The Roman Catholic Church distinguishes between matters of theological substance (women can’t be priests in the Roman Rite) and matters of ecclesiastical discipline (married men can’t be priests in the Roman Rite). Matters of discipline can be waived, as clerical celibacy can under the Pastoral Provision and Ordinariates, but matters of substance can’t. Men who aren’t priests can’t celebrate the Eucharist or pronounce Nuptial Blessings, so men who aren’t RC priests can’t perform RC weddings. That said, the necessity for a wedding of any sort is a matter of discipline and not a matter of substance. Many, if not most, Catholic marriages before 1563 were contracted directly between the parties (with or without other witnesses present) and only blessed later if at all. Nevertheless, the couple was regarded as validly married the moment that they entered into an agreement to immediately undertake the obligations of the married state.
After the Council of Trent, Roman Catholics could only be married through a ceremony witnessed and solemnized by a RC priest. [The Church of England, incidentally, retained the old rule until 1753, and many North American jurisdictions still recognize the validity of nonceremonial marriages.] Therefore, if one of the parties is considered to be RC under their Canon Law, they must be married in valid Catholic form (in the parish church by the parish priest using the Roman Rite) unless place and form have been waived by proper authority. If neither party is RC, they aren’t subject to RC disciplinary rules, so they can be married anywhere using any form they please, so long as the essential element remains—an agreement between the parties to immediately undertake the obligations of matrimony as the Church understands them. As with baptism, the sacramental validity of Anglican marriages does not imply anything about the validity of Anglican orders or about the status of Anglican groups as “churches” rather than mere “ecclesial bodies.”
More broadly, some of the differences between RCs and Anglicans are disciplinary matters that can be bridged by RC compromise (married clergy or the use of a minimally-modified Book of Common Prayer rather than the Roman Missal). Others clearly can’t. These include recognition of the Bishop of Rome not just as a first among equals, but as having immediate and universal jurisdiction over the Church as a whole. A few years ago, I would have said that Anglicans could never buy into the concept that anybody could exercise such jurisdiction, but that was before the current Presiding Bishop! At any rate, any hope that Rome would ever compromise on that, or on any number of other matters of theological substance, have always been no more than wishful thinking on the part of Anglicans who thought they could have their independence and papal recognition too. Whatever the situation in Anglo-Catholic regions, it is unlikely that a majority of Anglicans in any of the 44 worldwide churches would ever accept Papal Infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, or the Assumption as compulsory dogma. It is equally unlikely that the Roman Catholic Church would ever accept any of those as less than compulsory. That being the case, organic union or even intercommunion between the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches was never in the cards.
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