Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius
February 23, 2014
Spiritual Ponderings
Sexuality and Marriage

Let us finish our closer look at what God has revealed marriage to be in His divine plan. We once again to turn to Christopher West’s book Good News about Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions About Catholic Teaching for help with this. (Quotes from his book will be in bold and my commentary will be in regular font.)

6. For the purpose of their own good. “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gn 2:18). Thus, it’s for their own good. For their benefit, enrichment, and ultimately their salvation, that a man and woman join their lives in the covenant of marriage. Marriage is the most basic (but not the only) expression of the vocation to love that all men and women have as persons made in God’s image.

Human beings were made to love and be loved. Marriage is one of four specific ways in which one can and receive love. The ultimate goal in life is to spend eternity with God in heaven. Marriage is supposed to help spouses (and their children) make it to heaven. Another way of putting it is marriage is supposed to help all people involved become better people. In families we are suppose to learn about God and practice the virtues of humility, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice.

7. And the procreation and education of children. The fathers of Vatican II declared: “By their very nature, the institution of marriage itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children and find in them their ultimate crown.” Children are not added on to the marriage and conjugal love, but spring from the very heart of the spouses’ mutual self-giving as its fruit and fulfillment. Intentional exclusion of children, then, contradicts the very nature and purpose of marriage.

Children are always a blessing in God’s plan. I know this for a fact because I have been with couples who have suffered greatly for their children and yet still love them. I have seen mothers and fathers wait patiently for their newborns to be born because they knew their children would only have minutes to live because of some developmental defect. Watching these parents hold their children and talking with them afterwards tell the truth in a way that no philosophical argument can. Walking with women who have had an abortion only reinforces this truth because these women suffer in such horrible ways for not having being open to life. Healing is possible for these women.

I think Kimberly Hahn’s book: Life-Giving Love: Embracing God’s Beautiful Design for Marriage can also give us some insights. “In 1930, the Anglican’s Lambeth Conference in England became the first official Christian body to approve the use of contraception in the most severe cases. In response, a Jesuit, Fr. David Lord, wrote the following analysis.
1. Birth control destroys the difference between prostitutes and respectable women by eliminating the ideal of motherhood and substituting the ideal of personal pleasure and self-gratification.
2. Birth control leads to infidelity by destroying self-restraint and self-discipline. For unmarried folk it banishes fear of consequences.
3. Birth control prevents noble faculty by refusal to co-operate with God in creation of children and substitutes for it, pleasure.
4. Birth control affects the future. Substituting self-gratification for children, (those using it) strike at the very source of human life.”

8. Covenant. Marriage is not only a contract between a man and a woman, but a sacred covenant. God created marriage to image and participate in his own covenant with his people. Thus, the marital covenant calls spouses to share in the free, total, faithful, and fruitful love of God. Contrary to some trends in thought, the Church’s recent emphasis on marriage as a covenant does not exclude the idea that marriage is also a contract. It’s true that a covenant goes beyond the rights and responsibilities guaranteed by some contracts and provides a stronger, more sacred framework for marriage, but canon law still purposely uses both terms to describe marriage.

May be the best word to describe what is suppose to happen in marriage is the word “covenant”. A covenant is more than a special form of a contract just as marital love is more than prostitution. For a contract goods are exchanged in a covenant sacred kinships are formed. In a contract I have product “A” and you can purchased product “A” from me for x amount of money. In a covenant two people who were not related become related by the power of God.

9. The dignity of a sacrament. By virtue of their baptisms, the marriage of Christian spouses in an efficacious sign of the union between Christ and the Church, and as such is a means of grace. The marriage of two unbaptized persons, or of one baptized person and one unbaptized person, is considered by the Church a “good natural” marriage.

A Sacrament is a physical sign of invisible reality. The Sacrament of Marriage is more than a wedding day. As couple live out their married life they receive grace to become more and more unselfish and as they do so they give us a glimpse of God’s unconditional love that He has for us. Some married couples give us a clearer image than other but if all married couples did a great job, I truly believe the world would be changed for the better.