By Fr. Roque Green –
Marriage is willed by God, Jesus said: “Have you not read that in the beginning the Creator made them male and female, … For this reason, a man shall leave father and mother, and be joined to his wife, and the two become one body? So, they are no longer two but one body; what God has joined together no one must separate”.
The Council teaches that “all Christians in whatever state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity”. The call to marriage is a particular way of living the universal call to holiness given to every Christian in the Sacrament of Baptism. The calls to priesthood or to the vowed religious life are other Christian vocations. Along with marriage, all of them equally, though in different ways, are a response to the Lord who says, “Follow me.”
Marriage is a call to love. The call to love is “the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.” In the vocation of marriage, something which “is written in the very nature of man and woman,” we see that “the love of husband and wife becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves”.
This intimate partnership of married life and love… is rooted in the conjugal covenant of irrevocable personal consent. Pope Paul VI spoke of conjugal love as “faithful and exclusive until death,” Pope Saint John Paul II attributed indissolubility to the conjugal communion, “rooted in the personal and total self-giving of the couple” and “required by the good of the children.”
Christian marriage is a sharing in the mystery of Christ and the Church, as Saint Paul says: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her.” He continues immediately: “This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the Church.” Indissolubility is one of the most essential goods of marriage inasmuch as it represents the indissoluble union of Christ and the Church.
Marriage is a sacrament governed and enriched by Christ’s redeeming power and the saving activity of the Church,… They are fortified and receive a kind of consecration in the duties and dignity of their state. They are penetrated with the spirit of Christ, which suffuses their whole lives with faith, hope and charity. “Sealed by mutual faithfulness and hallowed above all by Christ’s sacrament, this love remains steadfastly true in body and in mind, in bright days or dark.” In the strength of the sacrament of marriage, the spouses participate in God’s definitive, irrevocable love.
Consequently, the 1983 Code of Canon Law for the Latin Church, legislated: “the consent of the parties makes marriage” and indissolubility is an essential property of marriage. “From a valid marriage, there arises between the spouses a bond which by its nature is perpetual and exclusive”.
Since God has endowed matrimony with various benefits and purposes which have very decisive bearing on the continuation of the human race, on the personal development and eternal destiny of the individual members of a family, and on the dignity, stability, peace and prosperity of the family itself and of human society as a whole. Consequently, this intimate union imposes total fidelity and an unbreakable oneness between them.
In conclusion, faced with the situations of individualism, hedonism, materialism, the separation of sexuality from procreation, and the influence of the media the Catholic Church draws attention to the implications and consequences of the lofty significance of marriage. The Church reaffirms that indissolubility cannot but be an essential, intrinsic and innate property of marriage.
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