The truth of marriage

If you have a subscription to the Register but didn’t catch this, I had a piece out last week about Pope Benedict’s rather recent clarifications of Catholic teaching on marriage, called ‘Let No Man Put Asunder.’ 

When the (Roman) Rota gathered for an annual meeting at the Vatican in January, the Pope urged members to recover the “truth of marriage,” which loses all significance in a culture of relativism that considers “marriage as a mere social formalization of the ties of affection.”

As a natural result of that attitude, Benedict said, marriage becomes “contingent,” just like feelings, and “a superimposed legal structure that human will can manipulate at will, even denying its heterosexual character.”

Since Vatican II, the Pope cautioned, a false notion has spread that indissoluble marriage is an ideal that “not all ‘normal Christians’ can be ‘obliged’ to follow.” He pointed to the Book of Genesis as the foundation for the truth of marriage as a “potent bond established by the Creator” and not merely a “commitment of the two parties involved.” The nature of marriage, Benedict explained, stands against “the subjective and libertarian realization of sexual experience,” and involves life-giving love between husband and wife.

This requires a re-education of the culture, obviously. And encouragement to prepare well for marriage, ahead of time.

“Marriage preparation is not hoops to jump through, but learning the nature of marriage as fully an adult commitment,” said Msgr. Richard Soseman, a canon lawyer, Peoria diocesan tribunal judge, and pastor of St. Mary’s of the Woods in Princeville, Ill. “Part of the difficulty we have in the culture is the separation of ‘life giving’ and ‘love making.’ …

“Society, on a theoretical level, wants marriage to be forever,” Msgr. Soseman elaborated. “It’s like the love song says, ‘I’ll love you till the stars fall from the sky.’ The Church’s vision of marriage is very romantic. People get into the trap of addressing the minimum standards. But when you look at what the Church holds as a valid, sacramental marriage, you see how earth-shatteringly wonderful that is.”

Pope Benedict sees it as the foundation of order in the world.

“The good that the Church and society as a whole expect from marriage and from the family founded upon marriage is so great as to call for full pastoral commitment to this particular area,” he wrote in Sacramentum Caritatis. “Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself.”