The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony

 

 

1. Marriage

The Catholic teaching on marriage, although built on the natural law, differs sharply from the earlier practices among the Jews and pagans, and also from the modern secular usage – to the point that no area of public relationship more clearly distinguishes Catholicism from other institutions of human society. It cuts across every aspect of the moral law and has implications in every phase of man’s attitude towards God, so that marriage can truly be called the most revealing trait of the Catholic religion and almost the test of its validity.

The following two Papal documents provide essential explanations on the Sacrament of Matrimony:

• Pius XI, On Christian Marriage, Casti Connubii, December 31,1930. This encyclical gives clear teaching on marital indissolubility and the evil of contraception. It was the principle source used by the Second Vatican Council for its document, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), numbers 47-52.
• John Paul II, On the Christian Family in the Modern World, Familiaris Consortio, November 22, 1981. This post-synodal apostolic exhortation, written after the Second Vatican Council, covers every important aspect of marriage and family life.

2. Nature of Marriage

In the Catholic Christian view of life, marriage is more than a social convenience whose structure is shaped by the people getting married and the accidents of time and place where they plan to live. Its foundations go back to the origins of the human race and clarify that marriage was not instituted by man, but by God. When God created man and woman, He implanted in human nature the urge for the marital union and reproduction: “God created man in His image. In the image of God, He created him. Male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). The Hebrew word for man (Adam) is a collective noun, referring not only to the first man but through him also to the race as a whole.

The Lord blessed the first human pair and, by a special revelation, gave them the divine mandate of reproducing their kind: “Be fruitful and multiply.” This immediately raises the status of marriage, even before the time of Christ, to a level above the merely human and invests it with duties and a sublimity that could only derive from God.

In the Catholic Church, therefore, it is held as an immutable and inviolable fundamental doctrine that matrimony was not originated or restored by man but by God.

“Not by man were the laws made to strengthen and confirm and elevate it but by God, the Author of nature, and by Christ our Lord by whom nature was redeemed. Consequently, the laws of marriage cannot be subject to any human decrees or to any contrary pact even of the spouses themselves. This is the doctrine of Holy Scripture; this is the constant teaching of the Universal Church; this the solemn definition of the Council of Trent, which declares and establishes from the words of Holy Writ itself that God is the Author of the perpetual stability of the marriage bond, its unity and its firmness.” (Pius XI, On Christian Marriage, Casti Connubii, #5).

Every position which challenges the Catholic teaching on matrimonial consent, impediments to marriage, divorce and birth control (contraception) ultimately comes back to this stance of questioning the divine authorship of the marriage contract.

Free and firm act of the will

Although marriage is, therefore, of divine origin, the human will also enters matrimony in a way so intimate that without it the marriage would be null and void. In every marriage only two people join together in a conjugal union, so that unless they give their mutual consent they are not really married. This free act of the will, by which each party hands over and accepts those rights proper to the state of marriage, is so essential that it cannot be supplied by any human power. Few aspects of marriage in the Western world are more illustrative of the influence of Christianity than the assumed liberty of a man and woman to choose their own life-long spouse.

However, while the Christian enjoys perfect freedom about entering marriage or marrying this particular person, once he enters the marital state, the duties he assumes are entirely independent of his free will, so that after marriage the husband and wife are subject to the divinely made laws that govern matrimony. Nevertheless, the union is entered willingly and this fact joins the contracting parties and knits them together more directly and more intimately than their bodies; what unites them is not a passing affection of passion or feeling but a deliberate and firm act of the will. From this union of wills there arises, by God’s decree, a sacred and inviolable bond. Hence the nature of the marriage contract, which is unique in human relations, makes it entirely different both from the sexual union of animals which is entered by blind instinct without free choice, and from the promiscuous unions among human beings, which enjoy none of the rights or privileges of family life.

Sacred contract

Marriage is a sacred contract, having been established by God as the natural means of uniting a man and woman, and of procreating and educating His sons and daughters. Indeed, in some way, even before Christ’s elevation of marriage to the dignity of a Sacrament, it was a contract involving not merely two human persons, but God Himself.  Hence, it is given the special name of covenant to indicate how, from its institution at the beginning of human history, it typifies both the covenant between God and the entire human race, and in particular, the covenant between Christ and the Church (cf. Ephesians 5:21-32).

It takes three to enter marriage according to Catholic Christian standards: husband and wife each contribute their free consent, and God contributes His share. From Him comes the very institution of marriage, the purpose for which it was made, the laws which govern it, the grace to live in accord with those laws, and the blessings which only He can give. From man and woman comes a generous surrender of their persons to one another for the whole span of life, thus becoming, with God’s help, the authors of each particular marriage and cooperators with Him in the advancement of mankind.

3. Marriage Raised to the level of a Sacrament

There were no true Sacraments before the coming of Christ. Consequently, marriage was not a Sacrament in the Old Testament. This is not to deny that already before the time of Christ, marriage was considered something holy, a natural sacrament or sign of divine love. But the essence of a Sacrament is to confer the grace it signifies. With the Incarnation, marriage became a sign twice over.

1. It became the sign of the close union between God and man—in other words, a symbol of the Incarnation.
2. It became the sign of the close union between Christ and the Church (cf. Eph. 5), and the sign of grace which the Incarnate God was now conferring on His married followers. This grace is nothing less than the grace of such selfless love between the spouses as Christ made possible by His own selfless love for us by dying on the Cross for our salvation.

It is an Article of revealed Faith that Christ raised marriage to the level of a Sacrament. What should be emphasized is that this is an Article of divine Faith. In other words, we must believe it as part of God’s revelation to the human race. It is a dogma and no mere theological conclusion, or less still, a form of theological speculation.

When we say that Christ personally elevated marriage to a Sacrament, we mean several things:

• He did so during His visible stay on earth.
• He did not merely found the Church which then, after Christ’s Ascension, elevated marriage to a Sacrament of the New Law.
• He laid down the essentials of marriage as a Sacrament, namely its being:

1. a divinely instituted source of grace for baptized married people;
2. monogamous, with only one man and one woman;
3. lifelong partnership;
4. a union of selfless and procreative love.

Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition

As Catholics, we recognize two sources of Divine Revelation: Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. We know from Sacred Tradition that the Sacraments were instituted by Christ personally and immediately during His visible stay on earth. At the same time, Our Lord determined the necessary conditions for their administration and conferral. Only Christ can infallibly join grace to the performance of a sensible sign. What we do not know is WHEN during Our Lord’s visible stay on earth they each were instituted. Consequently, we do not expect to find explicit evidence in the Bible for Christ’s institution of all the Sacraments.

In historic Protestantism, not all seven Sacraments are recognized. In general, the only Sacraments that are recognized by Protestants are Baptism and the Eucharist, the celebration of which they call the Lord’s Supper. Those who hold that Scripture alone (Sola Scriptura) is the source of Revelation, maintain that the Sacraments whose institution is not explicitly recorded in Scripture (that is, all of them except Baptism and the Eucharist) were instituted by the Church. Therefore, it is wrongly reasoned that they are not true Sacraments. Historically, it is the position of many Protestant churches that only Baptism and the Eucharist give grace of themselves—because there is Biblical evidence of their having been instituted by Christ. Furthermore, they claim, all the other Sacraments can be modified by the Church, because, strictly speaking, there is no Biblical evidence of their institution by Christ.

It is here especially that the Church’s faith in the communication of Divine Revelation, not only in the inspired Word of God, the Bible, but also in Sacred Tradition, is so important. We must insist that Christ instituted all seven Sacraments, even those not found explicitly in Sacred Scripture. Understanding this is, fundamentally, a liberation from the darkness which prevents us from seeing Christ, Who is so close to us, for instance, in the Eucharist. Part of the ignorance and irreverence found in our Catholic churches today is ultimately the consequence of the false proposition that we can only know God’s will by reading Sacred Scripture. This is private judgment (the notion that each of us has the authority to interpret Scripture) in one of its worse forms. Private judgment allows people to draw erroneous conclusions. For example, if they don’t believe that Christ instituted the Sacrament of Holy Orders, they may conclude that women can be ordained. Furthermore, they separate the institution of Holy Orders from the institution of the Eucharist. As a consequence of making Scripture alone the basis for believing in the Sacraments, it is not even possible to believe correctly in Baptism or the Eucharist.

Hence, the New Testament Scriptures do not explicitly declare that Christ instituted the Sacrament of Matrimony. But this, as previously noted, is precisely one of the basic principles of Catholicism that not everything which Christ revealed is found explicitly in the New Testament Bible (cf. John 21:25). In the Church’s revealed Tradition, however, from apostolic times, she has always held that Christian marriage belongs to the essence of a Sacrament. Over the centuries, the Church has more than once solemnly taught as an Article of Faith that Christ instituted the Sacrament of Matrimony. This teaching was formally defined by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. It declared, “If anyone shall say that matrimony is not truly and properly one of the seven Sacraments of the law of the Gospel, instituted by Christ our Lord, but was invented by men and does not confer grace, let him be anathema.”

By divine law, marriage is a Sacrament which confers on two baptized^[1] people who marry, all the graces they need for a lifetime to fulfill the duties of their state in life and to assist them in the grave duty to help each other grow in holiness and attain Heaven. Specifically, they receive an increase of sanctifying grace, which includes the virtues of faith, hope and charity; they are able to receive a series of actual graces which are available only through the Sacrament of Matrimony: light for the mind and strength for the will, the capacity to remain faithful to each other, grow in mutual love, and rear their children in the love and fear of God. Thus, by means of the Sacrament of Matrimony, God provides for the spiritual and temporal well-being of a husband and wife and their children, and thus enables people who are inclined toward selfishness and hardness of heart, to become selfless and loving.

4. The “Ends” of Marriage

Few aspects of matrimony are more widely misunderstood than its purpose, mainly because of the widespread custom of contraception and divorce, both of which contradict essential elements of marriage as understood by Christians since the time of Christ. Briefly stated, the primary purpose of marriage is the generation and upbringing of children, and the secondary is to offer mutual help in fostering love between husband and wife and aiding each other in the control of the sexual appetite and their emotional life.^[2]

1) Procreation, Care and Education of Children
There are two places in Scripture, both in Genesis, where these two ends or functions are touched upon. In the narrative of creation, the making of the first couple is the crowning work of God’s creative power, which may be seen from the careful parallelism in the various stages of reproduction. The trees and plants are said to have borne their seed according to their species, and they bore fruit having within it seed. Furthermore, the animals are commanded to increase their number. Finally, Adam and Eve receive the solemn injunction to multiply and fill the earth. Throughout the creation epic is the idea of life being transmitted through the obligation to perpetuate and develop the human family (Genesis 1:26-31).

2) Mutual Love

In the second chapter of Genesis, the situation is different. God created Adam before he formed Eve; on which the divine observation is made that “it is not good for man to be alone.” Eve comes into existence in order to be a companion of Adam and “a helper like himself.” Adam recognizes in her what he had been looking for before, one who was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, for whom his posterity were to leave father and mother. On authority from God, they were to be “two in one flesh,” so that mutual assistance, through love and a shared life, is a correlative function of marriage (Genesis 2:7-25).

1. Procreation, Care & Education of Children

Under pressure from their critics, Catholic theologians have sometimes been tempted to question the primacy of procreation of children in married life. But as often as the issue comes up, the traditional position is upheld and reiterated, that the first reason why God instituted marriage was to have children born into the world and reared in His knowledge and love. Thus in 1944, the Holy Office, now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in answer to an inquiry, repeated the familiar teaching. Some years later, Pius XII further clarified the doctrine.

“As a natural institution and in virtue of the will of the Creator, marriage has for its first and intimate purpose not the personal perfection of husband and wife but the procreation and formation of new life (through education). The other ends of marriage are certainly willed by nature, but they have not the same excellence as the first and much less are they superior to it. In fact, they are essentially subordinate” (Pius XII, Address of October 29, 1951).

Some people are scandalized at the intransigence of this doctrine, partly because they do not understand its meaning. To say that begetting children and providing for their nurture and care is primary means that nature has provided that, unless the spouses interfere with the generative organs, children will normally be conceived and eventually born. The “first” purpose here is the same as the direct purpose, the end that is built-into our human powers, the physical terminus to which sexual intercourse leads if both parties are fertile and no hindrance is placed in the way.

We might compare this with the appetite for food. It is common knowledge that nourishment of the body and giving it sustenance are the primary end of eating. This is the physical and immediate function that taking food is supposed to provide. It does not mean that every time I eat I overtly (and before all else) decide “I am going to eat in order to sustain my body and give myself the nourishment I need.” What it means is that the immediate purpose of eating, insured by the laws of nature, is to support bodily strength and physical life. This function is primary because any other purpose, like enjoyment from taking food, presupposes it. In other words, the objective reason why people eat (whether they advert to this or not) is to maintain life and health of body; it is not to get pleasure out of eating, which is only a means that nature uses to guarantee that people might be attracted to eating at all. If we lacked the appetite for food and drink, we would soon starve from under-nourishment or weaken our bodies to the point that any disease would carry us off in death.

The first end of marriage, therefore, has been made clear by nature in the complementary differences between the two sexes and has confirmed the mandate of the Author of nature to increase and multiply.

Not poets and homilists alone, but everyone who seriously reflects on the mystery of life has extolled the grandeur of this task of procreation. The word itself suggests that it means collaborating with the creativity of God Himself. In other productions of human power and genius, we leave the mark of ourselves on whatever we do, but in parenthood we enter into the heart of creation and become co-authors with God of the person we produce. God must indeed create each soul individually, yet even His almighty power will not be exercised unless and until two human beings furnish the bodily conditions which enable God, so to speak, to infuse a human spirit into the body we prepare.

We refer to a recent or impending birth as a “happy event,” as though to emphasize that nature itself is pleased at obeying the law of God. When Christ spoke of the woman who forgets all her pain once her child is born (John 16:21), He was saying that birth is joyful precisely because it means the attainment of a goal, since every goal achieved is a natural source of joy. When a child is born, something eternal has been made, something sacred has been reached. Even if a child should die on the day of his birth, faith tells the parents he is born in eternity. A birth is always a success, an accomplishment. The joy it brings comes from God; not even death can rob that joy from those who completed a divine and imperishable work by bringing an immortal personality out of nothing into the world.

Large families are thus encouraged by the Church’s Magisterium. This stands in stark contrast to the policy of so many secularized nations where so-called “planned parenthood” is really “planned limitation of children” to conform to the paganized philosophy of once-Christian nations.

Procreation, however, is more than producing a child. It seals the marriage union and brings it to fruition; it seals the marriage because the child is made to the image of his father and mother, as well as of God. The child is not just a child but, to each of the parents, he is the gift the other has given, the fruit of their love. He is a living expression of their mutual generosity. Through the child, the “two-ness” of marriage is changed and develops into a “three-ness;” as in God. Sexuality, it has been said, is duality. Love is always a trinity.

Care and Education

Too often people separate the two parts of the primary end of marriage, as though begetting offspring were the only goal. The primary function of matrimony is twofold, both generation and education, and not the first alone. Really two kinds of begetting are involved, the one physical by delivering a human being, and the other spiritual by training the child to know and love the truth and thereby save his soul.

Suppose God had not given parents the power and right to educate their children, but only the power to beget them. He would then have failed to make sufficient provision for children born, and so for the whole human race. Children, as we have seen, are incapable of providing wholly for themselves, even in things pertaining to the natural life, and much less in the myriad needs of the supernatural life of grace. For many years they have to be helped, instructed and educated by others.

The law of conscience, written in the heart of man, teaches that the right and duty to educate offspring belongs in the first place to those who began the work of nature by giving them birth; they are in fact forbidden to leave this task unfinished and so expose it to certain ruin. In the state of matrimony, the best possible provision has been made for the training of children because the parents are bound together by an indissoluble bond; the care and mutual help of each is always at hand. Both parents are necessary for the full, well-rounded development of the child.

Role of Mothers

Not a few mothers sometimes get overinvolved in complex theories and methods, or confused by the conflicting advice they read and hear. Child psychologists remind them that nature meant them to have children, and that they are endowed with a maternal instinct that will develop along with their child. As a human being, a child desires warmth and acceptance, attention and love. These are always the “right things” for him.

Certainly there is no one simple formula for rearing children, because people are individuals, whether babies or adults. While experience may help, lack of it should not be a handicap, otherwise the first-born would regularly be the worst trained! For the consolation of mothers, infants are an emotionally hardy lot and not easily harmed by occasional mistakes.

A child develops physically and emotionally. Nowadays it is agreed that both kinds of development begin at birth and are closely related. In fact, studies show the important influence of the attitude of parents upon the child who is physically developing in the mother’s womb from the moment of conception.

The physical aspect covers not only growth of body, but also coordination of muscles and nerves, development of the brain and thought processes, and learning to recognize people and things around him. Emotional development includes the whole complex of desires and appetites, and concerns the child’s reactions about things, people and situations. It means the development of affection, dependence on others, independence and freedom, fears and anxieties, likes and dislikes, confidence in himself and in the world about him. The two kinds of growth work together and affect each other.

A mother should know that her baby learns a great deal about the world in the first few weeks of life, before he can focus his eyes, recognize anything or anyone, or do a thing for himself. He learns to feel that it is a friendly, comfortable place where he will be welcome and happy, and that it can sometimes be strange, frightening and cold. He feels, at a remarkably early age, how much he “belongs,” and it is the mother’s privilege to foster this feeling from conception and birth on through infancy and into childhood. For the first weeks and months, the mother is her baby’s world; she does not cease to be the most important part of that world in the years that follow. No matter how awkwardly she may fulfill her role, the feeling of love comes to her child from the kindly, attentive way she cares for him. The development of her natural maternal feelings, as she fills his needs, will make him sense that he is loved, and he will feel safe and secure.

Mothers cannot overestimate their importance to their children, not just or mostly for physical care, but for the feelings and sentiments they transfer to him or create in him. So the logical starting point for good mothering is to consider oneself and one’s feelings and ideals. These should be deep and high, and the principles that govern them sound; they will be communicated to a child years before he ostensibly reaches the age of reason, not by formal instruction or training so much as by example and that mysterious, almost mystical, medium of exchange called a mother’s love.

Role of Fathers

Less familiar is the role of the father in the education of his children, perhaps because the mother is normally closer to home and traditionally considered the teacher in the family. Yet the father is in many ways indispensable; his function is not only to supplement the mother’s care but to contribute his own proper gifts. There are certain facets of personality that grow and develop in a home only where the father is playing his various roles effectively.

His first contribution is to father the children through their mother. His strength and power have the faculty of passing through the mother to the children. He helps to keep her in the mood for her maternal task by consistently providing material comfort and security for her through his labor. She is thus assured freedom from anxiety about food, clothing and shelter. By showing interest in her activity, creativeness and work, he furnishes what she needs for physical and emotional stability.

In addition to this vicarious “fathering” of the child, the husband has a more distinctive role to play. Comparable to the affection he shows his wife, the loving attention he gives the infant early in life will awaken a corresponding interest in the infant toward him. At first it may be only a dim awareness, but it is an important one. Boys and girls are alike in this respect. They develop their earliest and most decisive ideas about masculinity from their fathers. He evokes a process in the child which psychologists call “animating the mind” toward the male sex. Delay in enthusiasm on his part makes it harder than ever to create the depth of relationship that a child needs to grow into an emotionally healthy person.

One mistake often made is the tacit assumption that the father should avoid all sovereignty over the girl members of the family, as though the latter belonged by right only to the mother. The result can be a one-sided feminine personality that has never felt real nearness and understanding in their relations with men because this dimension of a father’s care had been neglected (or avoided) in childhood.

In the next stage of development, the grade school child tends to be unsure of himself, especially when, to a large extent, he is under the direction of women. Boys and girls are not unlike in this matter. They can easily grow to resent the imposed learning process where they are surrounded by women almost to the exclusion of men. With mother at home and the woman teacher at school, both urging children to learn and progress, they are liable to feel smothered by women. Boys in the lower grades are especially afraid of being effeminate, and whatever lack of docility they have is aggravated by a fear or even refusal to accept the female orientation of mother and teacher as to what constitutes acceptable behavior or moral conduct. Here the father can help to explain and teach, by word and example, the validity of practices which the boy may suspect are only feminine idiosyncrasies.

Specialists in the field suggest there are at least seven variants to the father’s characteristic part in the education of his growing family.

• He is above all a companion and inspiration for the mother; if she lacks this, the children may suffer radically from that essential ingredient which is loosely called security but which covers every facet of psychological development.
• The father is moreover an awakener of the emotional potentialities of his children; his role of active element in procreation carries on into education by evoking latent powers and stimulating mental and moral energies that might otherwise never come to light.
• He is meant to be a faithful friend and teacher to his sons and daughters, in a way that a mother can only, with difficulty, ever be; the native rationality of a mature-minded man is supposed to balance the more affectionate and emotional contribution of the mother.
• A father is meant by nature to become the “ego-ideal” for masculine love, ethics and morality. What he is and does will be reflected in his children, and their attitudes towards men will be strongly conditioned by the image of fatherhood which boys and girls see in their own fathers.
• Rising a step higher, even their concept of God will be colored by what they know of such qualities as justice, strength of character, kindliness, prudent foresight and solicitude in the parent whom they call father.
• Correspondingly, the father is meant to be a model for his children’s social and vocational behavior. “Like father, like son,” is not only a proverb. It intimates how deeply human conduct is shaped by immediate patterns of morality, and how instinctively a child imitates the one whom he has come to recognize as head of the family.
• The stabilizing influence of a father comes not only from his dominant position, but from the numerous elements which nature has implanted in him and which experience develops to the well-being of the children. Where this is missing, the consequences in stunted personality and moral deviation among boys and girls are common knowledge. Nothing can quite supply for the multiple role of a father as protector