El matrimonio católico en la república chilena

Abstract

Francisca Rengifo takes a look at the nascent Chilean republic through the lens of Christian marriage. For this republic, marriage expressed the internal contradictions and external ruptures of the process of political independence and legal change, revealing the ambiguities of this institution for the formation of the republic. Catholic marriage signified a legal and political bond that promised, on the one hand, to order social relations – by shaping the private space of the family in relation to the new political public space – and, on the other, to resolve certain deep-seated tensions between the republican project and the social reality of an essentially rural, illiterate and "backward" population. Paradoxically, the institution that was then considered essential for constituting civil society and generating social change had already been the canonical marriage in force in Hispanic-colonial society. For the republic, marriage, which the Council of Trent had established as a sacrament and regulated on the basis of the mutual consent of a man and a woman, was at the origin of the legitimate family in which future citizens were to be trained in civic virtues. This contribution explores the importance of the codification process (1855) of Christian marriage in the dissemination of this normative model and the socialization of its meaning.

Keywords

• marriage
• catholicism
• secularization
• religion
• civil code