(LifeSiteNews) — An archbishop in Argentina has declared that a supposed “marriage” between two “transgender” individuals in the country is null and void.
On January 28, a man who presented as a woman and a woman who presented as a man were “married” at Our Lady of Pompeii Parish in the Archdiocese of Corrientes, Argentina. Both had legally changed their gender markers and names on national documents under Argentina’s “gender identity” law.
One member of the couple, “Solange” Ayala, a man who believes he is a woman, said in a Radio Sudamericana interview that although getting married in the Church seemed “impossible,” they persisted in searching for possible host churches. “Several people told us that this church was quite open to welcoming the community,” Ayala said in reference to Our Lady of Pompeii Parish.
“We completed the process like anyone else, we started a marriage application, we went to speak with the priest, and he received us very well,” Ayala recounted, saying they had been “able to receive the blessing of the Church.”
“We had a chat, he explained the steps to follow and he himself went to speak with the archbishop and told us that there was nothing he could object to against us being able to get married, because if we spoke like this, transparently, biologically we were a man and a woman, then we could be blessed under the sacrament of marriage,” he explained in the interview.
However, the Archdiocese of Corrientes later denied having approved a sacramental marriage for the couple, stating that “this archdiocese at no time received the ecclesiastical documentation corresponding to the formalities required for processing these cases.”
Archbishop José Adolfo Larregain confirmed in February to ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language outlet of EWTN News, that the “marriage” has been annulled because it does not meet the basic requirements of a marriage, according to the Code of Canon Law.
The archdiocese will therefore take “canonical disciplinary measures” in response to the ceremony. It stressed that “Christian marriage, as a sacrament, requires essential canonical conditions for validity and licitness,” ACI Prensa reported.
“It’s not just a matter of a ceremony or documentation: It requires that the contracting parties be legally competent to marry, that there be no canonical impediment, and, crucially, that they give genuine consent; that is, that they wish to enter into marriage as the Church understands it, with integrity and good faith,” the archdiocese said.
The Code of Canon Law states that consent to marriage cannot be given by “those who suffer from a grave defect of discretion of judgment concerning the essential matrimonial rights and duties mutually to be handed over and accepted,” or by “those who are not able to assume the essential obligations of marriage for causes of a psychic nature.”
Gender confusion, an individual’s identification with the opposite sex or a “gender” other than their biological sex, is a mental illness and was long recognized as such by the American Psychological Association.
Archbishop Larregain further explained that both the matter and form of the sacrament of marriage, constituted respectively by the contracting parties and the marital exchange of consent, were not sufficiently present in the case of the “transgender” couple.
The “dissonance” between the couple’s ontology (the nature of their being) and their phenomenology (how they perceive and present themselves) renders their so-called “marriage” null ipso facto, according to Larregain.
“What does that mean? It is null at that very moment, because it does not effect the sacrament; that is, there is no sacrament as such,” he said.
The archdiocese said that it will strengthen its “interview, preparation, and verification procedures” to “safeguard the sanctity of the sacraments and avoid confusion in the community” moving forward.
Sacred Scripture affirms the created reality of sexual difference as grounded in divine will and not subject to human alteration. God created the human person “male and female” (Gen 1:27), a truth reaffirmed by Christ Himself (Mt 19:4), while elsewhere the Bible reads: “A woman shall not be clothed with man’s apparel, neither shall a man use woman’s apparel: for he that doeth these things is abominable before God” (Deut 22:5).