29. Marriage, the Origin of the Family
In the first volume of this work, in the treatise on the sacraments, we have studied marriage as a natural institution and as a sacrament. That study should be a preparation for this treatise. In this chapter we shall study marriage as the origin of the family, its characteristics, and requirements. We will see that marriage is:
· a person-affirming reality,
· a love-enabling reality,
· a life-giving reality, and
· a sanctifying reality.1
1. God, the Creator of Man
Divine revelation begins with the self-manifestation of God as the Creator of all things, both spiritual and material: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1).
In a special way, God created the rational creatures with body and soul. He endowed them with spirit, so that they may share his infinite happiness. God created spiritual beings—angels and humans—capable of spiritual knowledge and free volition. Thus, “God created man in his own image” (Gn 1:27). In this passage, God is revealing to us the individual and spiritual aspect of human nature: rational intelligence and free will. A human being is a person.
A complete reading of the passage reveals additional truths about humanity: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27). There is a certain parallel between the mysterious divine plurality of Persons within the transcendental unity of God, and the plurality of human beings—male and female—destined to the astonishing unity of the human family, which contains all persons.
Because man, like all creatures, is limited and always in need of complementing his own limitations, God wanted that another human being—a woman—should complement, enrich, and help him. God decreed that man and woman would live a life of love and knowledge in a natural unity, in a communion. Thus, God established matrimony as a natural institution. He also determined its essential characteristics and laws.
The intimate partnership of life and the love which constitutes the married state has been established by the creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws.… God himself is the author of marriage.2
There are some who think that matrimony is not a natural reality, but a changeable cultural trend. They try to manipulate it according to their own interest, or introduce what they call “alternative lifestyles.”
Among the most difficult challenges facing the Church today is that of a pervasive individualism, which tends to limit and restrict marriage and the family to the private sphere.
Many misunderstandings have beset the very idea of “nature.”… There is a tendency to reduce what is specifically human to the cultural sphere, claiming a completely autonomous creativity and efficacy for the person at both the individual and social levels. From this viewpoint, what is natural becomes merely a physical, biological, and sociological datum to be technologically manipulated according to one’s own interest. This opposition between culture and nature deprives culture of any objective foundation, leaving it at the mercy of will and power. This can be seen very clearly in the current attempts to present de facto unions, including those of homosexuals, as comparable to marriage, whose natural character is precisely denied.3
“Have not you read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19:4–6). Jesus said that husband and wife are to be one. In these passages, we discover one of the properties of this kind of human love, and, therefore, of marriage: its exclusivity (one man with one woman), which is the same as its unity or monogamy.
2. Marriage is a Person-Affirming Reality
Marriage comes into existence when a man and a woman, forswearing all others, through an act of irrevocable personal consent, freely give themselves to one another. It is based on a definitive decision, the consent. At the heart of the act that establishes marriage, there is a free, self-determining choice on the part of the man and the woman, through which they give themselves a new and lasting identity. This man becomes this woman’s husband, and she becomes his wife, and together they become spouses.
This man and this woman are not, for each other, replaceable and substitutable individuals but are rather irreplaceable and non-substitutable persons (with the emphasis on “persons”).
Through their own free and self-determining choices, they have given to themselves and to one another a new kind of identity, and nothing they subsequently do can change this identity. They simply cannot unspouse themselves. They cannot make themselves to be ex-husbands and ex-wives any more than I can make myself to be an ex-father to the children whom I have begotten. I may be a bad father, a terrible father, but I am still my children’s father. I may be a bad husband, a terrible husband, but I am still my wife’s husband, and she is my wife.4
Marriage is established in and through the free, self-determining personal choice of the spouses, and thus, it is a person-affirming reality.5
3. Marriage is a Love-Enabling Reality
Marriage, a person-affirming reality, enables husband and wife to give to each other the love that is unique and proper to them: conjugal love. Marriage enables them to give this kind of love because:
· only spouses can give love of this kind;
· what makes a man and a woman spouses is their marriage.
Thus, marriage is a love-enabling reality. Other kinds of love—love of neighbor, love of one’s children, love of one’s enemies—do not imply the marriage institution because these are inclusive, not exclusive kinds of love.
3a) What Love is Not
One of the dominant ideas to which the world is subjected today is the wrong notion of love. Motion pictures frequently portray love as a feeling that is so important to achieve happiness.
At other times, love is portrayed as pleasure, a philosophy (called hedonism) characterized by the belief that maximization of pleasure, accompanied by the minimization of pain, is the fundamental moral principle of human life.
Nowadays, for some, love has come to mean having sexual intercourse. This reduction leaves out values such as fidelity, exclusiveness, dependability, stability, childbearing, founding of a family, and love of children.
3b) Progress of Genuine Love
Pope John Paul II analyzes the stages of love:
i) The first element in the general analysis of love is attraction, a natural force that operates in persons.
ii) Desire follows. It becomes a longing for the person, and not a mere sensual desire (concupiscentia). Human love, however, cannot be reduced to desire itself: “I want you because you are a good for me.” If desire is predominant, it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it. Thus, desire should be placed under the control of reason.
iii) When love is perfected, the subject also longs for the other person’s good; it becomes love as good will, also called “love of benevolence” (amor benevolentiae or benevolentia for short).6
Furthermore, love finds its full realization not in an individual subject, but in a relationship between persons; there must be reciprocity. Love should be something that exists between man and woman. The structure of love is an interpersonal communion.
Genuine reciprocity cannot arise from egoism. Each person is called to love as friendship and self-giving, to the surrender of the “I” to form the “we”—a communion. This personal surrender is not in the natural order, or in the physical sense (a person cannot be another’s property). A person can give himself to another (whether to a human person or to God) at the level of love, and in a moral sense. This is something different from—and more than—attraction, desire, or even goodwill.
Moreover, sacrifice has always been the touchstone of authentic human love. People who love with sacrifice send a message about the nature of real love and thereby help to strengthen the marriage bond of other people. Genuine love is, therefore, the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.7
3c) Communion of Persons, Not of Bodies
We should not be deceived by the biblical expression “one flesh,” as if the union of husband and wife were purely physical. The expression one flesh refers to the complete human person. By creating the human race in his own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in man and woman the vocation—and thus the responsibility—of love and communion. Man is called to love in his unified totality, as a person: body and soul. The body is made a sharer in spiritual love.8
Bodily life is not merely an instrumental good for the person, but is itself integral to the person and thus a good of the person. In this personalistic interpretation, human love embraces the body and soul, and the body also expresses spiritual love.9
Since the body, male or female, is the expression of the human person, a man and a woman, in giving their bodies to one another, give their persons to one another. The bodily gift of a man and a woman to each other is the outward sign—the sacrament—of the communion of persons existing between them. And this sacrament, in turn, is an image of the communion of persons in the Trinity.… Pope John Paul II calls this capacity of the body to express the communion of persons the nuptial meaning of the body.10
Summing up, we can say that genuine love must be eminently human, directed from one person to the other person by an affection rooted in the will, and embracing the good of the whole person.11
Jesus, besides, explains the original divine design. “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). The sexual act is truly human only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one another until death. The physical aspect of the sexual act would be a lie if it were not the sign and fruit of a total self-giving, in which the whole person is present, everything one is, everything one will be. If anyone were to withhold something or reserve the possibility of deciding otherwise in the future, he or she would not be giving totally.12 This total self-giving points toward the second property of real married love: it is permanent. If it were temporary, it would not be total. Real marriage is indissoluble. Thus, the properties of marriage are as follows:
· Exclusivity (unity)
· Permanence (indissolubility)
3d) Complementarity of the Two Sexes
“Sexuality is a fundamental component of personality, one of its modes of being, of manifestation, of communicating with others, of feeling, of expressing and of living human love.”13 Femininity and masculinity are complementary gifts, through which human sexuality becomes an integral part of the concrete capacity for the love that God has inscribed in man and woman.
Sexuality characterizes man and woman not only on the physical level, but also on the psychological and spiritual, making its mark on each of their expressions. Such diversity, linked to the complementarity of the two sexes, allows thorough response to the design of God according to the vocation to which each one is called.14
3e) Virginal Love
Revelation clarifies that man’s vocation to love is authentically fulfilled in its integrity only in marriage and in virginity—in virginity by means of a direct giving of oneself to God, in marriage by means of a unique form of self-giving between a man and a woman that is truly human, one quite different from other kinds of human love. Thus, virginity and marriage are love-enabling and person-affirming realities.
4. Conjugal Love
Love drives a man and a woman to establish the intimate and permanent partnership of life, which is marriage. What specifies the community of marriage—in addition to its destination to the generation and education of children—is conjugal love. Conjugal love is the faithful and exclusive love that unites the spouses according to their truth as images of God. It is characterized by the unity and indissoluble fidelity of the spouses.
Conjugal love is an act of the total person, and not an instinctive impulse. It embraces the totality of body and soul in the human person.
This love can generate the stable community of life by means of a conjugal covenant of love and life, marriage,15 which is the initial nucleus of a family. The family is the necessary “place” where the children—fruit of the spouses’ mutual love—are born and formed.
Marriage is established by the consent. Independently of their prior love as fiancés, the spouses bind themselves with mutual love, which from then on will be owed as a commandment. Love, with its unity and exclusivity, is an intrinsic requirement of this conjugal community. But it could be lacking, being a good that is entrusted to human freedom.
In Christian marriage, this love is assumed by Christ, who purifies it and elevates it, leading it to perfection through the sacrament of marriage in order to establish “a new communion of love that is the living and real image of that unique unity which makes of the Church the indivisible Mystical Body of the Lord Jesus.”16
5. The Marital Consent Generates a Permanent Bond
By its nature, marriage is ordered toward the good of the spouses, and the procreation and education of offspring.17
To fill up the Kingdom of heaven, divine providence wanted to use the free cooperation of human beings. God created matrimony as a natural institution to protect that cooperation from the possible vagaries of impulses and caprice, and to make it permanent.
As we have seen, the essence of marriage in fieri (in its making) is the legitimate manifestation of mutual consent, that is, the marriage covenant or contract. Love is the object of the consent. The consent generates a permanent bond, which is the essence of marriage in facto esse (already done). Thus, love results in the matrimonial institution. It then becomes conjugal love, which is destined to grow by its generous exercise.18
The result of the spouses’ total self-giving is the child, a human person who is not only a biological organism, but also a spiritual entity with a series of personal values. For the harmonious growth of these values, a persevering and unified contribution by both parents is necessary. Marriage is the only “place” in which this total self-giving in its whole truth is possible. To be genuine, human love and marriage must be exclusive (one man with one woman), permanent, and open to life. Or, in equivalent terms, it demands:
· unity and indissoluble faithfulness,
· openness to fertility.19
5a) Characteristics of Married Love
The encyclical Humanae Vitae lists the marks and demands of conjugal love:
· It is human love (physical and spiritual).
· It is total.
· It is faithful.
· It is fruitful.20
The first three correspond to unity and indissoluble fidelity. All these goods of conjugal love are also goods of marriage.
(1) It is human. Conjugal love is described as fully human, encompassing the entire person, the senses and the spirit. It is not a simple instinct and sentiment. It is an act of the will, intended to endure and grow by means of the joys and sorrows of daily life. It is saying “yes” to someone else, and “no” to oneself. By it, husband and wife become one heart and one soul, and together attain their human perfection.
The phenomena of “free love” and rejecting marriage are nothing else than a degradation of true human love: the denial of its truth. It is worth noting that the concept of conjugal love must be seen in a personalist perspective, related to human persons, not in the abstract. Therefore, it is inseparable from the truth about the human person. From this perspective, it is easy to understand the requirement that the conjugal covenant must be indissoluble and public.21
(2) It is total. This love is also total. A married person loves generously and shares everything without undue reservation or selfish calculations.
(3) It is faithful and exclusive. Authentic love—as well as the good of the children—demands faithfulness and rectitude in all marital relations. It requires the indissoluble unity of the spouses.22
The adjective committed describes how true married love involves a pledging of oneself to another. Married love is not self-centered but looks to the other partner. To be able to give oneself, one must possess oneself; this involves some control of the passions on the part of the persons concerned.
(4) It is fruitful. Matrimonial consent has two essential elements: conjugal love, and the ordination to children. Once the covenant has been established by the consent, both become obligations, moral and juridical. They can, however, be missing because of the human will. In such cases, they are absent as disorders, faults, or injustices, while remaining in their condition as duties. All authentic conjugal love between a man and a woman, when it is not egoistic love, tends toward the creation of another being issuing from that love. It is, therefore, open to life.23
6. Marriage is a Life-Giving Reality
In every marriage, the mutual love of husband and wife is both an institution and a mandate from the Creator for the increase of his family on earth. God planned the family to be the environment where he will create new life. God told Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gn 1:28). That love with knowledge—that union of “male and female” (an image of God’s love)—was destined to bring forth other human beings like themselves. Marriage is a life-giving reality.
The marital act is the direct cause of the formation of a human body. The Magisterium of the Church teaches us that every soul comes into being through an act of divine creation.24
The total gift of self, which is required by conjugal love, also corresponds to the demands of the offspring. Thus, the third characteristic of genuine conjugal love and of marriage is their openness to new life.
7. The Causes of Marriage
In any action, one should distinguish the object of the action (i.e., what the chosen action by its own nature tends to, independently of the intention of the agent) and the purpose that is intended, or intention of the agent. Here, we may ask ourselves, “What is the purpose of marriage?” or rather, “For the sake of what do husband and wife come together?” and also, “What brings them together?” To answer these questions, we must first distinguish:
· The intrinsic purpose of the action (finis operis),
· The purpose of the agent (finis operantis), i.e., what he has in mind.
Obviously, these two purposes do not always coincide. One thing is the actual intention of the spouses, and the other is the purpose or end of the institution of marriage itself. The finis operis or normal and natural end of marriage—irrespective of the actual intentions of husband and wife for coming together—is the begetting (procreation) and upbringing (education) of their children.
We can now enumerate the causes of marriage, thus showing the depth of its being (its metaphysical roots) and thereby its ultimate ethical structure:
i) Final cause (purpose of the institution): primordially, the begetting and upbringing of the children; secondarily (i.e., not less important than, but subordinate to the primary purpose), the mutual help and companionship with all its implications
ii) Efficient cause (the agent who brings it about): the spouses motivated by a free decision to love each other for life, issuing into a formal and public declaration (man lives naturally in society) of remaining together until one of them dies
iii) Formal or constitutive cause (what makes it a marriage): the mutual self-giving (or matrimonial consent) thus expressed and never withdrawn (neither of the two has the right to do so if what they have entered into is a marriage union and not just animal mating)
iv) Material cause: the living bodies of the spouses, over which they acquire mutual rights (not over the souls, strictly speaking, since the sphere of conscience remains inviolable, although a closely knit spiritual and psychological mutual adjustment is highly desirable)25
8. The Elements of the Conjugal Community
Marriage (or conjugal community) has two integrative elements: conjugal love and the marriage institution. Conjugal love constitutes the personal reality that the institution confirms, protects, and sanctions before God and men.26 Conjugal love has need of the institution in order to be conjugal; the institution of marriage needs love to be enlivened. The unitive aspect of this community of persons is the conjugal love; the institution helps and protects it.
In marriage, conjugal love and the institution of marriage are both ordained to the procreation and education of children.27 Begetting and educating children, helping each other, enjoying mutual company, and walking together along the path that leads to heaven are just different aspects of one and the same superb reality: the family.
8a) Marriage Cannot be Identified with Love
One cannot identify marriage and love. Marriage is an objective point that assures security and duration. Being truly in love is a pre-condition for marriage, but is not absolutely necessary as a norm. If one does not experience it at the beginning, one can still be happily married.
9. Human Nature was Damaged by Sin and Restored by Grace
Conjugal love is realized in persons, wounded by original sin, and, many times, they tend toward selfishness. Therefore, even if this love—being a love of friendship—is already inclined to the generous gift of self, in order for it to develop fully, it has need of the healing action of grace. This grace is conferred on the Christian spouses because of the institution of marriage, which is a sacrament. With this grace, conjugal love becomes fully human and then divine.28
9a) God Restored Marriage to its Former Dignity
Jesus announced the new law on marriage: “They said to him, ‘Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?’ He said to them, ‘For your hardness of heart.… but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife away, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery’” (Mt 19:7–9). By restoring humanity, Jesus also restored marriage to its former dignity. Even more, the natural matrimonial institution was elevated to the dignity of a sacrament.29
From a valid marriage there arises between the spouses a bond which of its own nature is perpetual and exclusive. Moreover, in Christian marriage the spouses are by a special sacrament strengthened and, as it were, consecrated for the duties and the dignity of their state.30
The effects of a Christian marriage are:
· the marriage bond,
· the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony.
We are told how Jesus answered those who were astonished at his proclamation of the indissolubility of the marriage bond: “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given” (Mt 19:11). The divine commandment is categorical. “To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does, let her remain single or else be reconciled to her husband)—and that the husband should not divorce his wife” (1 Cor 7:10–11). This kind of commitment is possible, because when God commands something, he always gives the necessary graces to execute his command.
10. Christian Marriage is a Sanctifying Reality
St. Paul explains, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph 5:25). Love is also necessary for Christian marriage.
This conjugal love makes one look always for the good of the other. In fact, since love makes them be one—“one flesh” to a certain extent—to love the other is to love oneself. “He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church” (Eph 5:28–29).
“By means of Baptism, man and woman are definitively placed within the new and eternal covenant, in the spousal covenant of Christ with the Church.”31 Consequently, “because of this indestructible insertion [of Christian man and woman into that spousal covenant] … the intimate community of conjugal life and love, founded by the Creator, is elevated and assumed into the spousal charity of Christ, sustained and enriched by His redeeming power.”32 The love of the spouses in Christian marriage becomes not only an image of, but also a participation (the sacrament) in, the mutual love of Christ and his bride, the Church. Thus, we may call the Christian family a miniature Church (Ecclesia domestica). This identity is grounded in the reality of Christian marriage as a true sacrament. Every true (natural) marriage signifies the union of Christ with his bride, the Church. Christian marriage inwardly participates in this union. Jesus is the bridegroom, Savior of mankind, who loves and gives himself to his people, uniting them to himself as his body.33 Thus, the sacramental condition of marriage is a requirement for every baptized person, inseparable from the baptismal character. Christ makes Christian marriage the efficacious (life-giving, love-giving, grace-giving) sign of his redemptive love for humankind, just as the baptismal water both symbolizes life-giving power and actually gives grace. Christian marriage is a sanctifying reality.
As a result, when Christians unite sexually with others, they do so not as isolated individuals, but as members of Christ’s living body, the Church. Should they do so outside of marriage, they do not only act immorally but desecrate the body of Christ (cf. 1 Cor 6:15–17).34
Furthermore, conjugal love entails a totality; it leads the couple to be of one heart and of one soul. Thus, it requires indissolubility and fidelity in the reciprocal and definitive gift of self, and it must be open to fertility.
10a) Christian Marriage, a Way to Holiness
All are called to sanctity, each one, however, according to one’s own gifts and duties.35 Christian marriage is a situation in which many are called to concretize the universal call to sanctity. Thus:
The gift of the sacrament is at the same time a vocation and commandment for the Christian spouses, that they may remain faithful to each other forever, beyond every trial and difficulty, in generous obedience to the holy will of the Lord: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder (Mt 19:6).”36
All the characteristics of natural conjugal love are kept in Christian marriage, but with a new significance. These elements of natural conjugal love are purified, strengthened, and made an expression of specifically Christian values. The married state becomes a vocation and a way to sanctity.37
The supernatural vocation to holiness of the spouses is the principle of a specific apostolic mission.
Furthermore, we must notice that there is a relationship between the vocation of marriage and the vocation to virginity. These two gifts complement each other, because “marriage and virginity or celibacy are two ways of expressing and living the one mystery of the covenant of God with His people. Where marriage is not esteemed, neither can consecrated virginity or celibacy thrive; when human sexuality is not regarded as a great value given by the Creator, the renunciation of it for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven loses its meaning.”38 There is a complementarity between marriage and virginity because each is, in its own way, ordained to fertility. In fact, virginity is the root of a new form of fatherhood and motherhood.
11. The Blessings of Marriage
In getting married, a man and a woman not only give to themselves the irrevocable identity of husband and wife, but also pledge to one another that they will honor and foster the “goods” or “blessings” of marriage. Thus, the conjugal act—precisely as conjugal (as distinct from a mere genital act)—is an act that respects the “goods” or “blessings” of marriage, namely, the procreation and education of children and a steadfast, faithful, conjugal love.
Both conjugal love and the institution of marriage have the same properties. These properties are perfected and elevated by the grace of the sacrament.39 Thus, the matrimonial institution is built upon three purposes—which are also three requirements of conjugal love:
· The good of the children (its openness to fertility)
· Mutual fidelity (its unity and indissolubility)
· The good of the sacrament, which makes it a path to sanctity40
(1) Openness to fertility
The good of the children refers to the openness of marriage to fertility, a service to life. (Conjugal love is also open to fertility, as we have seen.) Christian spouses, moreover, receive the help of the Church in guiding their consciences. They also receive a new sense of generosity and trust in providence in order to fulfill their mission of procreating and educating children.
Spouses would render their sexual union non-marital if, in choosing to unite sexually, they deliberately repudiate its life-giving or procreative meaning.41
(2) The unity and indissoluble fidelity of marriage
The fidelity of conjugal love refers to the indestructible bond that is created by the spouses’ mutual consent in marriage (its unity and indissolubility).
(3) The good of the sacrament
The mutual and definitive self-giving of the natural marriage is perfected in Christian marriage by the transformation of conjugal love into the participation in the covenanted love of Christ (the bridegroom) for the Church (the bride). For Christians, the sacrament is not a simple adjunct to natural marriage, but its true transformation by grace. Permeated by faith, hope, and charity, Christian spouses come to their own perfection and mutual sanctification through their conjugal and family duties. Because of its sacramental character, Christian marriage confers a specific grace on the spouses to overcome the difficulties that may come up, to sanctify themselves in marriage and to sanctify others through it.42 The good of the sacrament is also seen in an enlarged perspective as the Christian perfection of marriage, as a way of holiness and a way of participating in the mission of the Church.
By virtue of the sacramentality of their marriage, Christian spouses are bound to one another in the most profoundly indissoluble manner. Their belonging to each other is the real representation and participation, by means of the sacramental sign, of the very relationship of Christ with the Church. The difference between Christian marriage and that of non-Christians is that the latter is an image but not a participation in the covenant of Christ’s union with the Church.
These goods and requirements of conjugal love derive from the very nature of marriage and benefit the whole human community; it is the spouses’ participation in the development of society. Summarizing, we can see Christian marriage as:
· a community of persons,
· brought to life by love,
· at the service of life,
· established by Christ as a sacrament and way of holiness.
The first three elements concern the essence of marriage; the last concerns its dynamism. There is an intimate unity between the former items and the latter, since there is a correlation between being and acting.43
12. Can Marriage Go Wrong?
There are at least three major points where man’s approach to marriage is faulty and can cause marriage to go wrong:
i) The tendency to “divinize” human love, expecting from human love what any believer knows only God can give
ii) The tendency to confuse the end of marriage with the motives that lead individuals to marry, i.e., the tendency to think that marriage is primarily for the expression and enjoyment of love, and secondarily (if at all) for having children
iii) The tendency to see opposition between these two factors, instead of seeing them as complementary to one another
Happiness can be found in marriage, but not unlimited happiness. This can be found only in heaven.
Footnotes:
1. Cf. W. May, Marriage, the Rock on which the Family is Built (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 16.
2. GS, 48.
3. John Paul II, Address to the Roman Rota, Feb. 1, 2001.
4. W. May, Marriage, the Rock on which the Family is Built, 21.
5. Cf. Ibid., 22.
6. Cf. Bishop Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II), Love and Responsibility, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993).
7. Cf. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 11.
8. Cf. Ibid.
9. Cf. Ibid.
10. W. May, Marriage, the Rock on which the Family is Built, 46.
11. Cf. GS, 49.
12. Cf. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 11; CCC, 1601–1605.
13. Congregation for Catholic Education, Educational Guidance in Human Love, 4.
14. Ibid., 5; cf. Pontifical Council for the Family, Guidelines for Education within the Family, 13.
15. Cf. GS, 48.
16. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 19; cf. Ramón García de Haro, Marriage and the Family in the Documents of the Magisterium, 343; GS, 48.
17. Cf. CCC, 1601; CIC, 1055; GS 48.
18. Cf. GS, 49.
19. Cf. CCC, 1643.
20. Cf. Paul VI, Enc. Humanae Vitae, 9.
21. Cf. Ramón García de Haro, Marriage and the Family in the Documents of the Magisterium, 349.
22. Cf. GS, 48.
23. Cf. Paul VI, Enc. Humanae Vitae, 9; CCC, 1652–1653, 2366–2372.
24. Cf. Pope Pius XII, Enc. Humani Generis, 64.
25. Cf. J.M. de Torre, Person, Family and State (Manila: Southeast Asian Science Foundation, 1991), 81.
26. Cf. GS, 48, 50; John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 14.
27. Cf. GS, 48, 50.
28. Cf. Ibid., 49.
29. Cf. CCC, 1609–1617; CIC, 1055.
30. CIC, 1134.
31. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 13.
32. Ibid.
33. Cf. Ibid.
34. Cf. W. May, Marriage, the Rock on which the Family is Built, 32.
35. Cf. LG, 41.
36. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 20.
37. Cf. Ibid., 13, 34, 56.
38. Cf. Ibid., 16.
39. Cf. GS, 48, 49.
40. Cf. CCC, 1643; John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 13. In a classification that dates back to St. Augustine, this threefold purpose of marriage was listed as bonum prolis, bonum fidei, and bonum sacramenti. Here, we will follow the vision of Pope John Paul II of the threefold purpose of marriage in Familiaris Consortio.
41. Cf. Paul VI, Enc. Humanae Vitae, 13.
42. Cf. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 13; GS, 48, 50; CCC, 1644–1645.
43. Cf. Ramón García de Haro, Marriage and the Family in the Documents of the Magisterium, 342, 348, 351.
· a person-affirming reality,
· a love-enabling reality,
· a life-giving reality, and
· a sanctifying reality.1
1. God, the Creator of Man
Divine revelation begins with the self-manifestation of God as the Creator of all things, both spiritual and material: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1).
In a special way, God created the rational creatures with body and soul. He endowed them with spirit, so that they may share his infinite happiness. God created spiritual beings—angels and humans—capable of spiritual knowledge and free volition. Thus, “God created man in his own image” (Gn 1:27). In this passage, God is revealing to us the individual and spiritual aspect of human nature: rational intelligence and free will. A human being is a person.
A complete reading of the passage reveals additional truths about humanity: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gn 1:27). There is a certain parallel between the mysterious divine plurality of Persons within the transcendental unity of God, and the plurality of human beings—male and female—destined to the astonishing unity of the human family, which contains all persons.
Because man, like all creatures, is limited and always in need of complementing his own limitations, God wanted that another human being—a woman—should complement, enrich, and help him. God decreed that man and woman would live a life of love and knowledge in a natural unity, in a communion. Thus, God established matrimony as a natural institution. He also determined its essential characteristics and laws.
The intimate partnership of life and the love which constitutes the married state has been established by the creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws.… God himself is the author of marriage.2
There are some who think that matrimony is not a natural reality, but a changeable cultural trend. They try to manipulate it according to their own interest, or introduce what they call “alternative lifestyles.”
Among the most difficult challenges facing the Church today is that of a pervasive individualism, which tends to limit and restrict marriage and the family to the private sphere.
Many misunderstandings have beset the very idea of “nature.”… There is a tendency to reduce what is specifically human to the cultural sphere, claiming a completely autonomous creativity and efficacy for the person at both the individual and social levels. From this viewpoint, what is natural becomes merely a physical, biological, and sociological datum to be technologically manipulated according to one’s own interest. This opposition between culture and nature deprives culture of any objective foundation, leaving it at the mercy of will and power. This can be seen very clearly in the current attempts to present de facto unions, including those of homosexuals, as comparable to marriage, whose natural character is precisely denied.3
“Have not you read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19:4–6). Jesus said that husband and wife are to be one. In these passages, we discover one of the properties of this kind of human love, and, therefore, of marriage: its exclusivity (one man with one woman), which is the same as its unity or monogamy.
2. Marriage is a Person-Affirming Reality
Marriage comes into existence when a man and a woman, forswearing all others, through an act of irrevocable personal consent, freely give themselves to one another. It is based on a definitive decision, the consent. At the heart of the act that establishes marriage, there is a free, self-determining choice on the part of the man and the woman, through which they give themselves a new and lasting identity. This man becomes this woman’s husband, and she becomes his wife, and together they become spouses.
This man and this woman are not, for each other, replaceable and substitutable individuals but are rather irreplaceable and non-substitutable persons (with the emphasis on “persons”).
Through their own free and self-determining choices, they have given to themselves and to one another a new kind of identity, and nothing they subsequently do can change this identity. They simply cannot unspouse themselves. They cannot make themselves to be ex-husbands and ex-wives any more than I can make myself to be an ex-father to the children whom I have begotten. I may be a bad father, a terrible father, but I am still my children’s father. I may be a bad husband, a terrible husband, but I am still my wife’s husband, and she is my wife.4
Marriage is established in and through the free, self-determining personal choice of the spouses, and thus, it is a person-affirming reality.5
3. Marriage is a Love-Enabling Reality
Marriage, a person-affirming reality, enables husband and wife to give to each other the love that is unique and proper to them: conjugal love. Marriage enables them to give this kind of love because:
· only spouses can give love of this kind;
· what makes a man and a woman spouses is their marriage.
Thus, marriage is a love-enabling reality. Other kinds of love—love of neighbor, love of one’s children, love of one’s enemies—do not imply the marriage institution because these are inclusive, not exclusive kinds of love.
3a) What Love is Not
One of the dominant ideas to which the world is subjected today is the wrong notion of love. Motion pictures frequently portray love as a feeling that is so important to achieve happiness.
At other times, love is portrayed as pleasure, a philosophy (called hedonism) characterized by the belief that maximization of pleasure, accompanied by the minimization of pain, is the fundamental moral principle of human life.
Nowadays, for some, love has come to mean having sexual intercourse. This reduction leaves out values such as fidelity, exclusiveness, dependability, stability, childbearing, founding of a family, and love of children.
3b) Progress of Genuine Love
Pope John Paul II analyzes the stages of love:
i) The first element in the general analysis of love is attraction, a natural force that operates in persons.
ii) Desire follows. It becomes a longing for the person, and not a mere sensual desire (concupiscentia). Human love, however, cannot be reduced to desire itself: “I want you because you are a good for me.” If desire is predominant, it can deform love between man and woman and rob them both of it. Thus, desire should be placed under the control of reason.
iii) When love is perfected, the subject also longs for the other person’s good; it becomes love as good will, also called “love of benevolence” (amor benevolentiae or benevolentia for short).6
Furthermore, love finds its full realization not in an individual subject, but in a relationship between persons; there must be reciprocity. Love should be something that exists between man and woman. The structure of love is an interpersonal communion.
Genuine reciprocity cannot arise from egoism. Each person is called to love as friendship and self-giving, to the surrender of the “I” to form the “we”—a communion. This personal surrender is not in the natural order, or in the physical sense (a person cannot be another’s property). A person can give himself to another (whether to a human person or to God) at the level of love, and in a moral sense. This is something different from—and more than—attraction, desire, or even goodwill.
Moreover, sacrifice has always been the touchstone of authentic human love. People who love with sacrifice send a message about the nature of real love and thereby help to strengthen the marriage bond of other people. Genuine love is, therefore, the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.7
3c) Communion of Persons, Not of Bodies
We should not be deceived by the biblical expression “one flesh,” as if the union of husband and wife were purely physical. The expression one flesh refers to the complete human person. By creating the human race in his own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in man and woman the vocation—and thus the responsibility—of love and communion. Man is called to love in his unified totality, as a person: body and soul. The body is made a sharer in spiritual love.8
Bodily life is not merely an instrumental good for the person, but is itself integral to the person and thus a good of the person. In this personalistic interpretation, human love embraces the body and soul, and the body also expresses spiritual love.9
Since the body, male or female, is the expression of the human person, a man and a woman, in giving their bodies to one another, give their persons to one another. The bodily gift of a man and a woman to each other is the outward sign—the sacrament—of the communion of persons existing between them. And this sacrament, in turn, is an image of the communion of persons in the Trinity.… Pope John Paul II calls this capacity of the body to express the communion of persons the nuptial meaning of the body.10
Summing up, we can say that genuine love must be eminently human, directed from one person to the other person by an affection rooted in the will, and embracing the good of the whole person.11
Jesus, besides, explains the original divine design. “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8). The sexual act is truly human only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one another until death. The physical aspect of the sexual act would be a lie if it were not the sign and fruit of a total self-giving, in which the whole person is present, everything one is, everything one will be. If anyone were to withhold something or reserve the possibility of deciding otherwise in the future, he or she would not be giving totally.12 This total self-giving points toward the second property of real married love: it is permanent. If it were temporary, it would not be total. Real marriage is indissoluble. Thus, the properties of marriage are as follows:
· Exclusivity (unity)
· Permanence (indissolubility)
3d) Complementarity of the Two Sexes
“Sexuality is a fundamental component of personality, one of its modes of being, of manifestation, of communicating with others, of feeling, of expressing and of living human love.”13 Femininity and masculinity are complementary gifts, through which human sexuality becomes an integral part of the concrete capacity for the love that God has inscribed in man and woman.
Sexuality characterizes man and woman not only on the physical level, but also on the psychological and spiritual, making its mark on each of their expressions. Such diversity, linked to the complementarity of the two sexes, allows thorough response to the design of God according to the vocation to which each one is called.14
3e) Virginal Love
Revelation clarifies that man’s vocation to love is authentically fulfilled in its integrity only in marriage and in virginity—in virginity by means of a direct giving of oneself to God, in marriage by means of a unique form of self-giving between a man and a woman that is truly human, one quite different from other kinds of human love. Thus, virginity and marriage are love-enabling and person-affirming realities.
4. Conjugal Love
Love drives a man and a woman to establish the intimate and permanent partnership of life, which is marriage. What specifies the community of marriage—in addition to its destination to the generation and education of children—is conjugal love. Conjugal love is the faithful and exclusive love that unites the spouses according to their truth as images of God. It is characterized by the unity and indissoluble fidelity of the spouses.
Conjugal love is an act of the total person, and not an instinctive impulse. It embraces the totality of body and soul in the human person.
This love can generate the stable community of life by means of a conjugal covenant of love and life, marriage,15 which is the initial nucleus of a family. The family is the necessary “place” where the children—fruit of the spouses’ mutual love—are born and formed.
Marriage is established by the consent. Independently of their prior love as fiancés, the spouses bind themselves with mutual love, which from then on will be owed as a commandment. Love, with its unity and exclusivity, is an intrinsic requirement of this conjugal community. But it could be lacking, being a good that is entrusted to human freedom.
In Christian marriage, this love is assumed by Christ, who purifies it and elevates it, leading it to perfection through the sacrament of marriage in order to establish “a new communion of love that is the living and real image of that unique unity which makes of the Church the indivisible Mystical Body of the Lord Jesus.”16
5. The Marital Consent Generates a Permanent Bond
By its nature, marriage is ordered toward the good of the spouses, and the procreation and education of offspring.17
To fill up the Kingdom of heaven, divine providence wanted to use the free cooperation of human beings. God created matrimony as a natural institution to protect that cooperation from the possible vagaries of impulses and caprice, and to make it permanent.
As we have seen, the essence of marriage in fieri (in its making) is the legitimate manifestation of mutual consent, that is, the marriage covenant or contract. Love is the object of the consent. The consent generates a permanent bond, which is the essence of marriage in facto esse (already done). Thus, love results in the matrimonial institution. It then becomes conjugal love, which is destined to grow by its generous exercise.18
The result of the spouses’ total self-giving is the child, a human person who is not only a biological organism, but also a spiritual entity with a series of personal values. For the harmonious growth of these values, a persevering and unified contribution by both parents is necessary. Marriage is the only “place” in which this total self-giving in its whole truth is possible. To be genuine, human love and marriage must be exclusive (one man with one woman), permanent, and open to life. Or, in equivalent terms, it demands:
· unity and indissoluble faithfulness,
· openness to fertility.19
5a) Characteristics of Married Love
The encyclical Humanae Vitae lists the marks and demands of conjugal love:
· It is human love (physical and spiritual).
· It is total.
· It is faithful.
· It is fruitful.20
The first three correspond to unity and indissoluble fidelity. All these goods of conjugal love are also goods of marriage.
(1) It is human. Conjugal love is described as fully human, encompassing the entire person, the senses and the spirit. It is not a simple instinct and sentiment. It is an act of the will, intended to endure and grow by means of the joys and sorrows of daily life. It is saying “yes” to someone else, and “no” to oneself. By it, husband and wife become one heart and one soul, and together attain their human perfection.
The phenomena of “free love” and rejecting marriage are nothing else than a degradation of true human love: the denial of its truth. It is worth noting that the concept of conjugal love must be seen in a personalist perspective, related to human persons, not in the abstract. Therefore, it is inseparable from the truth about the human person. From this perspective, it is easy to understand the requirement that the conjugal covenant must be indissoluble and public.21
(2) It is total. This love is also total. A married person loves generously and shares everything without undue reservation or selfish calculations.
(3) It is faithful and exclusive. Authentic love—as well as the good of the children—demands faithfulness and rectitude in all marital relations. It requires the indissoluble unity of the spouses.22
The adjective committed describes how true married love involves a pledging of oneself to another. Married love is not self-centered but looks to the other partner. To be able to give oneself, one must possess oneself; this involves some control of the passions on the part of the persons concerned.
(4) It is fruitful. Matrimonial consent has two essential elements: conjugal love, and the ordination to children. Once the covenant has been established by the consent, both become obligations, moral and juridical. They can, however, be missing because of the human will. In such cases, they are absent as disorders, faults, or injustices, while remaining in their condition as duties. All authentic conjugal love between a man and a woman, when it is not egoistic love, tends toward the creation of another being issuing from that love. It is, therefore, open to life.23
6. Marriage is a Life-Giving Reality
In every marriage, the mutual love of husband and wife is both an institution and a mandate from the Creator for the increase of his family on earth. God planned the family to be the environment where he will create new life. God told Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gn 1:28). That love with knowledge—that union of “male and female” (an image of God’s love)—was destined to bring forth other human beings like themselves. Marriage is a life-giving reality.
The marital act is the direct cause of the formation of a human body. The Magisterium of the Church teaches us that every soul comes into being through an act of divine creation.24
The total gift of self, which is required by conjugal love, also corresponds to the demands of the offspring. Thus, the third characteristic of genuine conjugal love and of marriage is their openness to new life.
7. The Causes of Marriage
In any action, one should distinguish the object of the action (i.e., what the chosen action by its own nature tends to, independently of the intention of the agent) and the purpose that is intended, or intention of the agent. Here, we may ask ourselves, “What is the purpose of marriage?” or rather, “For the sake of what do husband and wife come together?” and also, “What brings them together?” To answer these questions, we must first distinguish:
· The intrinsic purpose of the action (finis operis),
· The purpose of the agent (finis operantis), i.e., what he has in mind.
Obviously, these two purposes do not always coincide. One thing is the actual intention of the spouses, and the other is the purpose or end of the institution of marriage itself. The finis operis or normal and natural end of marriage—irrespective of the actual intentions of husband and wife for coming together—is the begetting (procreation) and upbringing (education) of their children.
We can now enumerate the causes of marriage, thus showing the depth of its being (its metaphysical roots) and thereby its ultimate ethical structure:
i) Final cause (purpose of the institution): primordially, the begetting and upbringing of the children; secondarily (i.e., not less important than, but subordinate to the primary purpose), the mutual help and companionship with all its implications
ii) Efficient cause (the agent who brings it about): the spouses motivated by a free decision to love each other for life, issuing into a formal and public declaration (man lives naturally in society) of remaining together until one of them dies
iii) Formal or constitutive cause (what makes it a marriage): the mutual self-giving (or matrimonial consent) thus expressed and never withdrawn (neither of the two has the right to do so if what they have entered into is a marriage union and not just animal mating)
iv) Material cause: the living bodies of the spouses, over which they acquire mutual rights (not over the souls, strictly speaking, since the sphere of conscience remains inviolable, although a closely knit spiritual and psychological mutual adjustment is highly desirable)25
8. The Elements of the Conjugal Community
Marriage (or conjugal community) has two integrative elements: conjugal love and the marriage institution. Conjugal love constitutes the personal reality that the institution confirms, protects, and sanctions before God and men.26 Conjugal love has need of the institution in order to be conjugal; the institution of marriage needs love to be enlivened. The unitive aspect of this community of persons is the conjugal love; the institution helps and protects it.
In marriage, conjugal love and the institution of marriage are both ordained to the procreation and education of children.27 Begetting and educating children, helping each other, enjoying mutual company, and walking together along the path that leads to heaven are just different aspects of one and the same superb reality: the family.
8a) Marriage Cannot be Identified with Love
One cannot identify marriage and love. Marriage is an objective point that assures security and duration. Being truly in love is a pre-condition for marriage, but is not absolutely necessary as a norm. If one does not experience it at the beginning, one can still be happily married.
9. Human Nature was Damaged by Sin and Restored by Grace
Conjugal love is realized in persons, wounded by original sin, and, many times, they tend toward selfishness. Therefore, even if this love—being a love of friendship—is already inclined to the generous gift of self, in order for it to develop fully, it has need of the healing action of grace. This grace is conferred on the Christian spouses because of the institution of marriage, which is a sacrament. With this grace, conjugal love becomes fully human and then divine.28
9a) God Restored Marriage to its Former Dignity
Jesus announced the new law on marriage: “They said to him, ‘Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?’ He said to them, ‘For your hardness of heart.… but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife away, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery’” (Mt 19:7–9). By restoring humanity, Jesus also restored marriage to its former dignity. Even more, the natural matrimonial institution was elevated to the dignity of a sacrament.29
From a valid marriage there arises between the spouses a bond which of its own nature is perpetual and exclusive. Moreover, in Christian marriage the spouses are by a special sacrament strengthened and, as it were, consecrated for the duties and the dignity of their state.30
The effects of a Christian marriage are:
· the marriage bond,
· the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony.
We are told how Jesus answered those who were astonished at his proclamation of the indissolubility of the marriage bond: “Not all men can receive this precept, but only those to whom it is given” (Mt 19:11). The divine commandment is categorical. “To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does, let her remain single or else be reconciled to her husband)—and that the husband should not divorce his wife” (1 Cor 7:10–11). This kind of commitment is possible, because when God commands something, he always gives the necessary graces to execute his command.
10. Christian Marriage is a Sanctifying Reality
St. Paul explains, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph 5:25). Love is also necessary for Christian marriage.
This conjugal love makes one look always for the good of the other. In fact, since love makes them be one—“one flesh” to a certain extent—to love the other is to love oneself. “He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the Church” (Eph 5:28–29).
“By means of Baptism, man and woman are definitively placed within the new and eternal covenant, in the spousal covenant of Christ with the Church.”31 Consequently, “because of this indestructible insertion [of Christian man and woman into that spousal covenant] … the intimate community of conjugal life and love, founded by the Creator, is elevated and assumed into the spousal charity of Christ, sustained and enriched by His redeeming power.”32 The love of the spouses in Christian marriage becomes not only an image of, but also a participation (the sacrament) in, the mutual love of Christ and his bride, the Church. Thus, we may call the Christian family a miniature Church (Ecclesia domestica). This identity is grounded in the reality of Christian marriage as a true sacrament. Every true (natural) marriage signifies the union of Christ with his bride, the Church. Christian marriage inwardly participates in this union. Jesus is the bridegroom, Savior of mankind, who loves and gives himself to his people, uniting them to himself as his body.33 Thus, the sacramental condition of marriage is a requirement for every baptized person, inseparable from the baptismal character. Christ makes Christian marriage the efficacious (life-giving, love-giving, grace-giving) sign of his redemptive love for humankind, just as the baptismal water both symbolizes life-giving power and actually gives grace. Christian marriage is a sanctifying reality.
As a result, when Christians unite sexually with others, they do so not as isolated individuals, but as members of Christ’s living body, the Church. Should they do so outside of marriage, they do not only act immorally but desecrate the body of Christ (cf. 1 Cor 6:15–17).34
Furthermore, conjugal love entails a totality; it leads the couple to be of one heart and of one soul. Thus, it requires indissolubility and fidelity in the reciprocal and definitive gift of self, and it must be open to fertility.
10a) Christian Marriage, a Way to Holiness
All are called to sanctity, each one, however, according to one’s own gifts and duties.35 Christian marriage is a situation in which many are called to concretize the universal call to sanctity. Thus:
The gift of the sacrament is at the same time a vocation and commandment for the Christian spouses, that they may remain faithful to each other forever, beyond every trial and difficulty, in generous obedience to the holy will of the Lord: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder (Mt 19:6).”36
All the characteristics of natural conjugal love are kept in Christian marriage, but with a new significance. These elements of natural conjugal love are purified, strengthened, and made an expression of specifically Christian values. The married state becomes a vocation and a way to sanctity.37
The supernatural vocation to holiness of the spouses is the principle of a specific apostolic mission.
Furthermore, we must notice that there is a relationship between the vocation of marriage and the vocation to virginity. These two gifts complement each other, because “marriage and virginity or celibacy are two ways of expressing and living the one mystery of the covenant of God with His people. Where marriage is not esteemed, neither can consecrated virginity or celibacy thrive; when human sexuality is not regarded as a great value given by the Creator, the renunciation of it for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven loses its meaning.”38 There is a complementarity between marriage and virginity because each is, in its own way, ordained to fertility. In fact, virginity is the root of a new form of fatherhood and motherhood.
11. The Blessings of Marriage
In getting married, a man and a woman not only give to themselves the irrevocable identity of husband and wife, but also pledge to one another that they will honor and foster the “goods” or “blessings” of marriage. Thus, the conjugal act—precisely as conjugal (as distinct from a mere genital act)—is an act that respects the “goods” or “blessings” of marriage, namely, the procreation and education of children and a steadfast, faithful, conjugal love.
Both conjugal love and the institution of marriage have the same properties. These properties are perfected and elevated by the grace of the sacrament.39 Thus, the matrimonial institution is built upon three purposes—which are also three requirements of conjugal love:
· The good of the children (its openness to fertility)
· Mutual fidelity (its unity and indissolubility)
· The good of the sacrament, which makes it a path to sanctity40
(1) Openness to fertility
The good of the children refers to the openness of marriage to fertility, a service to life. (Conjugal love is also open to fertility, as we have seen.) Christian spouses, moreover, receive the help of the Church in guiding their consciences. They also receive a new sense of generosity and trust in providence in order to fulfill their mission of procreating and educating children.
Spouses would render their sexual union non-marital if, in choosing to unite sexually, they deliberately repudiate its life-giving or procreative meaning.41
(2) The unity and indissoluble fidelity of marriage
The fidelity of conjugal love refers to the indestructible bond that is created by the spouses’ mutual consent in marriage (its unity and indissolubility).
(3) The good of the sacrament
The mutual and definitive self-giving of the natural marriage is perfected in Christian marriage by the transformation of conjugal love into the participation in the covenanted love of Christ (the bridegroom) for the Church (the bride). For Christians, the sacrament is not a simple adjunct to natural marriage, but its true transformation by grace. Permeated by faith, hope, and charity, Christian spouses come to their own perfection and mutual sanctification through their conjugal and family duties. Because of its sacramental character, Christian marriage confers a specific grace on the spouses to overcome the difficulties that may come up, to sanctify themselves in marriage and to sanctify others through it.42 The good of the sacrament is also seen in an enlarged perspective as the Christian perfection of marriage, as a way of holiness and a way of participating in the mission of the Church.
By virtue of the sacramentality of their marriage, Christian spouses are bound to one another in the most profoundly indissoluble manner. Their belonging to each other is the real representation and participation, by means of the sacramental sign, of the very relationship of Christ with the Church. The difference between Christian marriage and that of non-Christians is that the latter is an image but not a participation in the covenant of Christ’s union with the Church.
These goods and requirements of conjugal love derive from the very nature of marriage and benefit the whole human community; it is the spouses’ participation in the development of society. Summarizing, we can see Christian marriage as:
· a community of persons,
· brought to life by love,
· at the service of life,
· established by Christ as a sacrament and way of holiness.
The first three elements concern the essence of marriage; the last concerns its dynamism. There is an intimate unity between the former items and the latter, since there is a correlation between being and acting.43
12. Can Marriage Go Wrong?
There are at least three major points where man’s approach to marriage is faulty and can cause marriage to go wrong:
i) The tendency to “divinize” human love, expecting from human love what any believer knows only God can give
ii) The tendency to confuse the end of marriage with the motives that lead individuals to marry, i.e., the tendency to think that marriage is primarily for the expression and enjoyment of love, and secondarily (if at all) for having children
iii) The tendency to see opposition between these two factors, instead of seeing them as complementary to one another
Happiness can be found in marriage, but not unlimited happiness. This can be found only in heaven.
Footnotes:
1. Cf. W. May, Marriage, the Rock on which the Family is Built (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 16.
2. GS, 48.
3. John Paul II, Address to the Roman Rota, Feb. 1, 2001.
4. W. May, Marriage, the Rock on which the Family is Built, 21.
5. Cf. Ibid., 22.
6. Cf. Bishop Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II), Love and Responsibility, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993).
7. Cf. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 11.
8. Cf. Ibid.
9. Cf. Ibid.
10. W. May, Marriage, the Rock on which the Family is Built, 46.
11. Cf. GS, 49.
12. Cf. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 11; CCC, 1601–1605.
13. Congregation for Catholic Education, Educational Guidance in Human Love, 4.
14. Ibid., 5; cf. Pontifical Council for the Family, Guidelines for Education within the Family, 13.
15. Cf. GS, 48.
16. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 19; cf. Ramón García de Haro, Marriage and the Family in the Documents of the Magisterium, 343; GS, 48.
17. Cf. CCC, 1601; CIC, 1055; GS 48.
18. Cf. GS, 49.
19. Cf. CCC, 1643.
20. Cf. Paul VI, Enc. Humanae Vitae, 9.
21. Cf. Ramón García de Haro, Marriage and the Family in the Documents of the Magisterium, 349.
22. Cf. GS, 48.
23. Cf. Paul VI, Enc. Humanae Vitae, 9; CCC, 1652–1653, 2366–2372.
24. Cf. Pope Pius XII, Enc. Humani Generis, 64.
25. Cf. J.M. de Torre, Person, Family and State (Manila: Southeast Asian Science Foundation, 1991), 81.
26. Cf. GS, 48, 50; John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 14.
27. Cf. GS, 48, 50.
28. Cf. Ibid., 49.
29. Cf. CCC, 1609–1617; CIC, 1055.
30. CIC, 1134.
31. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 13.
32. Ibid.
33. Cf. Ibid.
34. Cf. W. May, Marriage, the Rock on which the Family is Built, 32.
35. Cf. LG, 41.
36. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 20.
37. Cf. Ibid., 13, 34, 56.
38. Cf. Ibid., 16.
39. Cf. GS, 48, 49.
40. Cf. CCC, 1643; John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 13. In a classification that dates back to St. Augustine, this threefold purpose of marriage was listed as bonum prolis, bonum fidei, and bonum sacramenti. Here, we will follow the vision of Pope John Paul II of the threefold purpose of marriage in Familiaris Consortio.
41. Cf. Paul VI, Enc. Humanae Vitae, 13.
42. Cf. John Paul II, Ap. Ex. Familiaris Consortio, 13; GS, 48, 50; CCC, 1644–1645.
43. Cf. Ramón García de Haro, Marriage and the Family in the Documents of the Magisterium, 342, 348, 351.