Forget the struggle between Clinton and Obama. A reader has chosen to take on Fr. Rutler–and the good padre has come out swinging. From the reader:

Mr. Robinson,
In your excerpt from NRO-chaplain-exofficio Rutler, I notice this phrase: “…had been married to Elizabeth Patterson in Baltimore by Bishop Carroll…”
Fr. Rutler knows very well that bishops (as wells as priests and deacons) in the Latin Rite of the Roman Church do not “marry” couples. Rather, they “receive their vows”; couples marry each other (they are the ministers of the sacrament).

Fr. Rutler replies:

Of course the man and woman are ministers of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony….But without derogating from that fact, it has been legitimate vernacular custom to say that an ordained minister “marries” a couple or “performs” a marriage – and this has been common in virtually every court protocol and has been accepted use, as far as I know, ever since the decretals of Alexander III. In royal marriages since the Frankish hegemony, this was the use, and to say a clergyman “performed” a marriage is to use the courtly Old French (“fornire”) with the Latin preposition “per.” Such is the development of language, though it was common from Urban II’s “performance” of the marriage of King Conrad right through the unfortunate second marriage of Napoleon I by his uncle Cardinal Fesch. (As is well known, Urban II also brought part of the skull of St. George to San Giorgio in Velabro where it can still be seen – I used to preach there every Lent on the day after Ash Wednesday.) – (Coincidentally, Cardinal Fesch gave paintings to the Baltimore Cathedral.)
Surely there are more precise formulations to represent the canonical and theological reality of the marriage sacrament, and it would be preferable I suppose to say that a marriage was “blessed” by so-and-so – (this was dramatically the case when, in the customary of Innocent III, couples wed outside the church door and the entered to receive a blessing) – but it would be pedantic to refuse a use employed by Pontiffs themselves.

Where will it all end?