Carmen is going to need to give her husband, or her fiancé at this stage, the right to have intimate relations with her. And that means that whose reproductive tract this is is ultimately important because I doubt very much—now, especially without doing a cell-by-cell level genetic comparison—I doubt very much that the statement that they share the same reproductive system is true.
My suspicion is the reproductive system probably belongs to either Carmen or to Lupita. And it would require some kind of detailed examination, either via X-ray and other forms of imaging or even cellular DNA analysis to figure out whose reproductive system this is.
So if it turns out that this is really Carmen’s reproductive system, then she has the ability to consent to marital intimacy with her fiancé, and they could get married, and any children that they would have would then be naturally Carmen’s children. On the other hand, it could turn out that if you look close, even on the cellular level, the reproductive system is really Lupita’s. And if the reproductive system is really Lupita’s, then Carmen cannot consent to marital intimacy with her fiancé, and they can’t get married.
So I think that that is a potential block. And in order to settle that question, one would have to do some kind of further analysis. This is the kind of thing that would ultimately come under the purview of the local bishop to figure out. This is such an unusual situation; the bishop would need to get consulted, and he would probably bring in medical experts to consider the situation.
But those would be the principles that I would use in order to try to navigate this. Now, I should say I’ve recently seen another situation like this on social media. It appears to involve different individuals, so I’m not sure how many of these there are. I’m not sure that they’re all accurate because today you can tell any AI you want, “Make a picture of people in wedding clothes where you’ve got conjoined twins standing next to a non-conjoined person.”
Oh, yeah. I’m assuming that everything is as it’s being presented. But assuming that everything is as it’s being presented, those are the two sources of concern that I can see someone raising. And ultimately, I think the decision would need to go to the local bishop, who might even want to consult higher and go to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith or the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.