# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1858_S375
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry. 375

of the authorities forbidding widows to marry within the year of mourning
rests on honorable and just grounds. The same apostle Paul demands, in
Philippians 4:8, that we should think on whatsoever is honorable and of
good report: but such a marriage bears the stain of infamy; that we should
be diligent in decency before all men: but such a marriage is not
decent. 5) If widows, because of the freedom of marriage established by
the apostle, may not be kept from marrying during the year of mourning,
why then do they keep the whole clerical estate entirely from marriage?
why do they maintain that marriage is hindered on account of spiritual
kinship? why do they introduce so many forbidden degrees? and so on. If
they think that in these and similar ordinances of canon law no obstacle
is thrown in the way of freedom of marriage, why then do they maintain
this concerning the prohibition of civil law, which rests on the fairest
grounds?

As for the second point, we hold it fair that widowers too, during the
time of the year of mourning, or at least of half a year from the death of
their first wife, should not marry again. For although they are not,
strictly, bound to this by any divine or civil law — although also the
first reason, namely confusion of offspring, does not apply to men — yet
the second reason, namely public decency, holds for them as well. For a
man does not seem to have been sincerely devoted in spousal love to her
whose memory he lays aside immediately upon her death, and it is not
without public scandal that a new marriage bond is entered upon over the
fresh grave-mound of the first wife. That some time elapsed between the
death of Sarah and the second marriage of Abraham, the Mosaic narrative
shows. Although, therefore, those who hasten to a second marriage after
the death of the first wife do not fall under the infamy of the law, as
Seneca says: "no fixed time of mourning is set for men, because none is
even decent" — still they can scarcely be free from the infamy of the deed
and from the suspicion of frivolity and want of restraint. It is
inhuman, "to see the burial of one's own with the same eyes with which one
saw them alive, to carry out their memory along with their corpse, and not
to be moved as a result of the first tearing of the family bond," says the
same Seneca: yet now this mourning is shown most of all precisely by one's
abstaining from a new marriage.