Category Archives: marriage

On Marrying Young

marriage, Natural Law, , ,

Over the past 40 years, the median age of men and women getting married in the US has risen steeply.  Catholics, it seems, are no different in this regard.  A Pew Research Center study in 2014 found that only 14% of Catholics between the ages of 18-29 were married.  Marrying at a much later age has become the “new normal”.  Statistics are helpful, but they do not answer the most important question as to whether this is a good thing or not.  The answer, not surprisingly, is a resounding “No”.

To see why this question is answered in the negative, we must first make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural.  Normality expresses to what degree a man conforms to a cultural norm.  These norms are always relative to the culture in which they are established.  In the best of all possible worlds, they are also relative to what is natural.  It is when the natural and the normal coincide that the behavior in question leads to true flourishing and happiness (in the fullest sense).  While it may be normal to get married older, it is questionable whether it conforms to what is natural.

A Natural Time to Get Married?

Marriage in itself is natural for the human person, but the question is whether the nature of marriage itself demands that the spouses wait until they are older to marry.  To address this question we must first ask how we determine what is natural.

One way that we can do this is by looking at the biological reality of the human body.  What I mean by this can be best illustrated by an example.  We know that, despite being deeply immersed in a Freudian-Kinseyan paradigm, children are not sexual beings.  If they were, then they would develop sexual capacities before the normal age of puberty (12-16).  This is why, as I have written previously, something like Drag Queen Story Hour is an abuse of childhood. 

While we might readily admit that biology reveals the grievous nature of sexualizing children, we tend to make a the same error when it comes to marriage and sexual development.  Is it reasonable to think that God made men and women sexually mature by their late teens and early 20s only to have them enter a holding pattern for up to a decade?  Perhaps you could say yes, except for the fact that they also experience their strongest libido at the same time. 

Sexual desire is the strongest desire we experience because it is meant to fuel the courage to make the necessary gift of self necessary for marriage and family life.  It is at its strongest at such an early age because it is meant to propel the man and woman out from their parents so as to become parents themselves.  The problem is that we now tell young adults that, despite the fact that they experience strong sexual desire, they are too young for marriage.  There is the obvious disconnect then between God’s design and lived reality.    

With these considerations in mind, it becomes clear that there is something contra-natural about waiting so long to get married.  As mentioned, marriage in and of itself at any age is natural so we cannot say it is against nature.  It does however tend towards being contrary to the nature of marriage itself, especially because it is the foundation of the Family.  Rather than making it possible to be “fruitful and multiply” it contributes to what would more accurately be called the modern “fruitful and maintain” paradigm.  Again to be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with waiting to marry in individual cases, but in the general trend and attitude towards the later marriages.

Marriage as a Life Accesory

Once we are able to grasp that younger marriages conform with God’s design for marriage, we can begin to ask why many people fail to see this.  To say that “Marriage is natural” means that it is one of the things that fulfills our nature (i.e. become virtuous).  This fulfillment comes not just because we biologically passed on our genes, but because Marriage and the Family are foundational for our moral growth.  The Family is a school of virtue, not just for children, but for the man and woman as both husband and wife and then father and mother. 

Our culture, on the other hand, treats marriage as if it is merely an add-on.  The professional has taken precedence over the personal.  Marriage is not even considered until a certain level of professional success is achieved.  The person trains himself to link fulfilment with professional achievement.  They also become very set in their ways and their capacity for self-giving in marriage and family is diminished.  We should expect the age to continue to increase unless a fundamental shift in attitude occurs.  The longer the person waits, the less they are “ready” for marriage. 

This putting of the occupational cart before the conjugal horse fails to acknowledge that, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out, the communion of persons in marriage is a fundamental human good upon which all human goods are built (Veritatis Splendor 14).  To add it into an already settled life is to risk disintegration because the true accessories have been placed before the essential.  Professional decisions are for the sake of supporting a family.  Rather than seeing education and careers as means to supporting a spouse and family, they have become competitors.  The attitude is “once I go to school and get a job, then I will think about marriage” rather than “I am choosing to be trained in this profession because it will allow me to take care of my family.”  And this attitude is encouraged even by well-meaning Catholics.

The Eucharistic Marriage

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Although the idea is no longer in vogue, the notion of the “marital debt” remains an important Biblical principle within Christian Marriage.  Within his teaching on Marriage in 1Cor 7, St. Paul exhorts married couples to never forget this principle that follows from the vows that seal the Covenant of Marriage.  Because the spouses pledge to give themselves personally, and therefor bodily to their spouse, they give their spouse rights over their body.  This is especially true when it comes to the marital embrace.  It is important not because spouses necessarily have to engage in the marital embrace anytime one of them feels like it, but because it is a sign that reveals something very important about the relationship between the Divine Bridegroom and His Bride. 

The preferred image of Sacred Scripture for the relationship between God and mankind is that of Bridegroom and Bride.  The Bible has numerous examples, most prominently that of the end of time when Christ will take His Bride into His home (Rev 19:7).  The actual wedding took place when a Virgin said Yes and became a mother, offering her body so that He could take human nature to Himself.  The Incarnation is the one flesh union of God and Man—what God has brought together, no man can ever draw asunder.  It is consummated when Bridegroom gives up His Body for His spouse with a love that is stronger than death.

If we were to stop there, we would be leaving things on a rather generic term.  Christ did not intend to consummate His marriage to mankind in general, but each man specifically; not just the Church, but each of her members.  And this is where the Marital understanding of the Incarnation meets the Eucharist.

At each and every Mass, Christ states His desire to enter into a one-flesh Communion which each of the believers present.  “This is My Body, given up for you” is meant to be taken quite literally as Christ giving Himself bodily to each of us.  We must likewise specify our consent to enter into this communion with our Amen.  To receive the Eucharist is to literally enter into a one-flesh Communion with Him, a Divine/Human marital embrace if you will.  This is one of the reasons why God, when He designed marriage, and the marital embrace specifically, attached such great desire and pleasure to it.  It was meant to point to the desire and joy that we experience in the heavenly consummation first and foremost.  But it is also meant to be a sign of the desire and joy of the earthly consummation in the Eucharist. 

The Marriage Debt and the Eucharist

All that being said, what does this have to do with the marriage debt?  Through the true one-flesh union that is effected in the Eucharist, the individual believer gains the rights over Christ’s Body.  These “rights” mean that they can offer Him to the Father as if the offering was their own and that there is a moral unity so that His acts become ours.  The Marriage Debt ultimately allows us to fulfill the debt that each of us has to God of offering a worthy sacrifice.  The Natural Law demands that we offer sacrifice to God.  But no sacrifice that man offers on his own could ever fulfill this obligation.  So Christ now makes such a sacrifice possible and in such a way that it is man that offers it.  This is no mere substitution but an offering in spirit and truth of the made possible only through the one flesh union that occurs in the Eucharist. 

The comparison then that St. Paul makes in Ephesians 5 is not just about marriage but about the Eucharist as well.  It also eliminates any understanding of the Eucharist as a mere symbol.  A symbol could not bring about a true Communion—only Christ truly present in the Eucharist will do.

With the one flesh union between Christ and the individual believer that occurs in the Eucharist, each person is able to give glory to God and achieve the salvation of their soul.  The one-flesh union is not just a union of bodies, but a union of Persons so that the fourfold intention of Christ in the Eucharist, becomes the fourfold intention of His Bride.

Furthering the Communion

This makes the short time in which this physical union takes place, namely the time right after receiving Communion, an important time.  It is the time where we further solidify our communion with Christ.  We join Christ in His fourfold intention and make His acts ours.  First, the Eucharist is offered as an act of adoration.  Adoration is the acknowledgement of our utter dependence upon God as our Creator Who alone is worthy of supreme honor and dominion.  Because it is Christ, true God and true Man, Who offers it the Eucharist is the most pleasing act of adoration to God.  Likewise, the Eucharist is offered as an act of Thanksgiving for all the benefits that God has bestowed upon us.  Each Eucharist can be offered for specific benefits.  Third, the Eucharist is a sin offering by which are sins are forgiven.  Finally, it is offered as an act of impetration asking for the necessary graces for salvation.  These same graces were won by Christ and are distributed through the Eucharist.

It is in and through the Eucharist that Christ fulfills the marital debt by offering His Body to His Bride for her use.  The Holy Eucharist is a nuptial Sacrament that is the greatest expression of married love.

Protecting Marriage

Culture, Family, marriage, Moralilty, , , ,

A study recently released by the US Census Bureau found that in the past two decades, the number of couples that cohabitate had nearly tripled from 6 million to 17 million.  The study found that the increase was due to the fact that “cohabitation has become increasingly accepted by a broad swath of social and demographic groups.”  Most people view this as a sign of “progress”, no longer bound to the Victorian restraints imposed by marriage.  It is most certainly progress, but it is likely not progress in the direction of anything other than cultural decay and collapse.  The institution of marriage is vital to the life of every society such that without it, the society is sure to crumble.

All of us sort of intuit why this might be the case but having plummeted into the morass created by the Sexual Revolution, we may not be able to articulate why this is the case.  Nevertheless, if we are to turn back to a society built upon marriage, then we ought to grasp the logic as to why this is so.  Thankfully, the great Counter-revolutionary to the Sexual Revolution, Pope St. John Paul II, has already done the intellectual heavy lifting for us in his book Love and Responsibility.  Written just prior to the “Salacious Sixties”, the then Fr. Wojtyla provided an intellectual basis for why the institution of marriage matters.  We would do well to examine his argument in order to apply the tonic to our decadent culture.

The future Pope set out to examine how erotic love develops and matures between members of the opposite sex.  In order to mature, the strong feelings that govern the relationships must always be subordinate to the true value of the person as a person.  When we fall in love with the feelings that the other person stimulates in us, rather than the person who stimulates those feelings, then love can never mature.  In fact, rather than being the basis for love, it becomes its exact opposite—use.  Once this foundation is laid, Fr. Wojtyla then seeks to set up the conditions by which love can truly mature, and one of which is the Institution of Marriage.

Marriage as an Institution

As the word institution suggests, Marriage is something that is established or instituted in accord with the concept of justice.  Marriage justifies, that is makes just, sexual relations between two people.  It does this by ordering them to their proper ends.  In other words, Marriage ensures that sexual relations between a man and a woman are governed both by commutative justice and social justice. 

With respect to commutative justice, that is, the justice that governs the relationship between two people as equals, Marriage protects conjugal love from the threat of use.  There is a vast difference between a concubine or a mistress and a wife—the former implies a relationship of use while the latter one of love.  Likewise, love is always attached to the value of the person as a whole and not just their sexual value.  Therefore, because the value of the person never changes, love must last forever.  This is why Marriage, as an expression of this love, is naturally indissoluble.  By committing one’s life to loving the other person, Marriage justifies sexual relations between the spouses.

This is also why sexual relations between deeply committed people, even if they are engaged say, is always wrong.  “Pre-ceremonial” sex ignores the fact that a Wedding is no mere convention or ceremony, but an entering into the institution of Marriage.  A new reality comes into being when vows are exchanged and it is this new reality that justifies sexual intimacy between the spouses.  Prior to the wedding there was no permanence, afterwards there is.  The permanence of the relationship rests upon the free choice of the spouses.  And because sexual relations always carry with them the possibility of becoming permanently parents, there must be a permanent commitment which justifies their sexual expression.  It is just that a child be conceived from within a marriage because only the institution of marriage forms the proper foundation for the institution of the family.

There might be a tendency to think that love between two people is a completely private affair between “two consenting adults”, but, according to John Paul II, the couple soon “realize that without this [social] acceptance their love lacks something very important.  They will begin to feel that it must ripen sufficiently to be revealed to society.”  There is a need to both keep private the sexual relations deriving from love and on the other hand a need for there to be a social recognition of this love that comes only through marriage. 

Why Marriage Matters for Society

This felt need directs them to fulfill the requirements of social justice.  This may not be immediately obvious, especially when we live in such an individualistic society, but it becomes clearer when we recognize that society itself is built upon the foundation of the family.  The institution of marriage is necessary to signal a mature union exists between two people, a mature union that is based upon a permanent love.  Thus, society can be built upon that foundation. 

One need not imagine too hard what a society would look like when its foundations were unstable or constantly being swapped out, especially given our current plight.  It looks like a society in which cohabitation numbers are tripling and marriage rates are falling.  It looks like a society that is committing cultural suicide.  There cannot be a society without stable families and there cannot be stable families without permanent marriages.  A sane society would enact legislation that protects families and legislates justly regarding the family by recognizing the rights and duties of marriage since the family is an institution based on marriage.

Instead, the inmates are running the asylum.  We feed a “divorce industry” with lawyers, social workers, and judges to name a few whose economic sustenance comes from the breakdown of marriage.  We make divorce “no-fault” and make single parenting “easy” with day-care, public schools, welfare and WIC (why isn’t there a FIC by the way?).  The family is then replaced by an elaborate bureaucratic machine that seeks to control the formation of children so that they grow up to see this as “normal”.  Meanwhile we all accept this as an accident rather than as a planned attack to seize the power of the family.  The sexual revolution was never about liberation but about control and the totalitarians will win unless we begin to think and act like our saintly Counter-revolutionary is instructing us.

The Rehabilitation of Chastity

Anthropology, Contraception, marriage, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, Theology of the Body, Virtue, , , ,

In his book Love and Responsibility, the future Pope John Paul II lamented the demise of virtue, and in particular, the virtue of chastity.  A spirit of resentment has emerged in the modern psyche towards high moral standards and anyone who practices them.  What was once admirable, even if very few people could master it, is now met with scorn and rationalization.  Chastity is viewed as repression and psychologically harmful, especially in young people.  But in truth, without chastity there can never be any true love.  That is why John Paul II thought modernity needed a “rehabilitation of chastity” and set out a program in Love and Responsibility for accomplishing it.

An Elusive Definition of Chastity?

Part of the reason that such a rehabilitation is necessary is because chastity is rarely defined in positive terms.  St. Thomas Aquinas defined chastity as a sub-virtue of temperance, the virtue that controls the concupiscible appetite.  He points out that chastity “takes its name from the fact that reason ‘chastises’ concupiscence, which, like a child, needs curbing” (ST II-II, q.151, a.1).  Of course, modern sensibilities being what they are, any whiff of restraint, is seen as an assault against freedom. If chastity is to be revived then we must expand our view of it as “a purely negative virtue. Chastity, in this view, is one long ‘no’” (L&R, p.170).  What Fr. Wojtyla hoped to accomplish then is to see chastity as “above all the ‘yes’ of which certain ‘no’s’ are the consequence” (ibid).

Chastity’s alleged violation of freedom really seems like an assault on love.  But this is only because our view of love, especially between the sexes, is far too narrow.  When the love between a man and a woman is viewed as primarily based on the subjective emotional and sexual experiences of the individuals then chastity will always be something negative.  This is not love, but use.  The two people use each other in order to “feel” like they are in love.  They do not love the other person but they love the feeling of being in love.  And they will be “in love” with the other person only so long as they are able to cause the emotional response. 

As opposed to its counterfeit, love is something objective because it is based not upon on an emotional and sexual response that the other caused, but on the objective value of the other person.  Love must always be directed towards the person and the value that they have as persons.  As good and as powerful as the sexual value of a person is, it does not exhaust their value.  Love between the sexes incorporates that sexual value into the total value of the person as a person.

When use is substituted for love, then chastity “feels” like it is holding love back and keeping it from blossoming.  In truth, chastity is an indispensable ingredient for love because “its function is to free love from the utilitarian attitude” (p.169).  Chastity is not a ‘No’ to sexual pleasure but a ‘No’ to treating the other person as an object of sexual gratification.  It is a steady and habitual refusal to use the other person.  It is a habitual readiness to affirm the full value of the other person.  Returning to JPII’s words, “only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. For chastity frees their association, including their marital intercourse, from that tendency to use a person” (L&R, p. 171).

Pleasure Freed by Chastity

The traditional definition of chastity, true as it is, does not exhaust its full meaning.  Chastity does not just moderate our sexual desire, but “liberates love from the attitude of use.”  It is then both a ‘No’ and a ‘Yes’—no to use, yes to love.  No longer under the sway of unbridled emotion, sexual desire is liberated to roam free and be directed towards the full value of the person.  Only the chaste man and woman experience true pleasure of sexual desire because it is governed by reason and directed towards its natural end. 

This is the great lie of those who would have us believe that chastity is mere repression.  Sinners always love company and seek a way to rationalize their own vices.  On the surface, and at least initially, it is easier to yield to sexual desire.  But pleasure is always fleeting and when chosen as an end always operates under the law of diminishing returns.  But John Paul II encourages his readers to persevere because virtue takes time and suffering because of our fallen nature.  Once it matures pleasure is restored to its natural place and, surprising to our untrained minds, actually increases.  The “in-between” time in which chastity feels like repression is certainly difficult, but once it grows, like a fully mature tree, it provides the sweet fruit of pleasure.  This reality only comes about however when chastity is seen as worthwhile.    

Fully rehabilitated chastity enables us to see that it is, like every decision that we make, both a no and a yes.  It is a no to a utilitarian relationship and a yes to the full blossoming of both spousal love and friendship.

The Social Construct Myth

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Marriage, according to conventional wisdom, is a social construct.  Governed by cultural norms and expectations, the institution of marriage is completely malleable.  This view of marriage was front and center in the debate over same-sex marriage, but the battle against traditional marriage was won long before that when divorce, especially in its no-fault variety, became an acceptable norm.  Divorce, or at least its cultural acceptance, is what changed marriage making it a social construct.  To say divorce made marriage a social construct is to suggest that things once were otherwise so that if we are to grasp how we got here, we might simultaneously find a remedy. 

Anthropological Roots of Divorce

Deeply imbedded within the Western mind is the notion of man as a rugged individual.  Naturally solitary and free, man forms a social contract either to escape the anarchy of the state of nature (Hobbes) or its noble savagery (Rousseau).  All social institutions become “social constructs” in which men and women freely enter and freely leave according to their own will.  From within this paradigm of liberalism, marriage like all other social institutions are “social constructs” in which men and women freely associate and equally as freely disassociate.  Only the State remains a permanent fixture so as to protect the individual from other individuals infringing upon their rights, even if it too is ultimately a social construct.

Civil divorce grew out of the soil of 18th Century liberalism because it, like all other private contracts, was completely voluntary and always in danger of one of the contracting parties dissolving the contract.  In order to protect this freedom, the State adopts the stance of arbiter and enforcer and is empowered to dissolve what was previously thought indissoluble.  Given the power to dissolve, the State must also then have the power to define and decide what marriage is and who should be married.

There is a certain irony surrounding the fact that marriage was not always thought to be a social construct.  The “social construct” viewpoint replaced the natural view of marriage.  For millennia, marriage was considered to be a natural institution that formed the foundation of the family which was the building block of society as a whole.  It is the natural view of marriage that would preclude either divorce or gay marriage.  By combining them into a single issue it avoids reducing the argument to mere biology.

It is not any mere external circumstances that draws man into society, but his nature.  Man is by nature a social animal.  In order to fulfill his nature, he must have a society of other men to do that.  Because they are absolutely vital for fulfillment, the family and the State are natural societies.

In order to grasp this truth, we must also see that men and women fulfill their nature by becoming virtuous.  Virtue is what perfects all our natural powers.  Marriage is the bedrock of virtue.  Only within the framework of the family are both the spouses and children perfected in their gift of self and unity.  It is where the children are educated in the cardinal virtues as they prepare to give themselves in service to society as a whole.  It is where siblings learn how to live as a community of equals.  It is where parents learn to shed ego.   As statistics repeatedly show, those who divorce or are victims of divorce severely handicap their chances at fulfilling their nature.

It is the Author of human nature, and not the State, that is the Author of marriage.  Marriage, because it is a complete union of persons in all their dimensions—bodily, spiritual and temporal—and thus naturally indissoluble.  The State does not make marriage but only provides an occasion for consent and works to protect and promote it.    The State in its role as guardian of the common good, may act to protect and promote marriage, even by dissolving legal bonds between spouses, but is powerless to dissolve the marriage itself.  In truth a civil divorce is worth no more than the paper upon which it is printed.

Marriage, because of its indispensable and irreplaceable role in fulfilling human nature, is a natural institution and not a social construct.  Understanding the roots of the errors that led to its demise helps us to go back and correct them. 

On the Heresy of Marriage

Culture, Eucharist, Grace, marriage, Sacraments, , , , ,

In a previous post, the logical and theological necessity of the Development of Doctrine was discussed.  One of the points made was that corruption of doctrine, normally what we label as heresy, always leads to a dead end and ends up destroying the very doctrine it was trying to explain.  But there is a sense in which heresy also can be an impetus for the development of authentic doctrine by “forcing” the Church to elaborate more fully on the doctrine in question.  History is replete with examples, but we are faced with a prime example today in the attack within the Church on the Sacrament of Marriage.

We do not need to go into the details of the attack specifically other than to say the widescale acceptance of contraception, remarriage, and even gay marriage within the Church all signal an attack on the Sacrament itself.  Part of the reason why the response has been so slow is that there is still a lack of clarity within the theology of the Sacrament of Marriage.  St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body was a beginning, but it remains just that—a beginning.  His teaching is so dense that there remains much work to be done to clarify and expound on what he hoped to accomplish.  This essay is an attempt to move the discussion forward by clearing up some common misconceptions.

Natural Marriage vs Sacramental Marriage

The first distinction is between natural and Sacramental marriage.  Marriage by its very nature is something sacred because it is ordered towards the co-creative action of procreation.  Even in its natural state it acts as a sacrament (note the small s) pointing to God’s covenant with mankind.  But this natural state of marriage is different not just in degree but in kind from Sacramenta Marriage.  So often people see the Sacrament as something added on to natural marriage but in truth it is a different reality.  It is a different reality because it has a different end.  Natural marriage is for the propagation of the species, Sacramental marriage is for the propagation of the Church.  Natural marriage is for the mutual help of the spouses, Sacramental marriage is for the mutual sanctity of the spouses.

Because natural marriage and Sacramental Marriage (for ease we will call it Matrimony moving forward) are distinct realities we must resist the temptation to lump them together.  It would be akin to not seeing bread and wine as essentially different from the Eucharist.  They may look the same from the outside, but the interior reality makes all the difference in the world.  Matrimony is not just a Catholic way of getting married, but instead its interior life becomes a cause of grace in the souls of the spouses.  In other words, its sacramentality is a direct participation in the mystery of Redemption.   

The Fruits of the Sacrament

Failing to grasp this and thinking that something like divorce is possible is not just to disobey a commandment of Christ.  Instead it is a denial of the Sacrament and threatens the entire Sacramental structure.  Matrimony, like all Sacraments has specific fruits.  The first fruit is the unity of the spouses.  Rather than trying to “hold it together”, Matrimony is a cause of their unity.  They are bound together as Christ is bound to the Church and their union continually approaches this ideal.  And in so doing, it brings about the thing it signifies by uniting them closer to Christ as members of His Church. 

Secondly, the Sacrament also bears the fruit of indissolubility.  As St. John Paul II puts it in Familiaris Consortio, “the indissolubility of marriage finds its ultimate truth in the plan that God has manifested in His revelation: He wills and He communicates the indissolubility of marriage as a fruit, a sign and a requirement of the absolutely faithful love that God has for man and that the Lord Jesus has for the Church” (FC, 20).

The Church uses the term fruit very purposefully.  For fruit comes about when a tree is matured and it is always sweet once it is ripe.  The fruits of Matrimony are felt more deeply as the marriage matures.  Lacking this maturity, the fruit often tastes bitter.  In other words, the gifts of unity and indissolubility do not guarantee that things will be easy, even if they guarantee they will be possible.  Before the fruits are matured the couple will have to have their faith purified.  His commands—“you shall not divorce and remarry another”—are not made in a vacuum, but instead ought to be read as promises—“because of the power of the Cross you shall not divorce and remarry another.”  As an they grow in faith in God, their faithfulness to each other increases likewise.  The fruit day by day matures until it becomes sweet.

Even tolerating divorce and remarriage is not just a practical issue but has theological consequences as a denial of the power of the Sacrament.  It says that the Sacrament really doesn’t do anything and ultimately Matrimony is no different than natural marriage.  To deny this ultimately is to deny the power of the Cross to save.  And this is ultimately why we are facing a heretical crisis.  Marriage in all appearance is impossible.  Matrimony however is not because “nothing is impossible for God.”  It is, as JPII put it, “permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross” (FC, 13).  The Church is facing a great modern heresy about the Theology of Marriage and the Faithful must respond in both their living and understanding of Matrimony as a Sign of Contradiction.

The Idolatry of Marriage

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In a society that finds its foundation, marriage, crumbling, one can’t help but ask why so many marriages fail.  There is no shortage of theories—a search of the internet yields close to 22 million hits and counting.  They usually boil down broadly speaking to a few categories related to economics, communication and emotional availability.  While these may be the reasons listed, they are mere symptoms of the real cause.  Marriages fail when marriage itself becomes an idol.

As Christians, we believe marriage is sacred, not just because it was instituted by God, but because it was instituted to serve as the primordial sacrament.  Marriage, for anyone with even a modicum of Biblical knowledge, is the primary image that God uses to describe His relationship with mankind.  He proposes throughout the Old Testament (c.f. Is 62:5), marries mankind in the Incarnation, consummates it on the Cross (John 19:30) and invites all of creation to the wedding feast (Rev 19:7).  All of this however is prefigured in the opening words of Genesis.

Marriage in the Beginning

When Adam is made, he is given dominion over all the earth.  He has everything at his disposal, and yet He is alone with no one to share it with.  He looks at the animals, and, despite them being bodily creatures like himself, he is unable to find a suitable mate to share those things with.  Then God puts Adam into a deep sleep and from his rib He creates Eve.  When Adam looks upon her he knows he has found that mate because, even though she has a body like the animals, there is something different about her as well.

What is it that is different?  Through her body, he discerns two things.  First that she is a person and no mere animal—a person made in the image and likeness of God.  Second, that because she is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” he is made for communion with her and vice versa.  In seeing the image of God, the image that sets her apart from the animals, and knowing that he is made for communion with her, he knows that he is ultimately knows that his communion is an image of the communion that he is to have with God.  It is considered the “primordial sacrament” because it is a sign of the ultimate communion that is to come—the one flesh communion of God and man in the Incarnation and the communion of saints with the communion of the Trinity. 

This natural desire that Adam experienced, this same natural desire to unite in marriage that we all experience, is meant to serve as a signpost to the infinite desire to be united to God.  But living outside of Eden the sign has faded.  Now two fallen people come together and are mostly just trying to get along.  Getting along even though they came into the nuptial pact expecting that infinite desire, the same desire that drove them to marriage in the first place, to be fulfilled.  This is why Our Lord saw the need to elevate it to the status of a Sacrament and repaint the sign in his Blood.  Now the Sacrament brings about the thing signified, union between the spouses in Christ begets union with Christ.

 

 

But even when it is not received as a Sacrament it is still a sacrament.  And herein lies the problem.  Whenever an image is confused for the real thing, the image becomes an idol.  When marriage is entered into with the expectation that it will lead to ultimate fulfilment it is doomed to fail.  The image/idol disorientation is what has lead many people to give up on marriage completely.  Once it becomes an idol it is emptied of its meaning.  Even those who decide to get married are in a precarious position because in idolizing it they are expecting their spouse to fill the God-sized whole in their heart.  When the emotional newness and excitement wears off, or their spouse turns out to be less than they were expecting (and how could they not have been?) or when someone else stimulates that excitement, they blame their spouse for not fulfilling their needs.  They are expecting their spouse to bear an infinite weight and are ultimately disappointed when they can’t.  The failure to see this is why most people who get divorced once do so multiple times afterwards.    

Raising Expectations

To think everything that has been said so far is simply a summons to lower expectations is to miss the point.  In fact it is the exact opposite.  Again as the primordial sacrament it still points to the thing signified—the union between Christ and the Church.  Instead marriage must be modeled upon that.  What does that mean practically?  First that the spouses must be willing to give of themselves completely to each other.  We only find meaning in life by making a sincere gift of ourselves (Gaudium et Spes, 24).  We only find ourselves by giving ourselves away and marriage is the place where this happens for most of us.  Marriage as an idol is focused merely on what we get out of it and when the ledger goes into the red it is time to move on.  But marriage as a sign means giving.

Marriage is not only giving, it is also taking—as in “do you take X to be your lawfully wedded …?”  Christ not only gives but receives.  Marriage requires not just a gift of self, but a reception of the other person’s gift.  This means seeing the other person as a gift and receiving the gift, brokenness and all.  Christ receives His Bride the Church with all her blemishes so that she might be made holy and spotless (c.f. Eph 5:25-30).  It is this receiving of the other that is usually the most difficult in practice.  And it is only when you see marriage as a sign, a faded and blurry sign at times, and not as an idol, that it is even possible. 

Christians unfortunately have failed to live marriage as a sign to the world.  It began when Luther de-Sacramentalized marriage making it essentially a secular institution.  The Church still recognizes all valid marriages between Baptized Christians as a Sacrament precisely so that the grace of the Sacrament can overcome the secularizing weight.  This secularizing of marriage has even crept into Catholic circles and is really at the heart of the push for giving Communion to those in irregular unions.  Now the sign must become a counter-sign to the world and we must, as Catholics, let the truth of marriage shine forth.

Going to the Chapel

Church and State, Ecumenism, marriage, Moralilty, Sacraments

Living in what is a predominantly non-Catholic culture, one of the most common questions that faithful Catholics are confronted with is whether they should attend a non-Catholic wedding or not.  One can certainly appreciate the moral difficulty of such a decision especially when there is a question as to the validity of the marriage and the chance that such a decision could permanently alter their relationship with the bride and bridegroom.  Complicating the issue is that the Church has not spoken definitively but instead has left the Faithful to exercise their own prudence in coming to a decision. Prudence requires knowledge of the principles involved so it is instructive to examine the principles involved.

The Scandal to Evangelization Ratio

For most people there is a certain moral calculus that comes into play.  They attempt to discern what might be called “a scandal to evangelization ratio”. They may intuit that their attendance at the wedding has the opportunity to create scandal but attempt to balance that with the opportunity to show them the love of God (i.e. evangelize).  This type of calculation however is fraught with problems.

First, it represents an equivocation of the theological understanding of scandal with the worldly version of it.  Scandal in the worldly sense means some behavior that causes public outrage.  Scandal in the theological sense is much broader than this and can occur even when there is no “public outrage”.  St. Thomas says that scandal really has two dimensions to it—what he calls active and passive scandal.  Active scandal is when 
a “man either intends, by his evil word or deed, to lead another man into sin, or, if he does not so intend, when his deed is of such a nature as to lead another into sin… something less rightly done or said, that occasions another’s spiritual downfall ”  Passive scandal on the other hand, is the reception of “another man’s word or deed actions such that it disposes him to spiritual downfall”  (ST II-II, q.43). 

For the sake of the discussion at hand, the focus is on active scandal.  Before we set aside passive scandal though a further distinction needs to be made.  A man may be guilty of active scandal even if the person who witnesses the word or deed is not actually led into sin. This is why St. Thomas calls it a “deed of such a nature as to lead another into sin.”  It is the type of the action and not its consequences that determine whether someone has committed a sin of active scandal.  A scandalous action may still be scandalous even if there is no “public outrage.”  The reason why this matters is that even if no one else knows about it (except the bride and groom of course), because a wedding is a public act it would still be the type of act that causes scandal and thus a scandalous act.  

Returning to our scandal/evangelization calculator we see why this approach would not work.  Negative precepts like “thou shall not commit active scandal” are binding at all times.  Positive precepts like “preach the Gospel” are still an obligation, but their fulfilment depend on the circumstances.  Setting aside the inherent contradiction that we could somehow preach the Gospel while at the same time sinning personally, there still would be no proportionality between the two.  Avoiding sin is one of the circumstances in which the positive precept of evangelization is set aside. Even if we label this quantitative tradeoff  as “discernment” it is still not possible.  Nor, as an aside, could we appeal to the principle of double effect because of the same lack of proportionality.

St. John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio warned about confusing the “law of gradualness,” that is the gradual way in which the ethos of the Gospel takes hold in a man’s heart, with the “gradualness of the law.”  There are not different degrees or forms of God’s law that apply for different individuals in different situations.  But in an effort to be “pastoral” or “charitable” people will try to lighten the load of the law by issuing personal abrogations instead of working with the person openly so that they may make their life conform with the life-giving ethos of the Gospel.  Sometimes the most loving and just thing to do is to tell a person the truth and then to continue working with them (even if virtually through prayer) to help them conform their lives with that truth.  You might not see immediate conformity, but you must always (hopefully gently) spur them on to living out the truth.  Otherwise you rob the Cross of its power by trying to make it easier on them.  This might also require some redemptive suffering on your part as you are scorned by them because you spoke truthfully. 

Other Moral Reasons

Scandal is not the only thing at play here, and, in fact, may not be the largest issue.  Weddings by nature are public events precisely so that the community can witness to the union. Practically speaking a witness is not just someone who attends a wedding, but someone who consents to it. Traditionally speaking this explains the tradition of asking whether anyone objects.  Just as St. Paul, bywitnessing to St. Stephen’s stoning was complicit in it (c.f. Acts 7:58, 8:1),witnesses at a wedding are cooperating formally in the exchange of vows.  That is, their attendance (and forever holding their peace) implies consent.  Based upon everything you know about the bride and groom, you will that they should be married.  To not align your will with the spouses and still attend the wedding would be a lie.  This goes for any other moral “short-cuts”like only going to the reception, not going and sending a gift, or even saying “congratulations.”  All of these, using the language of the body, tell the couple and everyone else that the marriage as something to be celebrated is a good thing.   

All that having been said, can we come up with a rule by which we can operate?  I think a general rule of thumb would be that it is morally permissible to attend a wedding in which there is a reasonable presumption of validity.  This can include marriages of Catholics, so-called mixed marriages, marriages between non-Catholic Christians, and non-Christians. The first two are governed by Canon Law and relatively easy to discern(canon 11-08-1133).  It is not like you have to form your own pre-Cana Tribunal to determine whether the wedding will be valid, but that you have good reason to believe that it is.  A wedding involving, for example, a couple who were previously married to other people, would be a clear-cut example of one that we would have to avoid.

What About Gay Weddings?

We have a great deal of freedom to exercise good judgment with only a few obvious exceptions.  There is one other exception that bears some closer examination and that is same-sex weddings.  All that we have said so far including scandal and formal cooperation would disqualify a Catholic from attending.  But those are not the only reasons.  Same-sex marriages are an intrinsic evil because they can never be ordered to the good, regardless of the intention or circumstances.  To witness and explicitly or implicitly imply consent to such a union is itself an evil. 

One might question the designation of it as an intrinsic evil, but in truth it attempts to “solemnize” a sacrilege.  From the beginning, marriage was meant to be a sacred union that reveals Christ’s nuptial relationship with the Church (c.f. Ephesians 5:21-33).  Even non-Sacramental marriages bear this mark and in this way marriage as a sign is considered to be the “primordial sacrament” (c.f. JPII Theology of the Body, 06 October 1982).  Same-sex marriage is a sacrilege because it attempts to falsify the sign.   Therefore a Catholic knowing this would participate in the sacrilege by attending a gay wedding.

Before closing it is worth revisiting something said above about having the hard discussion.  It can be extremely difficult to disappoint other people, especially people you love.  There is a real risk of damaging relationships.  That is why it is important keep an eternal perspective on these types of things.  When we generously strive to avoid disappointing God first, He always outdoes us in generosity by blessing both us and the other people involved.  While it may strain the relationship here, it paves the way for the only real relationship in the Communion of Saints.  Bearing this in mind, can help to ease some of the difficulty here and now.

The Gift of Advent

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In what became an international best-seller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Pope, St. John Paul II summarized Original Sin as “above all” an attempt “to abolish fatherhood”.  When Adam and Eve seized the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they didn’t just disobey, but epically failed to see that God in His fatherly love was offering everything they would ever need or want as a pure gift.  Instead of receiving the gift they attempted to appropriate it for themselves.  They wanted to “be like God” on their own terms and not as beneficiaries of the Divine Goodness.  That Satan tempted them to do so should not be all that surprising because these are the same conditions under which he too fell.  Rather than receive the gift from God, he decided he would grasp his greatness as his own.  Satan would “be like God”, but only on his own terms.

There is a flip side of this that can easily be overlooked but is something worthy of deeper reflection.  The abolition of fatherhood really comes about not by outright denial of it, but through a usurpation of sonship.  Lucifer was not so foolish as to think he could somehow eclipse God.  Instead he thought he could eclipse the Son by usurping His throne and ruling with God.  Lucifer’s transition to Satan was when he identified himself as only begotten son and not creature.  Thinking that equality with God was something to be grasped (c.f. Phil 2:6) rather than received, he, according to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, tried to “usurp a similitude with the Most High that was the Son’s by right.”

“You are My Beloved Son…”

Sonship, St. Paul’s great ode to the humility of Christ tells us, is not something that can be grasped but something that the Son must share with us.   Even the Son Himself does not grasp His Sonship but receives it from the Father.  And all that belongs to Him as Son, He gives to us by way of participation.  The Son did not shed His humanity when He ascended on high but instead took it with Him to affirm that mankind was made for this.

Notice that I didn’t say that the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us simply to redeem us.  That He did, but to stop there is to confuse the means with the end.   God redeems us so that He can give Himself to us.  This is a recurring theme in Scripture, but nowhere does it shine forth more brightly than in St. Paul’s canticle to marriage in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians (5:21-33).  In it, the Apostle to the Gentiles draws an analogy between the marital relationship of man and woman with Christ’s relationship to the Church.  Marriage is a Sacrament precisely because this analogy is real.

But St. John Paul II says that we can actually illuminate Christ’s relationship with the Church by looking at marriage (see Theology of the Body, 18 August 1982).  In other words, he suggests that we reverse the analogy by closely examining the spousal imagery.  The Divine Bridegroom wishes to remove every imperfection in his spouse by cleansing her in the “bath of water with the word” so that she is without spot or wrinkle or any blemish (Eph. 5:26-27).  This nuptial bath is an obvious allusion to Baptism, but that is just the beginning.  What the Bridegroom really wants is his bride to be spotless, so that He who is also spotless can unite with her in a one flesh communion (Eph 5:30-32).

The Great Mystery

Within marriage the gift that the spouses give to each other is first and foremost themselves—“I take you…”  So too with Christ.  In Baptism, He claims each one of us for Himself and says “I take you…”  Yes, He gifts us with the fruits of redemption, but the real Gift is Himself.  As John Paul II puts it in one of his addresses from the Theology of the Body “In him, We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses…’ (Eph 1:7). In this manner men who through faith accept the gift offered to them in Christ, really become participants in the eternal mystery, even though it works in them under the veil of faith. According to the Letter to the Ephesians 5:21-33, this supernatural conferring of the fruits of redemption accomplished by Christ acquires the character of a spousal donation of Christ himself to the Church, similar to the spousal relationship between husband and wife. Therefore, not only the fruits of redemption are a gift, but above all, Christ himself is a gift. He gives himself to the Church as to his spouse” (15 September 1982).  It seems as if the Saintly Pontiff, despite his Thomistic roots, thinks that the Incarnation would have happened even if man had no sinned.  God, for all eternity, planned to become one flesh with mankind.

If we take this theme and shine its light on the Parable of the Prodigal Son then we can begin to examine our own relationship to this truth.  The younger son wants to appropriate his sonship and take his father’s gifts by fiat.  But when “he comes to his senses” and returns contritely to the father, he bestows the gifts of sonship on him.  The older son on the other hand also rejects his sonship.  He is simply looking for his father to provide for his needs, like those who go to God only for redemption.  That is non-trivial of course, but to stop there is to never see the generosity of the father who says “everything I have is yours.”  It is servile rather than filial.

If divine sonship cannot be grasped but only received then we ought to dedicate this Advent to meditating upon this truth.  We should study the life of Our Lord and learn from Him so that we might take our place with Him upon His throne.  If we truly are sons in the Son, then we need to act like it.   Likewise we would do well to prepare ourselves for His second coming when He will initiate the Wedding Feast of the Lamb by allowing Him to cleanse us of every spot and blemish.  Light your lamps and go out and meet Him!   “Jesus is the reason for the season” indeed.

Marriage in Heaven

Anthropology, Bible, Heaven, Last Things, marriage, Mary, Sacraments, The Life of Jesus, ,

Matthew the Evangelist relays a conversation that Jesus once had with the Sadducees in which they tried to trap Jesus into admitting that the resurrection of the dead was absurd.  They present Him with a case study of a woman who was married seven times, each ending in the death of her husband.  They ask Our Lord, “Now at the resurrection, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had been married to her.”  If Our Lord said all of them, then He would be admitting there was polyandry, thus rendering the resurrection of the body a sinful state.  Instead Our Lord utters words that have shocked many Christians throughout history: “because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God.  At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven” (c.f. Mt 22:28-33).  For some of those who are married, newlyweds and those happily married especially, these words cause much angst.  For the rest, relief.  But for all of us they are relevant because they give us a momentary glance at our promised destiny.

This ought to go without saying, but it has been uttered enough that it bears mention.  When Our Lord says that they “are like the angels” He does not mean that they become angels.  “For angels have not bodies” as St. Thomas says.  Therefore, it makes no sense to speak of resurrection, that is the re-unification of body and soul, if there is no body.  Instead Our Lord is describing the qualities of the resurrected life.  They will have the powers of the angels in thought, movement and glorification, but they will still be embodied spirits.  They will also, like the angels, not marry.

Seeing Marriage for What It Is..and Isn’t

Part of the struggle to grasp what Our Lord is saying stems from the fact that we live in an age in which the definition of marriage remains elusive.  That is, we are unclear what marriage is and what it is for and so endeavor to see how, if at all, it could fit into the scheme of eternity.  Marriage is the one flesh union of spouses tending towards the communion of their persons.  This union is of the whole person, physically, emotionally and spiritually, and not just an emotional bond as is commonly thought today.  This unbreakable personal union also is the foundation of the family which is the natural domicile for the procreating and raising of children.

As the instrument for the procreating and raising of children, obviously marriage is unnecessary in the next world.  While it served this purpose here below as the place where man lived out the command to “be fruitful and multiply,” once the harvest comes there will be no need for more fruit.

As a Sacrament marriage too will pass away in the eschaton.  In fact, all the Sacraments will pass away.  As signs, the Thing signified will be unveiled and made fully present.  Gone will be the need to see Our Lord veiled behind the appearances of bread and wine and it will pave the way to see Him face to face.  Likewise Marriage as a sign will no longer be necessary because the reality will be fully present.

Marriage as a Sign

The nature of marriage as a sign that points to a very specific reality is vitally important.  Specifically, marriage, as an earthly reality tending towards the communion of the spouses points to a parallel heavenly reality.  First, in its bond of love and fruitfulness it points to the Communion of Persons which is the Trinity.  But that is not all.

As a complete gift of self, it signifies the mutual gift of self between God and each man and woman.  As proof that this union is real, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  The Incarnation is the definitive marriage of mankind with God.  The Son is forever united to a human nature.  As if further proof were needed, Christ also raised Marriage to a Sacrament by which He bestows sanctifying grace.  This sanctifying grace not only cements the bonds of the spouses, but more importantly it truly unites each of the spouses to God.  In this way it becomes not just a sign, but the thing signified, “the great mystery in reference to [the bond of] Christ and the Church” (Eph 5:32).

There is also a third reality that is signified in marriage and it is this one that ought to bring relief to those who despair no longer being united to their spouse.  It is this reality, says St. John Paul II, that is the reason why we are not simply “laundry listing” what we believe in the Creed but implying an intimate connection between the truths and reality.  More to the point, the Saintly Pontiff says that we link the Resurrection of the Body and the Communion of Saints in the Creed.

We are embodied creatures and our bodies too are a sign.  They are a sign that we are made for communion, not just with God, but with one another.  But these signs do not pass away because they bring about the thing signified, that is our bodies are who we are.  In this life we are limited in our capacity of self-giving to the point that we can only give of ourselves fully to one other person.  When time ceases, this limitation will be lifted so that we will be able to give of ourselves fully in all our relationships.  Put more succinctly we will participate fully in the Communion of Saints, a communion of self-giving and receiving of the entire redeemed community.  This is why, by way of anticipation, Our Lady, although only a creature, can have a personal relationship with each of the members of the Church Militant.  It is this redeemed community that is wedded to God, a communion with a communion as John Paul II said.

This is the Good News for spouses.  All in their relationship they have built upon and centered on Christ will endure.  The true intimacy, in Christ, they experienced will not be forgotten but instead will be the foundation of their relationship with each other in the Communion of Saints.  They will experience a level of intimacy beyond anything they could imagine.

And this is ultimately why Our Lord refused the Sadducees trap of treating marriage and the resurrection as some theological theory.  It is also why we shouldn’t treat this as some “pie in the sky” musings.  It ought to inform our relationships here and now.  If only those aspects of our relationship that were built on Christ will last, then we know which ones we should focus on.  If everyone did this in living out the consequence of Marriage as a Sacrament, then there would be peace in many homes.  And that, truly is the Good News.

The Roots of Feminism

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Whenever we want to understand the cause of human behavior, it is usually instructive to return to the “beginning.”  The divinely inspired words of Genesis 2 gives us a valuable glimpse of human psychology.  In this regard, the roots of modern day feminism are no different.  The reverberations from the Fall were felt not only in relation to God, but man and woman also experienced a rupture in their relationship with one another.  Rather than living in domestic bliss, man and woman are destined for conflict.  With the entrance of fig leaves, complementarity is threatened by competition as man rejects his role of protector and instead is met with the temptation to rule over woman (c.f. Gn 3:16).

Competition and Complementarity

It is important to add that while the Fall left man and woman with relational myopia, it did not doom their relationship.  It is strained, but not irreparably so.  The path to reconciliation, at least according to Our Lord, passes through “the beginning” (c.f. Mt 19:4).  Man and woman were made to live in harmony.  But this harmony was (and still is) contingent upon harmony with God.  In fact, it was meant to be a sign of it.    This helps us to grasp why we say they were cursed.  It was not because hell hath no fury like a God that has been scorned, but because God refuses to give up on mankind.  His cursing of man and woman and their relationship is meant to awaken within them an innate sense that reality is not quite what it seems.

The lie hidden within the serpent’s temptation was that God was withholding something from Adam and Eve.  Up to this point, man’s fundamental stance was one of receptivity.  They saw everything as a gift from the God Who desired nothing more than to father them.  But with satanic sophistry, the woman is tempted to change her stance to one of appropriation rather than receptivity.  Rather than receiving a gift, she is tempted to seize it.

This tension between receptivity and appropriation helps us to understand why it was woman who was tempted by the serpent.  Femininity, properly understand, was meant to be a sign of mankind’s receptivity of the gift.  In fact this receptivity is stamped into her body.  Eve, in seizing the apple, rejects not only God but her femininity.  By attacking the woman Satan is able to distort both man and woman’s signpost for their relationship to God.  Woman is now cursed to experience the consequences of the new paradigm.  She will become an object of appropriation as man no longer views her as a gift but instead as something to be seized and controlled.

With the threat of appropriation always looming over woman, she is keenly aware that something is fundamentally wrong.  She experiences desire for man, yet that desire is often met by a lust for domination.  This experience then also carries with it a temptation for her. The desire and the lust are precisely because of her femininity.  The temptation then is to reject her femininity.  Thus we find the genesis of modern feminism in Genesis.

Grasping Masculinity

This helps to explain why ersatz feminists, rather than embracing all those things associated with authentic femininity, attempt to grasp masculinity.  And because they are grasping they grasp a counterfeit version of it.  They set fake masculinity on a pedestal and then try to imitate it by taking a pill that enables them to indulge all their desire for man (even though the Pill actually robs them of that desire) and lord it over everyone they meet.  They come to loathe their own and other’s femininity and hate any man who portrays authentic masculinity, mostly because they cannot seize it on their own.

The curse may haunt the woman, but it does not have the final say.  The path out is by embracing her femininity.  Eve may have set the tone, but the New Eve gives the escape route.  Mary is the archetype of femininity.  She is totally receptive—“be it done to me according to Thy word” (Lk 1:38).  She is the archetype not just because she is the perfect wife and mother, but because she is the perfect disciple of her Son.   She is the model of receptivity, praising “the Almighty Who has done great things for me.”

The tug of the curse cannot be overcome by trying harder—that too is the appropriated masculinity revealing itself.  Instead the solution is to submit to Christ Who offers the grace to embrace her true femininity.  The true feminist is one who demands of men around them that they be authentically men.  She knows that masculinity is not something she can grasp but must come as a gift from a man who is able to give it.

Adam fell in not guarding Eve’s femininity.  The New Adam, because He “handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish empowers men to guard the femininity of woman” (Eph 5:25-27), restores man’s masculinity and empowers him to guard the femininity of woman.  Rather than seeing her as a threat to his own masculinity, he gifts himself to her.

Many of today’s feminists trace their ideological roots back to the 1960s.  If they were to dig further then they would find they extend back much further.  Failing to see this, they apply false solutions only exacerbating the problem.  Instead they should submit themselves and their femininity to Christ, the only One Who can fulfill their deepest desire.

Marriage as the Ultimate Act of Human Freedom

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Modern sensibilities find arranged marriages to be utterly repulsive.  They represent a great affront to human freedom and harken to a time of patriarchal repression of women.  Nevertheless, for much of human history men and women came together in marriage, not through courtship, but through some prior arrangement.  I am not suggesting that we return to those days, but instead to admit that given the glass house of marriage that we are living in, we should not be so quick to throw stones of subjection and patriarchy without first grasping the wisdom in the practice.  In particular, we can look to see how both love and freedom were actually protected and promoted by this practice so that we can apply these principles to the decrepit institution of marriage today.

In order to begin, we must put aside our gut reactions in order to see why, at least in principle, arranged marriages could work.  A father, when he truly loves his daughter, sees her as a gift and wants her to be fulfilled in the truest sense of the word.  That fulfillment includes the time when she must join herself to a husband.  Because of his great love, he wants to make sure that she will be yoked to a man who has a sense of responsibility of the great gift that has been bestowed upon him.  And so, in arranging the marriage, he was vetting his future son-in-law to make sure that he was worthy of such a priceless gift.  Did it always happen like this?  Of course not.  But the principle which animated it is wholly lacking in today’s culture and so bears some further examination.

Attraction in Marriage

What if the woman was not attracted to the man or vice versa?  Attraction, both sensual and emotional, is very important, but only in the sense that they contain the seeds of love.  But love is not the same thing as attraction.  Attraction is about the pleasure your presence brings to me.  In other words, it is a love of the feelings that you stir in me.  It draws me towards you, but I must decide whether you have more value than the mere trigger of pleasant feelings.  It is ironic that we recoil at the idea of our parents arranging our marriages while we have no problem submitting to the genetics of our passions, the same genetics we have received from our parents.

Attraction should serve to spur me towards love to see if the good that I detected is a real good for me.  When it does, love emerges in which my consciousness of the fact that you are gift (“a good for me”) stirs me to make a gift of myself (“to be a good for you”).  This is a solid foundation of love in which the couple sees each other as a gift and takes responsibility for the well-being of the other.  Once love emerges then genuine attraction roams free because it is directed towards the full value of the person and not just some attributes that I happen to like.  When a relationship never grows past attraction, then true love never develops—infatuation, lust, cupidity, yes—but not true love.  This seems to be one of major obstacles facing marriage today; an inability to move past attraction.  Marriages end because “I just don’t love you anymore,” which really means “I never really loved you, only the feelings you stirred in me.”  They put too much stock in the laws of attraction and when the market crashed they were left with nothing.  Arranged marriages may not have been the solution to this problem, but at least they recognized that attraction was only a seed of love and not a foundation; a lesson we would do well to learn.

Freedom and Marriage

The modern distaste for arranged marriages also sees them as a great affront against freedom.  We are right to think we should be free to marry whomever we choose, but we fail to see that true freedom comes not in choosing who to marry, but in being married.  What this means is that marriage truly is the ultimate sign of human freedom.  When a couple says “I do” it constitutes the greatest act of human freedom.  Why is that so?  Because they are saying that no matter what happens, nothing will change their will to be yoked to the other person.  They are free from any feelings that come or go—their freedom is stronger.  They are free from any person who might come or go in their life—their freedom is stronger.  They are free from any external circumstances that might happen—their freedom is stronger.  In fact, far from diminishing their freedom, holding onto the “I do” and making it an “I am” they are actually increasing it.  To give in to any of the thousands of temptations to call it quits is not freedom, but slavery.

Unlike the marriages of today, arranged marriages emphasized the freedom through the permanence of their consent.   We on the other hand emphasize the “I’d like to” even going so far as to cohabitate on a trial basis.  With no real emphasis on the “I do” we find it just as easy to say “I no longer like to.” To say “I do is to say “I will” and it shows that the human will is stronger than any other compulsion or external circumstance.  Marriage is the great sign of human freedom.

Sign of Contradiction

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In what has been labeled as a landmark study into various institutional responses to child sex abuse, the Australian Royal Commission targeted two particular practices of the Catholic Church; deeming them as directly contributing to abuse.  There is a certain familiar ring to them with the Commission recommending that the Church remove the canonical seal of Confession as pertains to sexual abuse and make clerical celibacy voluntary.  Many in the media, both Down Under and abroad, have criticized the Church for being too quick to dismiss the recommendations of the Commission.  Of course, the Church has been listening to these “recommendations” for many years now and so has good reason for rejecting them out of hand.  Nevertheless, it is always instructive for us to look at why, particularly the recommendation to change the practice of celibacy, is not a real solution.

To be fair, the Commission was quick to point out that clerical celibacy was not a direct cause of abuse but instead called it “a contributing factor,” especially since it “is implicated in emotional isolation, loneliness, depression and mental illness. Compulsory celibacy may also have contributed to various forms of psychosexual dysfunction, including psychosexual immaturity, which pose an ongoing risk to the safety of children.”  Furthermore, “for many clergy and religious, celibacy is an unattainable ideal that leads to clergy and religious living double lives, and contributes to a culture of secrecy and hypocrisy” (p. 71).

Statistics Don’t Lie but People Sometimes Use Them Wrong

Because we live in a world that increasingly relies on empirical observation, it is always helpful to begin by examining exactly how they came to their conclusions.  There can be no doubt that the Church in Australia, like the Church in the United States and the rest of the world, fostered a culture of abuse in the past.  There have been many effective safeguards put in place in the last decade but there is always room for improvement.  Still, there is some extreme speculation in what the Commission is saying.  To say that celibacy is a contributing factor with any degree of statistical confidence, you must be able to compare the incidence with non-celibates, with all other risk and institutional factors (including size) being equal.   To simply report raw numbers and unadjusted proportions comparing the Catholic Church (964 institutions) with Hinduism (less than 4 institutions) is highly misleading and can lead to spurious conclusions (see pp. 45-46).    They mention that the Church had the highest percentage of the total abuse cases, but there is no adjustment in that percentage for the fact that it is by far the largest institution.  It is like comparing the number of murders in Billings, Montana, with those in New York City without making any adjustment for the population size.  Per capita the incidence of abuse within the Church is no higher than other religious institutions, making any claim that celibacy is a contributing factor spurious at best.  In a peer reviewed setting, what they reported in their numbers of victims would have never passed even the most cursory of scrutiny.

They may have data to support this claim, but it would have been remarkable since no other group has found the incidence among priests to be any higher than other religious denominations and some have even found it to be lower.  If you really want to know the truth as to the incidence of abuse, follow the money.  Since the 80s insurance companies have offered sexual misconduct coverage as a rider on liability insurance and they have found that the Catholic Church is not at any additional risk than other congregations.  In fact, because most abuse claims involve children, the only risk factor they do include is the number of children’s programs they have (for more on this, see this Newsweek article).

The Unattainable Ideal

There is also a familiar tone to their contention that compulsory clerical celibacy is an “unattainable ideal” for many of the clergy.  In fact, it is similar to the response that Our Lord gave to the Apostles when they questioned Him regarding “becoming a eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom of God” (Mt 19:12).  It is a calling based on a very high ideal, an ideal that can never be attained unless there is a particular call—”Whoever can accept this ought to accept it” (Mt 19:12).  It is both a free choice and a calling to a high ideal, but God always equips when He calls.

The point is that it is an unattainable ideal for all of the clergy without the necessary graces attached to the call.  But it is still a fallen man who accepts the call and thus the possibility for infidelity always remains real.  But just because some men fail, does not mean that the Church should throw away the ideal.

What this really betrays is a hidden assumption that everyone is making.  Priests are human just like everyone else and when they itch they must scratch.  We do not understand what celibacy is and therefore assume the solution to the problem is an orgasm.  If we can set it so that this orgasm occurs in a licit situation then we will rid the priesthood of this problem.  But again, if that were the case no married men would do something like this.

This is where JPII’s elixir of Theology of the Body comes in.  In man who has been redeemed by Christ, sexual desire is meant to be the power to love as God loves.  Nuptial love is the love of a total giving of self.  It is in the body’s “capacity of expressing love: that love precisely in which the person becomes a gift—and by means of this gift—fulfills the very meaning of being and existence” (JPII General Audience 16 January 1980).  Marriage and Procreation aren’t the only ways to love as God loves.  These are simply the original models that God gave us “in the beginning”.  Anytime we image Christ in giving up our bodies for others we express the nuptial meaning of the body.

With this in mind we can begin to understand celibacy.  Celibate life can only flow from a profound knowledge of the nuptial meaning of the body.  Anyone who chooses this vocation out of fear of sex or some deep sexual wound would not be responding to an authentic call from Christ (JPII General Audience 28 April 1982).  Celibacy is meant to be an anticipation of Heaven where we are neither married nor given in marriage.  It is a witness to the resurrection of the glorified body.  In other words, those who forego marriage in this life do so in anticipation of the “marriage of the Lamb”.

The Commission simply sees no value in celibacy and therefore is quick to dismiss it.  It is a sign of contradiction and therefore “has to be the problem” even if there is no way to prove it.  They rightly call it an ideal, but then fail to grasp the value of that ideal.  It is an ideal because it is also a sign—a sign that is valuable to the rest of society as a whole.  It serves a complimentary role to marriage and helps to show its true meaning.  It is an anticipation of our future life where our union with Love itself will be more intimate than marriage.  But it also shows the great worth of marriage itself because it is a sacrifice of great worth.

A Culture of Divorce

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Once, when Our Lord was speaking with the Pharisees, they tried to test Him by asking Him about the lawfulness of divorce.  In response, He invited them to return to the beginning when, in God’s plan, man and woman became one through marriage.  In revoking Moses’ concession to man’s hardness of heart and outlawing divorce, He announced the indissolubility of marriage as a key aspect of the New Covenant.  This teaching however has become a source of controversy among Christians to the point where only the Catholic Church has remained faithful to Our Lord’s teaching of marriage as indissoluble.  Moses may have allowed divorce outright, but this is not the only way to “allow” divorce.  There is a second, more subtle way, that many within the Church would like to adopt—the “yes, divorce is wrong, but it doesn’t really matter” approach.

Remarriage is not the Only Problem

A point of clarification is necessary at first.  At first it seems the issue is really about remarriage after divorce.  But the Church, echoing Christ’s words is really against divorce.  In Matthew 19:9 Our Lord issues an exception opening the path to divorce because of “unchastity.”  The actual Greek word used by St. Matthew is porneia and has remained rather elusive as to an exact translation.  All of the ink spilled on a proper translation of this word is pointless unless we understand two things.

First, regardless of whether it refers to serious sexual sin or other forms of infidelity such as abuse, divorce is only a legal arrangement of living apart.  The marriage bond is not, nor can it ever be, broken.  Nowhere throughout the history of the Church did this ever mean that the person was free to remarry.  This teaching comes directly from St. Paul who taught that the separated couple has two options: reconciliation or remain single (1 Cor 7:10-11).

Second, the exception proves the rule.  This needs to be mentioned because we now live in a culture where the exception becomes the rule.  GK Chesterton said that because we have an “incapacity to grasp that the exception proves the rule, …silent anarchy is eating out our society.” He goes on to say that “if you treat a peculiar thing in a peculiar way, you thereby imply that ordinary things are not to be treated in that way…Anything in a special situation shows by implication that all things are not in that situation.”  In other words, the argument that there is an exception for “unchastity” says that divorce is normally wrong.  There can be no such thing as “no-fault divorce” because it takes the exception and makes it the rule.

That being said, divorce really does matter and we should not merely turn a blind eye to it.  Divorce really matters because of its effect on the Family.  When I say capital F Family, I mean the social reality that is the Family.  Yes, obviously, it has profound effects on those families touched by it directly, but no family remains immune to it.  Divorce leads to a divorce culture; a culture born not just by imitation, but also by intimation.

Marriage and Children

To see this, we must first acknowledge the relationship between marriage and children.  Most of us know these things are intrinsically connected but would struggle to articulate it.  Even the most ardent supporter of same-sex marriage knows this and often goes to great lengths to simulate it as part of their relationship.  The purpose of marriage is the mutual perfection of the spouses.  Marriage is an end in itself—it is not a means to have children.  A man and a woman desire marriage with each other, not because it will bring children into the world, but because they desire to be completely united to their spouse so that the two become one—spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

What does the Church mean then when she says that “Procreation and education of children is the end of marriage”?  What this means is that when the two become one, children naturally follow.  In other words, children are the fruit of conjugal love.  Procreation and education of children is the end of marriage not as the reason why spouses come together, but as a result of their coming together.  Marriage is the natural place in which a child is brought into and up in this world.  Yes, there are exceptions and courageous ones at that, but the exception proves the rule.  A child brought up with only one parent is at a disadvantage.

Clarity as to why this is a disadvantage emerges when we examine our brokenness.  As a result of the Fall, conflict and division emerges between men and women (c.f. Gn 3:16).  Their relationship becomes mainly one of competition.  But, “in the beginning, it was not so.”  Humanity is not man or woman, but both.  A child brought up with only a father(s) or mother(s) is really only half-educated on what it means to be a human person.  They need, and therefore have a right to, both parents.

But not any man and any woman will do.  They must be indissolubly united by love because each child must know that they are not a result of some random encounter, but through an act of everlasting love.  They remain incomprehensible to themselves unless they know they were loved into existence.  This is why their security always rests in the stability of their parents relationship and the love between the spouses must be the primary catalyst for the love of the parents for the child.

The Hidden Effects

In this setting, the child intimates what becomes a very important belief that puts structure his whole life.   A child needs a father and a mother not as separate or competing influences but as cooperating influences in their complementarity.  The world, especially today, says that men and women are mostly competitive and will only come together when, and for as long as, there is mutual benefit.  By remaining indissolubly united, the children learn that men and women are not naturally competitive but cooperative.  The minute divorce enters the picture, the child only sees the competitiveness.  When this happens enough and divorce within society gathers a certain momentum, indissoluble marriage becomes the exception and society built upon the Family crumbles.

Chesterton calls divorce, especially when there is remarriage, the height of superstition.  Can we really expect someone who broke a vow at the altar to keep a vow the second time at that same altar?  Vows mean very little and within a divorce culture integrity becomes an anti-value.  We are married at an altar because an altar is a place of sacrifice.  Marriage leads to the fulfillment of spouses because each learns to truly love.  It is a sad world where happiness (in the worldly sense) and love must co-exist.  Marriage is the school where love is learned and taught, and not just to the children.  Divorce says all of that was a lie.

Our Lady of Fatima and Gay Marriage

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When Our Lady appeared to the children of Fatima, she warned that without conversion, Russia would continue to spreads its errors throughout the world.  The “errors” to which she was referring were mainly those of Communism, rooted in the philosophy of Karl Marx.  More than an economic theory, Marxism views all of history as the conflict between oppressors and oppressed and seeks to do away with all division, natural or not.  Marx himself presented it as a conflict between capital and labor, but those categories can readily be adapted to any two groups including gender, race or sexual orientation.  While the fruit of the Marxist tree that is Communism may be dying, the Marxist roots are alive and thriving within our own liberal democracy, a society that is deeply (and deliberately) divided.  This makes Our Lady’s words all the more prescient and ought to give us pause as we mark the 100th anniversary of her appearance at Fatima.

All of the prior Marxist attempts to remake human nature and society have met one almost insurmountable obstacle—the Family.  Marx himself envisioned this obstacle and called for the abolition of the family in the Communist Manifesto saying, “Abolition of the family!  Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”

As long as the foundation of society remained strong and in place, any attempt to change society as a whole would ultimately fail.  But weaken the foundation and society will fall with it.

Not surprisingly, the Communist Party USA has been one of the most vocal supporters of the push for gay marriage.  They knew that by subverting marriage, the Family would ultimately be laid waste.  Ultimately this is why those who oppose Gay Marriage cannot give up the fight.  By removing one of the means by which the Marxist spread their errors, we are hastening the reign of the Immaculate Heart.

Thinking Clearly about Marriage

Pascal said that our first moral obligation is to think clearly so that before we do anything we must understand why Marriage and the Family are intrinsically linked.  Without marriage, the Family ceases to exist.

Amidst all the debate in the past decade about redefining marriage, neither side could actually define either the classical definition or the revisionist version.  In order to see why the family and marriage are linked, we must begin by offering a definition of marriage.  Marriage is the complete union of two persons.  It is the total union of their persons at every level of their temporal being—spiritual, emotional and bodily.  The conjugal bond is what makes marriage unique in comparison to any other relationship or community of persons.

What revisionists have tried to do is to remove one of the elements.  They would almost certainly call it an emotional and spiritual bond.  Although it may seem surprising it is the bodily union that they must remove; not because it isn’t a sexual relationship but because it is not a conjugal relationship.

Men and women are capable of performing all biological processes on their own, save one, procreation.  To perform this process they need a complementary other.  In other words, in performing acts that may lead to procreation, they become a single “organism.”  It is not just any sexual activity that unites them, but only sexual activity that is intrinsically ordered to procreation.  In order to be unitive, sexual activity must also be the kind that is procreative.  Any other sexual activity (including contracepted) simply becomes the exchange of pleasure and does not unite the two people physically any more than a handshake, a back rub, or putting one’s finger in another’s ear.  Only in the marital embrace can two spouses be physically united, an act that same-sex couples cannot perform.  Marriage, under the revisionists’ definition must therefore no longer be a complete union of two persons since the couple is unable to become one flesh.

A word of explanation as to why I have been careful about calling them acts that are “ordered to procreation.”  As a biological process, procreation has aspects that are under control of the person and aspects that are not.  One may choose to breathe, but one cannot choose to get oxygen into the blood.  Provided the conditions are right, that happens “automatically” and is outside the direct control of the person.  So too with acts ordered to procreation.  A couple can engage in the marital embrace, but whether conception occurs or not, happens after the fact and is outside of their direct control.  In other words, it is not the actual conception of the child that causes the act to be unitive.  It is unitive because it is a procreative act.  Grasping this helps us to see why an infertile couple may still be married (because they are capable of procreative acts even if they do not lead to conception) and a same-sex couple may not.

Marriage and the Family

It also helps us to understand what it means when we say that children are the end of marriage.  They are not the purpose of marriage—the purpose is the total union or communion of the persons—but they are the fruit of marriage.  In short, they are a natural result of the communion of persons in marriage.

With all that has been said, we can understand that the Church is not being old-fashioned when she defines the family as “born of the intimate communion of life and love founded on the marriage between one man and one woman” (Gaudium et Spes, 48).  The family as the first society a person belongs to forms that person in his vision of reality.  Each child learns that he or she was generated from an act of love and was quite literally loved into existence.  It is the school of love where the child learns both how to love and be loved.  In short, “a society built on a family scale is the best guarantee against drifting off course into individualism or collectivism, because within the family the person is always at the center of attention as an end and never as a means” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 213).

Joining the Battle

If the goal is to destroy the family, then get rid of marriage.  Erotic love is too powerful to destroy it altogether, but modifying it to the point that it becomes unrecognizable is sufficient to destroy the family.  Not surprisingly with a change in marriage we are seeing a change in what people call a family.  A “family” that is not founded upon marriage as the communion of persons is built on sand.  It is only the complete bond of the spouses to each other that keeps the family together.

Since the Obergefell decision almost two years ago, many Catholics have disengaged from the battle for marriage.  It is time to pick up the battle once again, especially considering what Sr. Lucia, the Fatima visionary once said.  “The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Don’t be afraid because anyone who operates for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be contended and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. However, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”  Let us re-engage and fight for marriage and the family!

It Takes Three

Devils, marriage

Marriage is by its very nature Trinitarian.  Venerable Fulton Sheen once wrote a book called Three to Get Married that highlights the many ways that married love is Trinitarian—lover, beloved and God who binds them.  Unfortunately, God is not the only “third” who wants access to a marriage.  If God is the one who binds the couple, it is Diabolos (which literally means “one who tears asunder”) who is constantly trying to rip them apart, often in hidden ways.  As St. Ignatius said the devil is like a lover who tries to seduce a young girl or another’s wife; once his machinations are revealed the evil one is vexed and flees.  It is only by exposing him that we can actively engage in spiritual warfare and be free to live the high ideal of Christian marriage.

It is important to recognize that the Devil had his sights set on marriage from the beginning.  He insinuates himself between Adam and Eve.  Not only did Eve disobey God, but she also did not trust Adam when he relayed to her God’s command not to eat from the Tree.  By using the second person plural in the original Hebrew, the author of Genesis is telling us that Adam was silently standing beside Eve while she battled the Serpent.  In many ways the battle was already won because the Serpent had come between them.

Why marriage in particular though?  In Hell, there is no love; only competition.  Everything is done out of self-interest.  Marriage is the cradle of love and represents a great threat to hell.  It is the place where spouses have their love purified.  It is the place where children from an early age learn they were created out of an act of love.  They learn that love is not competitive, but self-giving.  If the Devil wants to bring the competition of hell to earth, then he will naturally target the school of love.

Knowing that marriage has a particular bullseye on it, what are some of the ways we can protect it?  First it is important to understand something about demons in general.  They are extremely legalistic.  They only operate in those places where they have a “right” to be there.  They establish this right when someone who has authority abdicates that authority or someone rejects the God-given authority over them.  Returning to the Garden, we can see what is meant.

God gives Adam the command to “keep” the Garden.  “To keep” in Hebrew is more accurately translated as “guard.”  In other words, it is Adam’s duty to protect the Garden and all its inhabitants from the Evil One.  So too, Eve has a right to be protected by Adam.  Adam abdicates his authority and stands by while the Serpent attacks Eve.  By failing to exercise his spiritual authority over Eve, he opened her up to attack.  He failed to shield his bride.

This unwillingness of a man to shield his family is a perennial problem and one that is particularly acute in our time, accounting for the near collapse of marriage and family.  With Christ as his model, the man must be prepared to exercise his spiritual authority over his wife and children.  He must be willing to undergo trials and temptations for his family in order that they be protected from the snares of the Evil One.  He does this knowing that he has God-given authority over them and that his grace of state that came from the Sacrament of Matrimony empowers him.  Likewise the wife and children must be willing to be subordinate to him.  The man may be the shield, but those under him must be willing to stay behind the shield.

tasmanian-devils-marriage

When one of our boys was three, he would often wake up in the middle of the night screaming.  I would always be the one to go to him, pick him up, ask for St. Michael’s intercession, and he would fall back to sleep.  One night it happened several times so the next night I was very tired.  My wife went to him instead that night and he cried out, “Daddy help me!”  This made me shoot straight up in bed, not only because he cried for help, but because he has autism and was non-verbal at the time.  Once again I took him and prayed and back to sleep he went.  Knowing now exactly what was going on, I spent the next night on the floor at the foot of his bed knowing that whatever was after him would have to go through me first.  And for the first time in a while, he slept through the night.  Once my God-given authority was exercised, the demonic attacks were ineffective against him.  Men must be willing to shield their wives and children regardless of the cost to them personally.

As an aside, I should mention that we had the house exorcised the next day.  Within two days my son began to speak because someone in the house had bound his tongue.  If you have not had your house exorcised then I would absolutely recommend it.  You never know what went on in the house before you moved in.  In our particular case, there were three previous occupants all of which ended up divorced.  Clearly someone was at work in the house.

Most of his attacks are more subtle than this and so it is important that we are on the watch for them because of their cumulating effect.  The “ordinary” ways in which the devil tends to attack a marriage fall into two main categories: division and discouragement.

First, the Evil One uses division.  It usually starts with an accusation that we latch onto.  Once we are hooked on it, he then supplies us with reasons why they do it.  For example, a man is driving in the car and his wife is telling him to pass the car in front of him.  The devil is quickly there to point out to the man “she always does that when I am driving.”  Notice the absoluteness (“always”) of the statement so that there is an implication that she has a serious problem.  Once the man agrees with this, the devil then gives him reasons such as “she is so controlling.”  Now the man gets angry that his wife doesn’t trust him.  Meanwhile, the demon is acting in unison with another demon planting the same sort of accusation the mind of the wife; “He always blows things out of proportion.”

The antidote to this weapon of division is what I like to call “compassion in small things.”  It is an attempt to see things from other people’s perspective.  Returning to our example, the man might simply say “No she doesn’t always do that.  In fact she usually only does it when she is worried about being late.  She must be worried.  Let me reassure her.”  Likewise it is helpful to tell your spouse when you hear that voice because they are probably hearing something too.  All too often once he is exposed, the demon flees.

Finally, there is discouragement.  Marriage often suffers because of the quirks and character flaws of each of the spouses.  Being “stuck” with a person who has serious flaws that you find annoying (at the least) can lead you to discouragement.  “This just isn’t what I expected when I fell in love with you” or “For better or worse.  Yes, but this is the worst.”

He can also tempt us to discouragement by getting a comparison game going in our mind.  When we are at our lowest, he will point out other (seemingly) perfect marriages.  In this regard, Facebook and other social media is a tremendous weapon.  People tend to handpick the good news they want to post.  Because that is all we ever see, we assume that everyone’s life is better than ours.  This is not to point out the inauthenticity of most people of Facebook, but to recognize that if you are discouraged or are finding yourself discouraged when you are on Facebook, you should log off immediately.  Discouragement never comes from God.

We also have to remember that love is a two way street.  It does not just require self-giving, but also other-receiving.  We must renew our commitment daily to receive our spouse, warts and all.  The second antidote to discouragement is to dwell on the positive characteristics of our spouse and to practice forgiveness.  For marriages that are heavily burdened, gratitude that God has given you someone to suffer with can often lift us out of discouragement.

It is no accident that St. Paul’s great hymn to married love in Ephesians is followed by a call to arms in spiritual warfare.  Marriage, in our fallen world, is a battleground.  The only question is whether we will identify the real enemy.  It may take three to get married, but no doubt it also takes three to destroy it.

A Perfect Marriage?

Family, marriage, Mary, Saints

In a letter to the Italian Cardinal Carlo Caffara, the Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia prophesied that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family.  With marriage and the family under attack from so many fronts, her words are truly prophetic.  But it is her commentary on the prophecy that is worthy of consideration.  She added, “Don’t be afraid because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue…however, Our Lady has already crushed its head.”   What she was implying is that it is Mary, specifically in her marriage with Joseph, that crushed the Devil’s head.  To put it more succinctly, it was Christ Who redeemed marriage and the marriage of His parents shared the first-fruits.

In order to see their marriage as the prototype of a redeemed marriage, it is necessary to clear up some misconceptions regarding the Holy Family, most of which have arisen more recently.  The most common misconception is that Mary was an unwed mother, her child somehow being conceived outside of wedlock.

Mary and Joseph were already married at the time of the Incarnation.  Our Lady was not an unwed mother.  For proof of this, we need only look at the words of the angel to Joseph when he tells him not to fear to take his wife into his home (Mt 1:20).  A divorce does not break off an engagement.  Joseph’s consideration of divorce is because they are already married.

If Joseph and Mary share what would be the prototype of marriage, then why would Joseph consider divorcing her in the first place?  When Joseph considers divorcing Mary, the angel appears to him and tells him that the child has been divinely conceived and that he should not fear to take her as his wife.  Some have taken Joseph’s decision to divorce her as a sign that he thought her to have been guilty of adultery, but that he did not want to expose her to the shame publicly.  However, this does not really fit with Joseph being a “righteous man.”  A righteous man would have followed every precept of the law of Moses including the requirement that if a wife was found in the act of infidelity by her husband then he was forced to divorce her and make her crimes known.  Anyone who hid the crime was also guilty (see Lev 5:1).  Therefore, if Joseph did not denounce her then it is because he did not suspect her.

Instead the more compelling explanation is the one that is offered by Aquinas.  He contends that Mary told Joseph what had happened and out of a sense of religious awe he thought himself unworthy to serve as the earthly father of the Son of God and husband of Mary.  Aquinas says “Holy Joseph pondered in his humility not to continue to dwell with so much sanctity.”  This explains the angel’s response to Joseph that he should not “fear to take Mary his wife into his home.”  It is the angel who affirms Joseph’s vocation as head of the Holy Family.

Establishing that they were married at the time of the Annunciation is also important for another reason.  Properly understood we should say that Jesus was given not just to Mary but within the marriage of Joseph and Mary.  God always respects the nature He has created and children are to be given as a fruit of marriage.  Therefore St. Joseph and Our Lady had a true and valid marriage.  There was never any suggestion that Our Lord was illegitimate, despite what some contemporary theologians may say.  The Incarnation was to be brought about through the Holy Family and not just through Mary.  It has been the constant tradition of the Church that prior to their marriage that both Joseph and Mary had taken a vow of perpetual virginity, but in their humility chose to keep it hidden.

This leads one to ask how if the marriage was never consummated that they could have a valid marriage.  Pope St. John Paul II addressed this question in a General Audience in 1996 (21 July) when he said:

“Precisely in view of their contribution to the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, Joseph and Mary received the grace of living both the charism of virginity and the gift of marriage. Mary and Joseph’s communion of virginal love, although a special case linked with the concrete realization of the mystery of the Incarnation, was nevertheless a true marriage.”

For a marriage to be valid, consummation is not necessary.  All that is necessary in matrimony is mutual consent and fidelity—both of which is found in their marriage.

st-joseph-and-mary-marriage

This non-consummation presents a further obstacle in that it makes it seem like the marriage was a mere façade.  After all some might say, if they were lacking a sex-life, then it was missing something that is a fundamental part of all healthy marriages.  It is this pattern of thought that reveals exactly why our perception of marriage has gone awry.

Sexual love is not the same thing as genital contact.  Sexual love may include that, but it does not exhaust it.  As proof of how narrow our thinking about this has become, Professor David O’Connor points out in his book Plato’s Bedroom that a modern reader would be scandalized to read a 19th century novel in which a man and woman are “making love” in a room full of other people.  The term “making love” would have referred to the couple creating intimacy through conversation and planting the seeds of enduring love.  Modernity however have taken this much broader meaning and reduced it to nothing but a physical act.

To be clear, this is not meant to imply that the marital embrace is just like conversation and all the other ways in which married couples “make love.”  It is most assuredly a part, but it is a foundational part.  That is why, even if it is not strictly necessary, consummation is an important part of marriage.  But, and this is a big but, it is important not in itself but because of its inner meaning.

The marital embrace is a sacrament—a sign of the couple’s total gift of self to each other.  Because we are fallen, we are unable to make a total gift of ourselves to each other in marriage.  All of our efforts at “making love” will always be tainted, even if in diminishing amounts, with self-love.  The marital embrace is an expression of the desire to make this gift by making a complete and total gift of ourselves physically to our spouses.  This is why contraception is so damaging to marriage—it obscures this sign.

Mary and Joseph on the other hand were capable of making this total gift of self.  In other words, they didn’t need the sign because they were already capable of the thing signified.  Certainly they could have expressed their total gift to each other through a marital embrace, but they didn’t need to like the rest of us do.  As if to offer proof of this, they share the fruit of a consummated marriage, a child.  This child comes about without the act itself.  In other words, their unity of hearts which is shown by the sign of consummation in all other marriages is actually given in the sign of Our Lord.  Summarizing, Mary and Joseph share the fruit of consummated marriage without the act itself.

While the sacrament of marriage had yet to be instituted, the marriage of Our Lady and St. Joseph remains a perfect sign or type of the union of Christ with the Church because it is the Church as a virginal bride wedded to the Virginal Christ.  This is why some Church Fathers have referred to Joseph as the “Virginal Father of Christ.”  This is an especially apt title given that God could not deny Joseph the paternal right to the fruit of his wife’s womb.  Joseph was no mere figurehead, but a husband and father in the truest sense, even if not biologically so.

Looking around society today it seems Sr. Lucia is right—Satan has set his sights on marriage and the family.  This is what makes the Feast of the Holy Family such an important celebration within the Church and serves as an opportunity for us to consecrate our family life to the Holy Family.

Mary and St. Joseph, pray for us!

The Effects of Matrimony

marriage, Sacraments

In her excellent book, Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell quotes some alarming statistics regarding the Church in the United States.  One in particular bears mention and that is the number of marriages celebrated in the Church has decreased by 60 percent since 1972.  What makes this alarming is not only that the number of  Sacramental Marriages has decreased, but instead it signals a divorce between marriage and its sanctifying effect in many people’s minds.  This essay offers some reflections in this regard.

All the sacraments confer sanctifying grace but each one also has special graces attached to it called sacramental graces.  Matrimony (for ease of use, I will use the term “Matrimony” to refer to the Marriage that is sacramentally constituted) is no different in this regard.

Nowhere else is the dictum that “grace perfects nature” more visible than in Matrimony.  Marriage is part of man’s constitution “in the beginning.”  Man and woman by nature are drawn to it.  Yet in our fallen state, the relationship between the spouses is marked by strife and division.  The conjugal instinct, that is the desire to give of oneself fully to another person remains, but it becomes tainted with selfishness and division (Gn 3:16).  By wedding Himself to mankind in the Incarnation, God has come to heal this division and make it a living sign of His relationship with the Church, His Bride (Eph 5:22-33).  This visible sign, constituted as a Sacrament, becomes an infallible means of sanctification.

It is important to make two key distinctions at this point.  While the Sacrament of Marriage requires only that the man and woman be baptized and exchange consent (and that there are no impediments like already being married, age, etc.) in order to be valid, this does not mean that its sanctifying effects are felt by all.  Matrimony is referred to as a “Sacrament of the Living” meaning that its effects remain bound when the spouses are not in a state of grace (or fall into sin during the marriage).

The second distinction has to do with the nature of the Sacrament itself.  The sanctifying grace is not simply given on the day of the wedding.  Instead this Sacrament is continually exercised by the spouses and is a means of ongoing sanctification.  Each instance of self-giving love causes the spouses to grow in conformity to Christ.  This does not mean “great” acts of service and love only, but the very simple domestic acts all married couples must deal with.  In other words, every moment of married life causes holiness in both the husband and the wife.  Rather than division and competition, the spouses strive “to outdo one another in love and honor” (Romans 12:10).

Stain Glass Marriage

When seen as a source of sanctifying grace, the demands of marriage ought to be viewed in a positive light.  The harder the trials, the greater the merit.  The harder the trials, the more each spouse becomes a source of sanctification for the other.  Rather than running from or avoiding trials, the spouses can embrace them with the surety that they are being “made holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:27).

Like Baptism and Holy Orders, Matrimony constitutes a person in a state of life.  When God calls to a state of life, He also equips.  What makes the sacramentality so important is that it gives the recipient a continuing right to the sacramental graces needed for the faithful performance of the duties of married life.  In other words, it is not just that God gives sacramental graces, but that He has set up the sacramental system such that He is obliged to give them.  From our perspective this means that we can absolutely expect to receive these graces.

What are the sacramental graces attached to Matrimony?  In short, they are the graces that in some way or another act against the pitfalls of marriage in a fallen world.  Before examining these sacramental graces it is necessary to stress that marriage in a fallen world between one man and one woman for life is a practical impossibility.  For two people to be united such that they are one flesh (loving the other as they do their own bodies) and yet with no reduction in their personality is humanly impossible.  But with God, all things are possible.  This is what makes the numbers quoted in the introduction so alarming.  We cannot save marriage as an institution on our own.  Only the Church can save the institution of marriage by showing forth the splendor of Sacramental Marriage.  Without accesses to the Sacramental Graces and the awareness that they are available, more and more marriages will fail.

In paragraph 1607 of the Catechism, the rupture of the original communion of man and woman was manifested in three ways:

  • Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations;
  • Their mutual attraction, the Creator’s own gift, changed into a relationship of domination and lust.
  • The beautiful vocation of man and woman to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth was burdened by the pain of childbirth and the toil of work.

With these three effects of the Fall, we can consider three specific Sacramental graces.  Msgr. Cormac Burke in his new book The Theology of Marriage goes into these in detail, but a summary here follows.

First, there is the grace to overlook the other spouse’s defects.  All too often, marriage suffers because of the quirks and character faults of the two spouses.  Being yoked to someone who has some particular faults that you are bound to find annoying (at the least) can be extremely taxing.  Insert into this the presence of the Accuser who hates marriage and seizes on the smallest faults in our spouses in order to stir up the embers of hatred, and marriage is in danger.  To counter this tendency, God gives us the graces needed to dwell on the positive characteristics of our spouses and to forgive as He forgives.

Second, the spouses are given the Sacramental Grace to purify sexual love.  In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI speaks of, despite objections from the more secularly minded  to the contrary, Christ’s role in purifying sexual love (eros).  He says that “eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns” (DCE, 4).  He goes on to say how Christianity purifies eros so that it becomes one with agape (that is “gift love”).  This happens most especially through Matrimony.  Yet the conjugal instinct, because it is so powerful, must also be tempered even in marriage and used in the right ways at the right time.  Christ, through Matrimony, gives to the spouses the power of conjugal chastity.

Finally, Matrimony also bestows the grace to live out “the vocation of man and woman.” This is related to more than just “gender roles” but to see the truth of sexual complementarity.  As Msgr. Burke points out, “complementarity implies that each sex can be a humanizing inspiration and guide to personal growth and maturity for the other.”  Something is seriously wrong in a marriage when the spouses are incapable of evoking a sexual response in each other.  This response is not just physical but means that a wife should admire her husband’s particularly masculine qualities which she very likely lacks in equal measure just as a husband should admire his wife’s particularly feminine qualities which he likely lacks in equal measure.  Men tend to have virtues related to being “thing” oriented and therefore have a greater aptitude for technical aspects of life.  Women tend to lack these qualities by nature and can learn from men how to acquire them.  Women on the other hand often have virtues that are more relational in nature.  Men tend to lack these qualities and therefore needs to emulate his wife in order to be more completely a person.  This is what we mean when we speak of complementarity—it is not just a matter of a physical coupling but by discovering and acquiring truly human values that are characteristic of the other sex.  This is why man (and woman) needs a “helper fit for him” (Gn 2:18).  Of course this only happens when men are truly masculine and women truly feminine.  As Msgr. Burke says, “When a man truly runs as a man, he provokes his wife’s admiration; and she, when she runs as a woman, provokes his.  Further, the more a woman the wife is, the more she motivates the husband to be a man; and vice versa.  Sexual excellence stimulates emulation.”

While it is in vogue to blame the problems in marriage on the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the Church saw these problems coming long before the Revolutionaries struck.  When Pope Pius XI wrote Casti Connubii in 1930, Marriage was already in decline because of the self-absorbing gravity of contraception.  He wrote that “When we consider the great excellence of chaste wedlock, Venerable Brethren, it appears all the more regrettable that particularly in our day we should witness this divine institution often scorned and on every side degraded” (CC 44).  The Pontiff’s prescient words are more appropriate today.  The Church needs to once again proclaiming “the great excellence” of Sacramental Marriage and offer this most precious gift to those who have turned away from the Church.

Marriage as a Call to Holiness

marriage, Theology of the Body, Vatican II

At the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, there were 58,632 priests in the United States, serving a Catholic population of 48.5 million.  In 2014, there were 38,275 priests, serving a total of 79.7 million Catholics.  The number of women religious in our country has seen an even more dramatic decrease, plunging from 179,954 to 49,883 during the same time frame (CARA Church Statistics).    We have labeled this reduction in the number of priests and religious sisters as the “vocation crisis.” We are regularly instructed to “pray the Lord of the harvest to send more laborers” (Mt 9:38).  But what if the issue is really our neglect of the seedbed vocations, namely marriage?  What if we have a priestly vocation crisis because we have a marriage vocation crisis?  The crisis is not just that we have fewer people getting married within the Church (the number of marriages within the Church went from 352,458 to 154,450) , but that we have treated marriage as a second-class vocation for far too long.

This second-class designation is not without a seeming biblical precedent.  In his first letter St. Paul tells the Corinthians that “he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (1 Cor 7:38).  Earlier in the letter (7:9) he tells them that “if they cannot exercise self-control, then they should marry.  For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”  The popular interpretation of this is that the decision between whether one should remain celibate depends upon whether one can control himself or not.  If he cannot, then it is better to be married than not.  Read through the lens of our fallen human nature and thanks to a practical denial of marriage as a Sacrament, marriage became viewed as an outlet for indulging otherwise out of control passions.

This view has predominated for centuries in the Church.  The Church even labeled it as the secondary end of marriage calling it the remedium concupisentiae, which was translated as the remedy of concupiscence (or lust).  It is time that we re-examine this viewpoint to see if it really fits with what St. Paul was saying especially in light of Vatican II’s universal call to holiness.  With this as our understanding, marriage is viewed as being only for those who lack self-control.  It is only a short leap from this to the conclusion that self-control is not necessary in marriage because it offers us a place where we can legitimately engage our lust.  In other words, the call to holiness for married people comes despite their vocation and not because of it.

As an aside, I have to say that the need to work out a theology of marriage should have been a major focus of the Synod of the Family the past two years.  Instead they debated secondary issues like gay marriage and Communion for the remarried, wasting the Church’s time and money.  How many people actually want Communion that are remarried?  Why not focus on properly setting the ideal of marriage and showing how that can be a source of sanctification rather than look for loopholes to let a distorted view seem legitimate?

Once Vatican II and the subsequent popes began looking at marriage through a personalist perspective, framing marriage in terms of its unitive and procreative aspects, the term remedium concupisentiae was dropped from the Church’s vocabulary.  But the question is still open and marriage will still be viewed as a lesser vocation until it is addressed.  Rather than dropping the term, we should return to its roots because it contains an important truth.  St. Thomas and the Church fathers before him translated remedium concupisentiae as the remedy against concupiscence.  This change in a preposition makes all the difference.

Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin

St. Thomas says marriage is a remedy against concupiscence because it offers graces to overcome the self-seeking aspects of (married) love.  Love means making a gift of yourself and marriage offers us a unique way in which our love can be purified because it requires a total gift of oneself.  Through the grace of the sacrament of Marriage, the tendency to live a life of selfish taking is overtaken by a life of generous love.  In other words, one of the primary effects of marriage is that it purifies the love of the spouses.  It is not just a purification of the love for each other that occurs, but a purification of the love for God as well.

Each and every Sacrament is a real encounter with Christ and the Sacrament of Marriage is no different.  Although it is a “great mystery,” (Eph. 5:32) the spouses by being ministers of the Sacrament of Marriage bestow Christ on one another.  This occurs not just on the day of their wedding, but every day.  This is why St. Paul commands spouses to be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ (Eph. 5:21).  This isn’t meant to be interpreted poetically, but sacramentally.  The spouses really act in persona Christi to one another.  How often in our married life it is necessary to call this truth to mind!

Returning to the text in 1 Corinthians we can begin to see why St. Paul wishes everyone to be as he is without in any way denigrating marriage.  In the case of celibacy emotional love is purified through a “special gift from God” (1Cor 7:7) while in the case of the spouses, their love is purified through marriage lived out in a “truly human way” (Gaudium et Spes, 49), bolstered by the Sacrament of Marriage.  Both celibates and married however have the same ideal, namely for their love to be purified of concupiscence.  In the case of the married they actually grow in holiness through this struggle, while the celibate simply live out the gift.

This is why the Church has always insisted that the initial discernment should always be between celibacy and marriage.  If one discerns he has been given the gift of celibacy then he would discern how that call is to be lived out (laity or clergy).  Proper discernment would never consist (at least initially) in marriage vs priestly/religious life.

Looked at from the perspective of potential for holiness, Marriage is actually the higher calling.  The celibate gains no merit for the gift of celibacy per se (recognizing there is merit in responding to this gift).  His love is purified by a singular grace.  The married person however must actively cooperate with the grace of the Sacrament of Marriage daily.  St. Paul himself says this when he mentions that married life is the harder path because of the concerns of the spouses and the world (1 Cor 7:32-35).  If the path to holiness is harder, then there is greater merit when it is achieved.

As somewhat empirical proof of this second class status, the number of married persons among declared saints is extraordinarily few as compared to the number celibates.  This sends the message that marriage is not so much a calling but a human concession.  Back in October, the Church canonized Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin who became the first married couple with children to be canonized in the same ceremony, but this should be seen merely as a start.  Surely there are many other married people in heaven and the Church would do a great service to married couples by opening up causes of other married saints.  Sts Louis and Zelie Martin, pray for us!

 

 

 

Reading Between the Lines

marriage, Mary

Catholics are often accused of reading between the lines of Sacred Scripture, especially when it comes to her teachings regarding Our Lady’s role in the Incarnation.  There is some truth to the accusation in that one way to look at Sacred Tradition is to see it as a reading between the lines.  But this does not mean that we ignore the lines themselves.  One place in particular where the lines are being ignored is directly related to the status of the marriage of Mary and Joseph at the time of the Annunciation.

Early in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 1:26-34), we are introduced to Mary, who is “a virgin betrothed to a man whose name is Joseph.”  To the modern ear, it is assumed that the word betrothed means that Mary was engaged to Joseph, but not yet married.  That is why some otherwise good translations (like the RSV Catholic Edition) have Mary responding to Gabriel’s proposal by saying, “How shall this be, since I have no husband?”  What follows is the assumption that Mary’s yes meant that she was to become an unwed mother and that Jesus is somehow illegitimate.  Part of Our Lady’s share of the Cross would be to bear this shame.  Despite the fact that this understanding is contrary to the perennial teaching of the Church, it is amazing how many Christians accept this unquestioningly.

By turning first to Matthew’s Gospel we can see that Joseph and Mary are in fact married when the Annunciation takes place.  We are given an account of “how the birth of Jesus Christ took place.  When His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit; and her husband Joseph being a righteous man…resolved to divorce her quietly (Mt 1:18-19, emphasis added).  Clearly, Mary and Joseph are in fact married and not merely “engaged.”  The Evangelist introduces Joseph as Mary’s husband, Joseph contemplates divorce, and the angel tells Joseph not to fear to take Mary, “his wife” into his home.  The use of the terms husband, divorce, and wife all make it pretty clear that they were married.

St. Joseph and Our Lady Marriage

Some of the confusion stems from ignorance surrounding the Jewish marriage rite.  The Jewish matrimonial procedure was normally is divided into two distinct phases—an initiating phase and a completing phase.  The first phase consisted in the man presenting himself at the house of his desired bride to ask her (or her father) for her hand in marriage.  Once he received consent, a marriage contract was drawn up and the two were officially married.  This initiating phase was designated by the Rabbinic term kidushin, which referred to a marriage actually contracted.   The problem is that in modern languages we do not have an equivalent term that describes an initial phase of marriage and it is rendered as espoused or betrothed.  In this context however, it does not mean that they were merely engaged.  At this stage the couple was married with all the rights and duties that come with it.  The completing phase or nisuin, would occur when after a previously established time has passed, the man takes the wife into his home and fulfills all the promises of the marriage contract.  This second phase can be seen as completing or sealing the marriage.  Nothing new is added except the husband takes full possession of the wife and the wife is “husbanded” and given all the rights as his wife.  This is also when the marriage was normally consummated.

Analogously we could look at these two phases of marriage in a similar way to what we do today.  The couple exchange vows and are validly married (initiating phase) and the marriage is sealed through consummation that occurs sometime after the exchange of vows.

St. John Paul II affirms this understanding of the rite in his Apostolic Exhortation on St. Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer saying, “according to Jewish custom, marriage took place in two stages: first, the legal, or true marriage was celebrated, and then, only after a certain period of time, the husband brought the wife into his own house. Thus, before he lived with Mary, Joseph was already her ‘husband.’” (Guardian of the Redeemer, 18).

The reason why a proper understanding of the married state of Joseph and Mary is so important is because it serves as an example of the sanctity of marriage.  Mary and Joseph were validly married and the natural fruit of marriage is a child.  That is the place in God’s divine plan where a child is to be conceived and born.  Now certainly Our Lord’s conception is altogether different than any other, but that does not change the fact that He is conceived and given as the fruit of Joseph and Mary’s marriage.  What would it say if Jesus Himself were conceived out of wedlock and God performs a shotgun wedding of sorts through the Angel Gabriel?  It would be an affirmation to many that having children outside of marriage is no big deal, especially because the Mother of God did it.  Certainly there are many with diabolical intent who would like to promote this idea.

There was never any accusation against Jesus as illegitimate, which most certainly would have been the case had Joseph and Mary not been married.  The Pharisees spent a lot of time trying to find dirt on Jesus and He was called many things, but a bastard was not one of them.  Why would God allow the reputation of His Mother to be sullied in any way?

It is worth mentioning as well Joseph’s consideration of quietly divorcing Mary.  This is not at all because he suspects her of adultery.  Mary’s intention to remain a virgin was well known to Joseph prior to their marriage.  A proper translation of Mary’s response to the angel reveals this.  She asks “how can this be because I know not man?” (and not “how can this be because I do not have a husband?”)  to indicate that she intends to remain perpetually a virgin, a vow that she assumed precluded her from having a child.  The tense of the Greek suggests that her virginity was to be an enduring condition.

Given this knowledge Joseph would have had no reason to suspect her of adultery.  In fact if you correctly read between the lines of Matthew’s text, you can conclude that if Joseph was in fact a “righteous man” then he would have followed every precept of the law of Moses including the requirement that if a wife was found in the act of infidelity by her husband then he was forced to divorce her and make her crimes known.  Anyone who hid the crime was also guilty (see Lev 5:1).

He contemplated putting her away quietly because he did not think he was worthy of being married to her.  He knew she was completely given to God, but he could not have known that it was to such a high degree.  It is like a single man or woman who meets their ideal in a consecrated person and immediately knows they are not meant to be.  They do not want to interfere in the life of someone given to God.  As Aquinas says, “Holy Joseph pondered in his humility not to continue to dwell with so much sanctity.”  This explains the angel’s response to Joseph that he should not “fear to take Mary his wife into his home.”

One might rightly wonder why, if Mary had been inspired by God from her youth to remain a virgin, she would have been given in marriage at all?  This certainly speaks to the love and holiness of St. Joseph that he would take a woman with such a vow to be his wife.  It could only be explained by Joseph himself being inspired to make a similar vow to live a life of wedded continence.  Her father would have given her away because a father was obliged not to leave his daughter a virgin because it was seen as an inferior condition of a lack of fulfillment as a woman and mother.  This is why the daughter of Jephthah mourns her virginity after she becomes a victim of her father’s rash vow.  She is mourning not because of a lack of integrity but because of a lack of fulfilment (Judges 11:37-38).

In summary, Cardinal Burke as the following to say:

The reason for the virginal marriage of Mary with Saint Joseph was to secure the conception and birth of Jesus within wedlock, the normal context for all conception and birth. For all who are born of man and woman are intended eventually to be part of the Holy Family first constituted by Joseph, Mary and Jesus. For Jesus to have been born out of wedlock would, in fact, make the Holy Family something significantly less than holy. The fact that Jesus was virginally conceived and born after the marriage of Mary and Joseph means that Jesus was conceived and born within wedlock. This is contrary to what so many, even priests, are saying at the present time, namely, that Jesus was born out of wedlock, like the children of so many unmarried women today, and that this is not an ‘abnormal’ situation. A pregnant, un-wed mother is said to be, according to these people, in the same condition as Mary, who they claim was also un-wed at the time she conceived Jesus. This is false; it is indeed a very serious falsehood, for it undermines the sanctity of marriage and the reason for that sanctity. It is said by defenders of this position that Jesus was conceived after Mary and Joseph were engaged, but not yet married.