The alliance is vertical. From top to bottom. God makes it with his children, from agreement to the divine right, which makes the union of the spouses a symbol of the union of Christ with his Church.

If there is an institution absolutely necessary for the functioning of society, it is marriage. And if there is an institution that has been in free fall for decades, it is, unfortunately, marriage. By manipulating it mercilessly, at the cost of altering its very nature and under the guise of respect for sexual freedom and social pluralism, we have little left of what mankind has called marriage for centuries. First we took away its consideration as the foundation of the family; then, its purpose of forming a stable community of love -two out of every three marriages are divorced in Spain-; then, its connection with procreation, the grade of heterosexuality, until it is, at the present time, very difficult, not to say impossible, to arrive at a descriptive definition of what marriage is.

This discrediting of marriage, in general, has undoubtedly dragged down canonical marriage, which is on the way to extinction. According to programs of study of the National Institute of Statistics, Catholic weddings in Spain have fallen by 83% in the last twenty-five years. This is the figure: of the 194,084 marriages celebrated in 1996 in Spain, 148,947 were celebrated within the Catholic Church (76.7%). In 2021, on the other hand, only five years later, of the 148,588 weddings celebrated in Spain, only 24,957 were agreement with the prescriptions of the Church (16.8%).

A good rabbi friend of mine, a professor in the United States, recently commented to me about the case of this great country. You Catholics, he told me, forbid divorce, but the truth is that statistics confirm that there is practically no difference between Catholic and non-Catholic divorces. We, on the other hand, he concluded victoriously, have succeeded in making our religious marriage more stable than yours and than civil marriage.

Faced with this complex status, the Catholic Church has reacted by offering a wide variety of marriage courses training , many of them highly qualified. But it has not been enough. In my opinion, the Church has to undertake a long-term strategy that will lead it to revitalize canonical marriage with all its consequences. And a good start could be to dissociate itself from any relationship with civil marriage and even gradually abandon the hackneyed word marriage, replacing it with the precious expression sacramental conjugal covenant. This is not just an opportunistic change of look, but to contribute to an authentic social transformation of the perception of canonical marriage in our society. For the rest, this is what popes do when they are elected: change their name. A clean slate.

The expression conjugal covenant is much richer and deeper, sacred and noble, than the expression marriage contract, from which the canonists have still not been able to escape, even though the Catechism of the Catholic Church has abandoned it. The covenant is vertical. From top to bottom. God makes it with his children, from agreement to the divine right, which converts the union of the spouses into a symbol of the union of Christ with his Church. The word contract, on the other hand, is poorer and more mercantilist, less liturgical, because it is still horizontal, between equal parties, even though the Canon Law has elevated it, sacramentalized it, divinized it, in this concrete supposition of marriage.

On the other hand, the word marriage itself, from the etymological point of view, has a macho connotation. Marriage is the official document of the mother (matris-monium), as patrimony is the official document of the father (patris-monium), testimony is the official document of the witness (testis-monium), or vadimonio the official document of the bondsman (vadis-monium). This social separation of functions between the official document of the mother who takes care of the children and that of the father who looks after the business has been, thank God, completely overcome in our days. Another reason to denigrate the name of marriage.

Once canonical marriage has been transformed into a sacramental conjugal covenant, the Church, as part of this new shock pastoral, should only call to this covenant those persons who are really fully willing to live this union of spouses with each other and with God for life and open to life, according to non-negotiable divine laws, which bear little or no resemblance to what we currently call link civil.

After a few years, this sacramental conjugal covenant will acquire enormous prestige among the baptized and the whole of society, and will end up becoming the best way to live conjugally in this world, because of its visible results of happiness, generosity, unity, family peace and openness to life. For those Catholics who are not ready to live together according to this sacred covenant, the Church, as the mother that she is, could grant them a special marriage blessing, which would begin a phase of human and spiritual training for the reception of the sacrament of the conjugal covenant.

Naturally, this proposal that I offer would require a profound change in the whole of canonical marriage law and in the juridical principles that animate it, drawn for the most part (consent, capacity, validation, form) from secular contract law. It would no longer be a matter, as it has been until now, of sacramentalizing the contractual, operating from the bottom up, that is, going from the juridical to the sacramental, but rather from the top down, moving from the sacramental to the juridical.

Most of the conflicts between spouses generated in the living of the covenant would be resolved not before canonical courts, but through restorative, non-adversarial justice, facilitating forgiveness, healing wounds, seeking mercy, and not only applying contractual justice. Quite a paradigm shift. That does begin with a change of name.