"a couple cannot enter into marriage if they share a firm intention not to have children. Priests and pastors should not officiate at weddings of couples who express this intention. This does not mean that infertile individuals or women beyond the age of child-bearing cannot marry. The inability to have children is not the same as taking active measures to prevent their conception. The former is a physical condition, the latter is a moral choice."
"The gift of children: a statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together," First things no. 297 (November 2019): 40 (37-42), italics mine. Cf. 1983 CIC 1101 §1, italics mine: "If . . . either or both of the parties by a positive act of the will exclude marriage itself, some essential element of marriage, or some essential property of marriage [(matrimonium ipsum vel matrimonii essentiale aliquod elementum, vel essentialem aliquam proprietatem)], the party contracts invalidly." Latin from AAS 75.2 (1983), 193 (no corrigenda in the appendix). 1917 CIC 1081 §2: "Matrimonial consent is an act of the will by which each party gives and accepts perpetual and exclusive rights to the body, for those actions that are of themselves suitable for the generation of children" (The 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of canon law in English translation with extensive scholarly apparatus, ed. Edward N. Peters (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 372, italics mine).
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