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The jurisprudence of church tribunals has constantly held that the marriage consent from which offspring is intentionally excluded ("bono prolis excluso") is null. A recent rotal Sentence coram Stankiewicz, in expressing this principle, says that it is the exclusion of the procreative element which vitiates the very object of matrimonial consent: "Since the procreative element enters the essence of matrimony and represents an essential component of the formal object of matrimonial consent, no one of the contracting parties can deliberately exclude it without thereby invalidating the marriage itself" (coram Stankiewicz, 29 October, 1987, n. 3).

The 1917 Code of Canon Law described matrimonial consent as that "act of the will by which each party gives and accepts a perpetual and exclusive right over the body, for acts which are of themselves suitable for the generation of children" (1917 Code: canon 1081, # 2.). The 1983 Code describes this consent in apparently very different terms: it is that "act of the will by which a man and a woman, through an irrevocable covenant, mutually give and accept each other in order to establish a marriage" (1983 Code: canon 1057, # 2. ).

An assumption at times found in current canonical writing is that Church thinking has been dominated for centuries - right up to Vatican II - by an "institutional" understanding of marriage, and that this is now gradually but surely giving way to a more personalist understanding. In the institutional understanding the social aspect of marriage is emphasized and, concretely, its role as an institution for propagating the human race. This understanding has roots that stretch far back into the past. A lot of its strength developed from the doctrine of the three-fold matrimonial "bona" and, later, from the elaboration of the contractual concept of matrimony and from the requirement of canonical form.

[in Same-Sex Attraction; a Parents' Guide (Eds. John F Harvey and Gerald V. Bradley) St. Augustine's Press, South Bend, Indiana, 2003 (pp. 33-49)]

 Canon Law and Recent Developments in Psychology and Psychiatry