What Are You Looking For? Part 2: The Liturgy and the Sacraments

The Sacrament of Matrimony: Openness to Fertility

The Sacrament of Matrimony: Openness to Fertility

                When a man and a woman get married within the Catholic Church, they make four vows.  They vow that they are entering into marriage freely.  There are no shot-gun weddings in the Catholic Church.  They vow that their marriage is a total covenant of each to the other.  Divorce is not on option.  Ever.  They vow that their marriage will be fruitful.  And they vow that they will remain faithful to each other in every way until they are parted in death.  For anyone who is married, especially if you used traditional vows, three of the four vows are familiar to you.  However, if you were married within a Protestant tradition, the vow that the marriage will be fruitful probably isn’t.  I know it wasn’t mentioned in my vows. 

                What does it mean that the marriage will be fruitful?  It means that the couple is open to having children.  It’s a fact of life that someday we will all die.  In a very practical sense, if the population is going to remain stable and not decrease, each man and each woman must reproduce one person to replace them when they are gone.  But not everyone marries, or can have children.  In some countries, the long term effects of population control are now being seen, in that there aren’t enough women for the men to marry, which means fewer families in the next generation. 

                Because marriage is a sacrament, it is an icon of the fruitful love of the Father, which begat his Son, and of their love comes the Holy Spirit, “who proceeds from the Father and the Son” (Nicene Creed).  The conjugal love of husband and wife mirrors this, for just as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one, the husband and wife also become one flesh.  From the joining into one flesh, they also become one heart.  And just are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are also three persons, so the husband and wife remain two persons, yet one flesh and one heart.  A sacramental marriage is the closest we will ever come to understanding the Most Holy Trinity while we are on this earth.  And within a sacramental marriage we find the purpose of marriage, which is bonding and babies. 

                The bonding is what happens when the two become one.  If you look at couples who have been married a long time, you often find that they think alike.  They finish each other’s sentences.  That’s bonding.  It’s having that one person who you love the most (excepting Jesus, of course), who’s well-fare comes before your own.  The person who knows you completely.  That is why the Church teaches that all scientific form of having a child, including surrogacy is wrong.  There is no bonding involved between the couple in producing the child.  It takes having children out of God’s hands, and puts them in our own, thereby making what may seem an unselfish act actually an incredibly selfish act.

                The other purpose of marriage is babies.  It is the openness to life, to procreation.  It put God in the center of the family and it demands that a bride and groom put the others well-being ahead of their own wants and needs.  For this reason, the Church teaches against the use of contraception, which is the topic of the next blog.  It is also the reason it is impossible for two homosexuals to be married.  It is physically impossible for two people of the same gender to ever produce a child as the result of the fruitfulness of their love.  Since procreation cannot be separated from the purpose of marriage, homosexuals cannot be sacramentally married.  I know that’s not a politically correct statement to make in America today, however I am writing on the Sacrament of Matrimony and anything less than the truth, though unpopular, is a disservice to any who might be reading this.  And that’s not to say that we shouldn’t love those who struggle with homosexuality, we should.  They just can’t be sacramentally married. 

                For a lot of people in America today, we’ve lost sight, or never knew what marriage is really all about.  Maybe that’s why so many marriages fail today.   If we really knew that our marriages were an icon of the Most Holy Trinity, a sign and symbol of God’s great love for us individually, many marriages would look much different than they do.  And many would choose more wisely and not just settle for the first person who asks.  Lord, may our marriages become that icon you have declared they should be.