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(Opening address to the Canadian Canon Law Society Convention, St. John's, Newfoundland, October, 1997)

            If I am glad to have been invited to speak on a topic other than canon 1095, the reason is certainly not any feeling that the last word has been said on consensual incapacity. It is simply because of a personal conviction that there are more null marriages today through simulation of consent, than through incapacity for it.

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. ).

Nullity of Marriage (L. -D.) on the grounds of incapacity to accept the essential obligations of marriage due to homosexuality in the Defendant.

THE FACTS

            "Human rights" is a subject on almost everyone's lips today. Peculiarly enough, although rights inevitably imply duties (the two are correlative), "human duties" or obligations are talked about far less. Yet we all have our duties and obligations: towards God, towards his world, towards its environment, towards others, towards ourselves. In interpersonal relations rights and obligations have a very particular importance. Social life itself becomes impossible unless an elementary consensus about essential rights and obligations exists, and unless the majority of citizens have at least a basic disposition not only to exercise their rights but also to fulfil their obligations.