HOLY MARRIAGE, HOLY FAMILY ^_[1]

DIVINE IMPRINT

1.  Infallible truth is made known to the world by means of divine revelation, the self-disclosure of the eternal, absolute and unchanging God who has graciously lifted the veil  (Lat. revelare)  of natural man's ignorance of supernatural realities.  By faith the natural man knows that he bears God's indelible image and likeness. 

2.  The divine imprint orients him to the supernatural and impels him to seek union with God.  [cf. Gen 1:26]  By faith he is baptized into a new existence; the Spirit of God configures him to the image and likeness of Jesus Christ. By grace the natural man is transformed into the spiritual man.  Having the mind of Christ  [cf. 1Cor 2:16], the spiritual man's hope is perfected.  He seeks and finds God:  "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me."  [Jn 14:6] 

3.  Bearing the indelible image and likeness of Christ-- the exclusive Way, the consummate Truth, and the absolute fullness of Life--the newly baptized disciple enters into communion with God in union with the Church.  Divine revelation extends beyond the domain of the individual. Jesus Christ instituted the Sacrament of Marriage as the unitive archetype of human society^[2] and the procreative principle of the family.^[3] 

SUPERLATIVE GENESIS

4.  By faith he knows "a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh".  [Eph 5:31]  By grace the Sacrament of Marriage unites them in the covenantal mystery of Christ's love for his Church.  [cf. Eph 5:21-33]  By grace a man and woman in holy matrimony substantially image the unchangeable and irreducible communion of the Trinity:  the Father, Son and Holy Spirit whose intimate being and innermost life subsists in a mutual and complementary union of love. Self-existent and without origin, the Holy Trinity is the superlative genesis of human personhood and society:  "For this reason", declares the apostle, "I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named."  [Eph 3:14-15] 

5.  The Spirit confers the Trinitarian image on a husband and wife as a grace of the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony--he in the likeness of Christ, she in the likeness the Church. God wills that every couple consciously undertake to conform their marriage relationship to the divine activity of the Trinity--self-less love, the highest good of the other, fullness of communion and fidelity until death.  They are called to glorify God in their physical and spiritual communion. Thus one reality prevails over all variants which claim, to whatever degree of necessity or importunity, the name family.

UNITIVE AND PROCREATIVE

6.  A family consists of a husband and wife who establish a home in which the unitive and procreative charisms of marriage may be fulfilled. They discern God's will and assent to his plan for their lives. The Gospel of John emphasizes the unitive charism of marriage in the miracle of water and wine.  While attending a wedding celebration at Cana, Jesus and his mother are made aware that their hosts' supply of wine is exhausted.  The need is urgent. Mary entrusts her son to the servants of the feast saying, "Do whatever he tells you."  [Jn 2:5]  Ordering six large stone jars to be filled with water, Jesus directs that the chief steward to drink a portion. 

7.  The steward tastes not water but fine wine and expresses delight to the bridegroom. The miracle story offers salutary guidance. The stewards see water as water, complete and unchangeable. Christ recognizes in the wedding celebration an eagerness for perfection, that is to say, his consecrating presence. Seeing water as wine, he makes it so.  Hence the transformation of water has a transforming effect on the wedding celebration.  One errs if he thinks that marriage is merely a social construct dictated by circumstances in the natural order.   Underlying the virtue of procreation is spiritual and physical fertility.

ACT OF JUSTICE

8.  The relationship between man and woman in holy matrimony is characterized by integral fruitfulness:  1.)  a self-less love for one another in the context of conscientious cooperation with God, and  2.)  the establishment of a home in which children are conceived and reared in accordance with the mind of Christ.  [1Cor 2:16]  Christ is the guarantor of the family's spiritual and existential integrity and the minister of its fulfillment. The human person enjoys a physical reproductive capability which finds its counterpart in the potency and potentiality of the soul.  Consider that the gifts of human personhood are ordered to one another.  Physical fertility properly yields to spiritual fecundity in the hierarchy of personal goods--to preclude the eternal soul's generative powers from succumbing to disorder and senescence.  Notwithstanding the primacy of the soul, man's physical fertility is finite and more than deserving of protection from loss or desecration.    

9.  Joseph, a righteous man to whom the mystery of the incarnation was entrusted, submitted to the archangel's message from God and accepted the lowly handmaid Mary as his wife.  His obedience was counted as justice by the Father of Heaven from whom all human fathers take their name, and Mary's obedience was counted as blessing.  [cf. Mt 1:19, Lk 1:48]  Thus Joseph and Mary accepted marriage as an act of justice towards the Creator: conformity to the order of nature and the existential integrity of the human person.^[4]  Mary and Joseph received a generous portion of God's pleasing grace--great joy and peace [cf. Lk 2:10, 14]--which poured itself out as a fountain of mercy over all men and women who worship the true God in spirit and truth.  [Lk 1:50; Jn 4:23-24] 

MAGNIFY THE LORD

10.  Theirs was a ministry of the glorification of God and the salvation of souls. Mary's canticle, the prototypical hymn of Christians everywhere, testifies especially to the sovereign role of a holy family whose mission is to magnify the Lord and rejoice in the God who saves.  [cf. Lk 1:46-47]  A Christian mother and father fulfill the ritual and catechetical requirements associated with religion. They seek baptism for their children. They raise their children in the practice of the faith: reverence in the assembly of the faithful, the meaning and practice of the sacraments, devotion to worship and prayer, love for Sacred Scripture, a meaningful relationship with Christ and his Church, and service to others--first by the credible witness of their own example and second by training them in the practice of religion. 

11.  By maturing in spiritual wisdom and right judgment, they receive the favor of God.  [cf. Lk 2:40]  Of great importance is the true definition of family. The human family is an unchangeable and irreducible communion of distinct, complementary persons imaging the divine community of persons in the Holy Trinity. A man and woman, distinct and complementary in gender and sexuality, make a solemn covenant with Christ who unites them in a sacramental communion:  "So they are no longer two but one flesh."  [Mt 19:6]  The sacramental communion of husband and wife is fruitful when as one flesh they conceive and bear offspring naturally. Complementary to the sacramental communion of man and woman is the vocation of fatherhood and motherhood, as the husband and wife protect and nurture their children.

THEORY OF REVOLUTION

12.  Both secular and ecclesiastical traditions confirm that marriage is unchangeable and irreducible. More than anthropological theory is at stake. Whether same-sex partnerships can imitate certain external aspects of matrimony is wholly beside the point; they cannot duplicate the essence of heterosexual marriage that underlies all its outward manifestations. The point at issue ultimately is not the sensitivities of ambitious homosexual men or women; it is precisely in the urgent concern: To subsist and flourish over time, a society must establish and protect those institutions which are vital for its survival. Should it fail to do so, pervasive social disorder and instability are inevitable. The over-arching issue that needs to be urgently addressed is the well-being of the traditional institution of marriage and family and its substantive contribution to the identity and well-being of the meta-society.

13.  Moreover, the society that is unable or unwilling to defend its core social institutions cannot survive; in a word, the rationale for the overthrow of the foundational institution of marriage and family is a theory of revolution. The hyper-simplification that typifies same-sex partisans is the hallmark of naturalism--the cult of what is and the criminalization of moral shoulds and oughts. Naturalism, a sophistic theory fervently proselytized by the media and universities in the twentieth century, overvalues social phenomena at the expense of immutable truth.  It lionizes understanding over moral judgment and whether consciously or not, devalues the human person and his society.^[5]  Lamentably naturalism is firmly entrenched in American culture, providing a platform for high priests of fornication to pander their own deviant experiences as self-explanatory phenomena deserving to be formalized on a par with society's cherished institutions. 

WAR AGAINST NORMS

14.  Naturalism sees no distinction to be made between what a family does and how a family's members ought to act in it. Naturalism recognizes no cause that is not observable in nature.  Goodness is no longer objective, that is to say, coherent and ordered to human being or family being.  Rather, it is idiopathic and subjective, the exercise of unexamined common sense.  Bereft of moral principles, however, common sense cannot defend itself against idiosyncrasy, error, or the fabrication of meaning where none exists.  Such reductionism demands the denial of the obvious and the ruthless disavowal of objective good and evil.   Divine revelation, faith and spiritual knowledge are denounced as  inappropriate means of obtaining the truth about reality.  

15.  Only fools would mistake a rubber stamp for a signature or prefer cubit zirconias to diamonds, yet innumerable media sycophants shamelessly hustle pleasantness as the true meaning of the good. They enshrine utility as a law and are fully prepared to stigmatize if not marginalize anyone who transgresses voguish definitions of openness, acceptance, tolerance and inclusiveness. The war against the norms of marriage and family is a revolt against God's eternal, unchanging and absolute truth. In hopes of appropriating secular and ecclesial tradition, special interest groups aggressively hawk their sexual deviations by specious, extravagant appeals to fairness and equality.  But secular and ecclesial tradition is not so easily swayed:  Two persons of the same sex can never be husband and wife or mother and father.

TRANSCENDENT ECOSYSTEM  

16.  The difficult and complex, even transcendent ecosystem of human relationships--the sacred human dynamic we know as human society--cannot be reduced to simple ingredients or twisted in the name of equality. Human reason and the test of reasonableness reveal the good and goodness as the solid rock  [cf. Lk 6:46-49]  on which husbands and wives are to establish their married life.  The ultimate and absolute good is Christ and goodness is his standard of conduct and moral judgment written in the human conscience and received in divine revelation:  

MARRIAGE, OBJECTIVELY considered, must provide first of all the means of continuing existence, secondly a conjugal life for man and woman, and thirdly a legitimate orientation for desire.  The ends of marriage, in the order mentioned, are incompatible with any subjectivist interpretation of the sexual urge, and therefore demand from man, as a person, objectivity in his thinking on sexual matters, and above all in his behavior. This objectivity is the foundation of conjugal morality.^[6]  

What follows is no less obvious. The pastors of the Church must teach the primacy of this holy, human relationship without cringing and without regret. The pastors of the Church must assert the Christian norm of marriage as vitally necessary for the stability and well-being of human society. The homologia^[7] of egalitarianism and diversity stands in opposition to the Word of God. It is impotent before the unassailable, transcendent dignity of a man and woman united in holy matrimony. No human relationship images more perfectly  the life of the Holy Trinity than that of marriage. The prerequisite for a holy family is a holy marriage: "Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."  [Mt 1:20-21] 

^[1]  Cycle C   /Holy Family   /Sunday in the Octave of Christmas   /Sir 3:2-6, 12-14   /Col 3:12-2   /Lk 2:41-52.  

^[2]  Cf  Mk 10:2-12; Jn 2:1-10; 1Cor 7; Eph 5:21-33, 6:1-4; Col 3:18-21; Gen 2:18-24.   

^[3]  Cf  Mt 18:1-6; Mk 10:13-16,12:19; Lk 1:17; Jn 1:12-13; Rom 8:16-17; 1Tim 2:15, 5:10. 

^[4]  Cf  Karol Wojtyla  (John Paul II),  LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY,  trans. H.T. Willetts  (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981)  247.   

^[5]  In the turbulent 1930s, German National Socialism emerged to fill the vacuum between faith and reason and, assisted in large part by the method of naturalism, justified its deconstructionist agenda as common sense.  Beyond its claim to scientific legitimacy, naturalism was powerless to critique the Nazis and their fascist program.  Its self-censure was complete when, at the end of the second world war, it pronounced the post-mortem experience shows bad science over a ravaged world and 50 million dead at the hands of National Socialist scientists.  

^[6]  LOVE AND RESPONSIBILITY,  66.   

^[7]  The manifesto of man's self-deification.