• Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. •
"Spousal love involves a total gift of self that, by its very
nature, founds a form and is itself a form."
The distinguishing feature and organic center of the doctrine of
the Second Vatican Council is trinitarian Christocentrism. In terms of the
council's teaching on the meaning of Revelation, the nature of sacred liturgy,
the mystery of the Church, and above all, the Church's missionary opening to
the world—the figure of Jesus Christ, the only Son of the Father, is presented
as the beginning, the middle, and the end.1 He is at once the
fullness of the Godhead and the deepest truth of creation: the one for whom all
things were made and the one in whom all things hold together (cf. Col 
Paul II
could describe the Second Vatican Council as "the great grace bestowed on
the Church in the twentieth century . . . [and] a sure compass by which to take
our bearings in the century now beginning."2
Paul II
could describe the Second Vatican Council as "the great grace bestowed on
the Church in the twentieth century . . . [and] a sure compass by which to take
our bearings in the century now beginning."2
The
significance of Vatican II's christocentric deepening and enlivening of dogma
comes to light against the backdrop of the question of nature and grace, taken
in its broadest sense. Without confusing the order of creation and the new gift
of deifying grace, the council documents point the way to a rediscovery of an
older tradition that conceives Jesus Christ as the deepest truth of both nature
and grace. Not only is he "the mediator and fullness of all
revelation" (Dei Verbum, 2), but by revealing the mystery of the
Father's love Christ brings to light the original truth or logos of
creation itself.3 Pope Benedict XVI thus sums up the theological
vision of the council when he writes:
The "name"
of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense, imprinted upon all things
because all that exists, down to the last particle, is in relation; in this way
we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and ultimately, Creator Love. All
things derive from love, aspire to love and move impelled by love . . .
"In him we live and move and have our being," St. Paul said at the Areopagus
of Athens (Acts 17: 28). The strongest proof that we are made in the image of
the Trinity is this: love alone makes us happy because we live in a
relationship, and we live to love and to be loved. Borrowing an analogy from
biology, we could say that imprinted upon his "genome," the human
being bears a profound mark of the Trinity, of God as Love.4
My aim in what follows is to probe and develop this thesis
regarding the council's trinitarian Christocentrism by reflecting on the
section of Gaudium et spes devoted to marriage and family. This text
reflects a development of doctrine that displays the breadth and fruitfulness
of the council's central theological vision. After all, if Christ reveals man
to himself as person, he must also reveal to humanity the communion of love
that is both the earthly matrix of the identity of the person and its highest
natural expression. Yet Gaudium et spes does not simply apply trinitarian
Christocentrism to the realm of marriage and family; as I will suggest at the
conclusion of this essay, the council's development of Catholic teaching about
matrimony also enriches our contemplation of the mystery of Christ in his eucharistic
and ecclesial body.
I begin with a citation from Joseph Ratzinger that provides some
historical context for Gaudium et spes' treatment of marriage:
In the [nineteen-]
thirties and forties, some Catholic moral theologians had begun to criticize
the one-sidedness of the orientation of Catholic sexual morality toward
procreation from the point of view of personalist philosophy. Above all they
called attention to the fact that the classic treatment of marriage in Canon
law, based on its 'ends', did not do full justice to the essence of marriage.
... In no way did these theologians deny the importance of fecundity in the
complex values of human sexuality. But they assigned a new place to it within
the framework of a more personalistic perspective in the way of considering
marriage. These discussions were
important and have produced a significant deepening of the Catholic doctrine on
matrimony. The Council accepted and confirmed the best aspects of these
reflections. But at this point in time a new line of development began to materialize.
Whereas the reflections of the Council were based on the unity of person and
nature in man, personalism began to be understood in opposition to
"naturalism" (as if the human person and its needs could enter into
conflict with nature). Thus an exaggerated personalism led some theologians to
reject the internal order and language of nature (which instead is moral of
itself, according to the constant teaching of the Catholic Church), leaving to
sexuality and conjugal life the sole point of reference in the will of the
person.5
The Catholic personalists alluded to in the opening sentence
undoubtedly include Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) and Herbert Doms
(1890-1977). The publication of von Hildebrand's book Die Ehe in 1929
and Doms' Von Sinn und Zweck der Ehe in 1935 provoked a heated debate
both in Europe and the United States on the nature and ends of marriage.6
Von Hildebrand and Doms developed an account of marriage that focused on the
fundamental importance of spousal love conceived as a reciprocal "gift of
self."
In a preface to the 1942 English translation of his book Marriage,
von Hildebrand explains that his aim is to call attention to the
"spiritual significance of marriage," and to elucidate "not only
the primary end of procreation, but its primary meaning as the intimate union
of two persons in mutual love."7 He writes:
"Magna res est amor!"—"A great thing is love!" Although directly referring to
the love of God, this saying of Blessed Thomas a Kempis can be applied to all
authentic love and especially to conjugal love. An understanding of this is
beginning to grow in 
different
countries, and moral theologians are emphasizing the role of love in marriage,
a role which was previously underestimated by some. In stressing the primary end
of marriage —procreation—certain theological treatises have overlooked the
primary meaning of marriage, which is love.8
different
countries, and moral theologians are emphasizing the role of love in marriage,
a role which was previously underestimated by some. In stressing the primary end
of marriage —procreation—certain theological treatises have overlooked the
primary meaning of marriage, which is love.8
Acknowledging his indebtedness to von Hildebrand, Herbert Doms
sounded a similar note regarding love as the primary meaning of marriage. And Doms
was more forthright in his criticism of the traditional teaching that
"procreation is the primary end of marriage." "The conjugal
act," he writes, "is full of meaning and carries its own
justification in itself, independently of its orientation toward offspring:'9
Not surprisingly, this proposed rethinking of the nature of
marriage was met with sharp criticism from Catholic moral theologians and
eventually the Congregation of the Holy Office, which was concerned with
upholding the traditional hierarchy of ends. On 1 April 1944 the Holy Office
issued the following clarification:
In recent years a
number of books and articles have been published treating of the ends of
marriage, of their mutual order and relationship, which deny that the primary
end of marriage is the generation of offspring, or that the secondary ends are
subordinate to the primary, but are instead independent of it. In these
writings the primary end of marriage is designated differently by different
authors. Some say it is the mutual fulfillment and personal perfection of the
spouses through their total sharing of life and conduct. Others say it is the
spouses' mutual love and union developed and perfected in the psychological and
physical giving of themselves to one another. . . . This novel way of thinking
and writing is prone to breed error and uncertainty. In view of this the Most Excellent
and Reverend Fathers of this Supreme Congregation, charged with the defense of
faith and morals, met on Wednesday, March 29, 1944, to consider the following
question: "Whether the opinion of some current authors is admissible which
either denies that the primary end of marriage is the generation and nurture of
offspring, or teaches that the secondary ends are not essentially subordinate
to the primary, but are independent .of it and equally primary." Our
response to this in decree: negative.10
In hindsight it seems fair to say that the time was not yet ripe
for an adequate integration of the procreative end of marriage and the personalist
understanding of conjugal love.
Instead of delving into the work of the personalists, whose
importance and limitations Ratzinger nicely expresses in the above passage, I
want to focus on what Ratzinger describes as a "significant deepening of
Catholic doctrine" brought by the conciliar text. I turn, then, to the
spring of 1962, six months before the opening of the council, when the
Theological Commission tasked with preparing for the council submitted a draft
schema titled De castitate, virginitate, matrimonio, familia}1 The
principal author of this schema was the head of the Theological Commission and
Prefect of the Holy Office, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. Among the errors that
the Theological Commission expected the council to condemn are the following:
[this Holy Synod]
condemns the opinion asserting that marriage is a specific means of attaining
that perfection by which man is truly and properly an image of God and of the
Blessed Trinity. . . . What is more, it condemns the theories which subvert the
right order of values by making the primary end of marriage inferior to the
biological and personal values of the spouses. . . So much is procreation
primary and overriding (praevalens) that it in no way depends on any of
the other intended ends. . . nor can it be reduced to equality with.12
When this schema was submitted to the Central Preparatory
Commission an intense discussion ensued which anticipated the debates that
would accompany the drafting of Gaudium et spes. Cardinals Dopfner of
Munich and Alfrink of Utrecht voiced a common concern: missing from this draft
schema on "Chastity, Virginity, Marriage, Family" is an adequate reflection on the
nature of marital love. "One gets the impression," Dopfner
interjected,
that what it must say
of marital love it says in a grudging way, more in order to warn against its
dangers than to present it in its authentic nature. For example, in the entire
chapter "The Divinely Established Order of Marriage," nothing more is
said about married love than the condemnation, at the end of the chapter, of
the opinion of "those who claim that marital love is the primary end in
the objective order."13
The response of Ottaviani to this line of
criticism is instructive:
As to the question of
marital love, about which many and endless things have been said—things that
tell of the environment in which Cardinals Dopfner, Alfrink and others live—it
seems to me that it must be taken with a grain of salt [cum mica salis] . .
. Today the aspect of marital love is exaggerated to the point where it is
set in the front rank, ahead of the nature itself of the marriage contract and
ahead of the primary end. We have included in the constitution a paragraph on
the moral necessity for the spouses loving one another. For, rather than being
of the nature of marriage, this love is one of its duties.14
Ottaviani's concern is that if love is deemed essential to
marriage, when love ceases, there is no reason why the marriage itself should
not be ended. Ottaviani's warning that romantic love cannot constitute the
nature of marriage is well-taken, but there is an important weakness (or at
least a one-sidedness) in his position that will be remedied by Gaudium et spes
and John Paul II. The weakness consists in a failure both to grasp that
love is an objective form, and to appreciate the theological depth of marital
consent. There is, then, a logical connection between Ottaviani's Theological
Commission seeking to condemn the idea that Christian marriage specifies the
call to holiness and their claim that "so much is procreation primary . .
. that it in no way depends on any other intended ends." Garrigou-Lagrange
exhibits this connection when he writes that "holy virginity is
immediately ordered to the good of the soul, to the contemplative life and
union with God, -whereas marriage is ordered to the conservation of the human
species and the active life."15 Note that we are dealing with a
failure to appreciate fully even the natural form of marriage—and that it is
precisely this failure that prevents the mystery of Jesus Christ from revealing
anything profound about the nature or logos of marriage itself, or vice
versa.
At this point we can better understand the doctrinal development
of Gaudium et spes that has been confirmed and deepened in subsequent
magisterial teaching. Gaudium et spes defines marriage as a community of
love, an intimate partnership of life and love ordained to the procreation and
education of children. Marital consent is not simply—as the language of the
1917 Code of Canon Law suggested—the granting of a right over one's body for
certain acts but rather "that human act whereby spouses mutually bestow
and accept each other" (48). This idea of a sincere gift of self, which
was introduced earlier in Gaudium et spes in the context of a communion
of person's imaging the Triune God (cf. 24), resounds like a refrain throughout
the entire chapter on marriage. It has nothing to do with the reduction of love
to a psychological disposition rightly combated by Ottaviani; spousal love
involves a total gift of self that, by its very nature, founds a form and is
itself a form. The reciprocal gift of self that brings the marriage into being
culminates precisely where the gift is as it were taken out of the spouses'
hands and becomes an objective form endowed with the equally objective
properties of unity and indissolubility— indissoluble precisely because the
gift of self is total and thus irrevocable.
Despite repeated attempts by Ottaviani and others to reintroduce
into the schema the language of primary and secondary ends for marriage, the
council fathers sedulously avoided this terminology. Significantly, the
language of a hierarchy of distinct ends remains conspicuously absent in
virtually all subsequent magisterial documents, including Humane vitae (1968),
the revised Rite of Marriage (1969 and 1990), Familiaris consortio (1981),
the Code of Canon Law (1983), and the Catechism of the Catholic
Church (1992).16
How should we interpret this deliberate avoidance by the Second
Vatican Council and the subsequent Magisterium of the terminology formerly
used? Several theologians have suggested that the shift away from the language
of a hierarchy of distinct ends represents a fundamental break or reversal in
the Church's teaching. For example, the authors of the 1977 study Human
Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought claim that
"[t]he Council's deliberate rejection of the centuries-long tradition that
regarded the procreative end as supreme, necessitates a thorough rewriting of
the theology of marital sexuality found in the manuals."17
Setting aside the strange idea that an Ecumenical Council would deliberately
reject a centuries-long tradition, this interpretation ignores or misconstrues
the clear teaching of Gaudium et spes that "by their very nature,
the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for
the procreation and education of children, and find in them their ultimate
crown" (48). The widespread tendency to place the "personalism"
of Gaudium et spes in simple opposition to the preceding tradition's
emphasis on the procreative end of marriage is premised on a false opposition
between person and nature. In a seminal text that anticipates the teaching of
Humanae vitae, Gaudium et spes affirms that
when there is
question of harmonizing conjugal love with the responsible transmission of
life, the moral aspect of any procedure does not depend solely on sincere
intentions or on an evaluation of motives, but must be determined by objective
standards. These, based on the nature of the human person and his acts,
preserve the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the
context of true love. (51)
This teaching regarding the truth of love as a gift of self
presupposes the unity of person and nature and thus the
"inseparability" of the procreative and unitive meanings of marriage.
The idea of "inseparability" sheds light on why the
Church has shifted away from the language of a hierarchy of distinct ends. The
traditional teaching that the end of marriage is the procreation and education
of children is carried forward and deepened within the context of a personalist
understanding of the truth of conjugal love.18 Love is integral to
the meaning of procreation, just as procreation—an openness to the gift of a
new human life—is integral to the unitive movement of love.19 To
love is to receive and give the whole of oneself, and at the heart of this gift
is the astonishing capacity to participate in, and bear witness to, the
generosity of God, the author of life. In the words of John Paul II, "in
its most profound reality, love is essentially a gift; and conjugal love . . .
does not end with the couple, because it makes them capable of the greatest
possible gift, the gift by which they become Cooperators with God for giving
life to a new human person. Thus the couple, while giving themselves to one
another, give not just themselves but also the reality of children."20
This brings me to the third aspect of Gaudium et spes' development
of Catholic doctrine: the personalist idea that marriage is constituted through
a reciprocal "gift of self receives its innermost measure from the mystery
of Christ's love. In the words of Gaudium et spes, spousal love has its
source in divine love and is structured on the model of Christ's union with the
Church (cf. 48). Through the sacrament of matrimony, " [Christ] abides
with [the spouses] so that just as he loved the Church and handed himself over
on her behalf, the spouses may love each other with perpetual fidelity through
mutual self-bestowal" (48). The Christian family which springs from
marriage is "a reflection of the loving covenant uniting Christ with the
Church, and a participation in that covenant" (48). The chapter concludes
with exhortation to follow Christ, who is the principle of life, so that
through "their vocation and through their faithful love, married people
can become witnesses of the mystery of love which the Lord revealed to the
world by his dying and his rising up to life again" (52). Christian
spouses are thus "Cooperators with the love of God the Creator, and are,
so to speak, the interpreters of that love" (50).
Let me summarize the main points covered so far:
First, Gaudium et spes presents a new definition of the nature
of marriage and marital consent. Marriage is a community of life and love
ordered to the procreation and education of children. Marital consent consists
in a mutual gift of two persons—a total and irrevocable gift of self.
Second, the older teaching regarding the primary and secondary
ends of marriage is carried forward and deepened in terms of the inseparability
of the unitive and procreative meanings of marriage. The ground of this
inseparability is an anthropology of love. Created in the image of the Triune
God, human beings are created through love and called to share in God's love
through a sincere gift of self.
Third, the source and form of this love is Jesus Christ, who, in
the words of the Letter to the Ephesians, "loved us and gave himself up
for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" (Eph 5:2). Interpreting
the council's teaching that marriage should be celebrated within the Mass (cf. Sacrosanctum
concilium, 78), John Paul II describes Christ's eucharistic sacrifice as
the "source" and "interior structure" of Christian
marriage.21
At this point, a twofold question arises. Do our remarks on
married love as form-establishing and formal apply also to "natural
marriage," that is, to the nature of matrimony as an institution belonging
to the order of creation? I would answer in the affirmative. But, given this
affirmative answer, in what sense should we understand the christological norming
of marriage emphasized by Gaudium et spesl
The sacramental grace bestowed by Jesus Christ not only elevates
and perfects marriage, it brings to light the original purpose and end of the
nature of marriage itself—marriage is the communion of love that comes from God
and that is called to bear witness to his love as the origin, the middle, and
the end of human love. Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom who loves and gives himself
to the Church, "reveals the original truth of marriage, the truth of the
'beginning.'"22 The great nineteenth-century theologian
Matthias Scheeben uncovers the profound connection between the nature of
marriage and the mystery of Jesus Christ:
In this sacrament the
Church clasps to her heart the first of all human relationships, that upon
which the existence and propagation of human nature depends .... Nowhere has
the truth more strikingly come to light that the whole of nature down to its
deepest roots, shares in the sublime consecration of the God-man, who has taken
nature to Himself. Nowhere does the truth more clearly appear that Christ has
been made the cornerstone upon which God has based the preservation of and
growth of nature.23
We would miss the deepest point Scheeben is making in this passage
if we failed to see that the natural form of marriage is already saturated with
God. Think of procreation: here, nature's highest fruitfulness is simultaneous
with its reception of a gift—the child—that comes from above, from the hands of
the Creator. Our passage from Scheeben thus modifies our understanding of the
sense in which procreation is the end of marriage. The child, in other words,
is not simply the goal of sexual love regarded as a purely instrumental
process. For, supposing this to be the case, if another purely instrumental
process could lead just as easily to the same goal, why should there be
anything special about the instrument consisting in the embrace of man and
woman in marriage? This is not to deny that the child is the end of marriage;
it is rather to affirm that the child's end-character does not consist simply
in being the goal of a purely instrumental function, but in his being the fruit
that both proceeds from nature as its supreme fecundity and comes down as a
surprising divine gift from above that cannot be instrumentalized in any way.
This suggests that the real problem with Ottaviani's theology of marriage is
not its insistence on the primacy of the procreative end of marriage, but
rather its failure to do justice to the truth of procreation and the relevant
meaning of "end."
I think we can extrapolate a more general thesis regarding the
theology of nature and grace: the weakness within certain versions of modern neo-scholasticism
is not, as is sometimes suggested, that these authors claim too much for nature
(and the natural law). It is rather the case that the modern theory of
"pure nature" says too little about nature's integrity and
fruitfulness, insofar as there is an implicit denial that Jesus Christ reveals
the original meaning and end of "nature." At the heart of the theory
of "pure nature" is the assumption that human nature's ultimate end
must be strictly proportionate; that is, attainable by nature's own powers. The
astonishing gift of a child opens up a new horizon of gratuity within the
created order. Creation itself is a gift, and the capacity of 
nature to
desire what can only be received as a gratuitous gift (i.e., the natural desire
for supernatural beatitude) is a sign of God's generosity.
nature to
desire what can only be received as a gratuitous gift (i.e., the natural desire
for supernatural beatitude) is a sign of God's generosity.
In conclusion, the integration of the procreative and unitive
meanings of marriage in the light of the form of matrimony as total self-gift,
far from implying any romantic capitulation to the separation of sexual union
and fruitfulness, actually turns out to be essential to the recovery of an
authentic sense of, and respect for, this fruitfulness itself. Fruitfulness is
most truly fruitful, as it were, when the conjugal union is not simply a means
to it, but already shares in its end-character by the totality of its
self-gift. At the same time, this recovery implies a deeper appreciation of the
coincidence of natural fruitfulness and divine gift—already at the level of the
natural form of marriage as an institution pertaining to the created order.
This structure is an innate opening, indeed, ordination, to being lifted up
into the Christ-Church relation that manifests its deepest meaning. "Jesus
Christ, the Bridegroom," writes John Paul II, "who loves and gives
Himself reveals the original truth of marriage, the truth of the
'beginning.'" Thanks to this innate openness, we can say that marriage, as
such, is a specific call to holiness in the following of Christ.24
But, as noted at the beginning, this deepened understanding of marriage is not
just an illustration of the trinitarian Christocentrism of the council; it also
enriches it in turn. For, in being assumed into the Christ-Church relation, the
experience of the mystery of natural fruitfulness itself becomes a source of
light for understanding concretely what it means for Christ to have loved the
Church to the point of dying for her on the Cross. In the gift of Eucharist,
Christ communicates the innermost form of his life as gratitude and
self-offering. In communicating the substance of his life, Christ gives more
than himself. He gives us the Holy Spirit, who bears witness to the love
between the Father and the Son that is the true origin and final end of all
created being. Through the twofold gift of Eucharist and Spirit, Christ
establishes an eternal covenant with creation. The ultimate fruitfulness of his
eucharistic sacrifice is the Church, who is at once the body of Christ and the
bride who is called to say "yes"; to give herself for the salvation
of the world.25
Nicholas J. Healy,Jr., is
assistant professor of philosophy and culture at the Pontifical John Paul II
Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of
America.
1. Pope Paul
VI's "Opening Address" at the start of the second session on 29 September 1963
exemplifies the Christocentric orientation of the council: "From what
point, dear brethren, do we set out? ... What is the road we intend to follow?
What is the goal we propose to ourselves? These three very simple and at the
same time very important questions have, as we well know, only one answer,
namely that here at this very hour we should proclaim Christ to ourselves and
to the world around us; Christ our beginning, Christ our life and guide, Christ
our hope and our end. . . . Let no other light be shed on this Council, but
Christ the light of the world! Let no other truth be of interest to our minds,
but the words of the Lord, our only Master! Let no other aspiration guide us
but to be absolutely faithful to him!"
2.
John Paul II, Novo millenio ineuente, 57.
3. In his
1968 "Kommentar zum I. Kapitel" [Gaudium et spes, 11—22], in Commentary
on the Documents of Vatican II, v. 5, ed. H. Vorgrimler, et al. (New York:
Herder and Herder, 1969), 115-64, Joseph Ratzinger recalls the sharp debates
that accompanied the drafting of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in
the Modern World. Ratzinger notes that a significant number of council
Fathers were determined to overcome the neo-scholastic "representation of
nature and the supernatural viewed far too much as merely juxtaposed"
(119). "As opposed to this," he writes, "it was urged that the
starting-point should be Christ, the second Adam, from whom alone the Christian
picture of man can be correctly developed" (120). These remarks help to
explain the fundamental importance that Ratzinger and John Paul II accord to
the well known words of Gaudium et spes, 22: "Christ the new Adam,
in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals
man to himself and brings to light his high calling." Commenting on this
text, Ratzinger writes: "In accordance with the whole composition of the
text, the chapter on the dignity of man culminates in Christ who is now
presented as the true answer to the question of being human, and therefore to
the questions of true humanism and of atheism. Article 22 thus returns to the
starting-point, Article 12, and presents Christ as the eschatological Adam to whom
the first Adam already pointed; as the true image of God which transforms man
once more into likeness to God. . . .We are probably justified in saying that
here for the first time in an official document of the magisterium, a new type
of completely Christocentric theology appears. On the basis of Christ this
dares to present theology as anthropology and only becomes radically
theological by including man in discourse about God by way of Christ, thus
manifesting the deepest unity of theology. The generally theologically reserved
text of the Pastoral Constitution here attains very lofty heights and points
the way to theological reflection in our present situation" (159).
4. Pope Benedict XVI, "Angelus for the
Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity," 7 June 2009
5. Josseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), 88.
6.
Dietrich von Hildebrand, Die Ehe (Munich: Verlag An Sacra, 1929); Eng. Eng.
7. von
Hildebrand, Marriage, xxiv.
8. von Hildebrand, Marriage, xxv—xxvi.
9.
Herbert Doms, "Conception personnaliste du mariage d'apres S. Thomas Revue
Thomiste 45 (1939): 763 [emphasis added].
10. Acta Apostolicae Sedis,
vol. 36 (1944), 103.
11. Acta Concilio Oecumenico
Vaticano II Apparando, Series II (Praeparatio) vol. 2, Pars 3,893-937. Theodore Mackin, What is Marriage? (New York: Paulist
Press, 1982), provides a helpful overview of the ante-conciliar and conciliar
debates.
12. Acta Concilio Oecumenico
Vaticano II Apparando, Series II (Praeparatio), vol. 2, Pars 3, 910; cited
in Mackin, 250-51.
13. Ibid,
947-48; cited in Mackin, 253.
14.
Ibid., 977-78; cited in Mackin, 256-57.
15. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange,
The hove of God and the Cross of Jesus, vol. trans. Sr. Jeanne Marie
(St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co., 1947), 348
16. One
exception to this silence is John Paul II's General Audience of 10 October 1984 :
"According to the traditional language, love, as a superior power,
coordinates the acts of the persons. Although, in approaching the issue,
neither the conciliar constitution nor the encyclical [Humanae vitae] use
the language that was at one time customary, they nevertheless speak about that
to which the traditional expressions refer. As a higher power that man and
woman receive from God together with the particular 'consecration' of the
sacrament of Marriage, love involves a right coordination of the ends according
to which—in the Church's traditional teaching—the moral (or rather 'theological
and moral') order of the life of the spouses is constituted. The teaching of Gaudium
et spes as well as that of Humanae vitae clarifies the same moral
order in reference to love, understood as a superior power that gives adequate
content and value to conjugal acts according to the truth of the two meanings,
the unitive and the procreative, in reverence for their inseparability. In this
renewed orientation, the traditional teaching on the ends of marriage (and on
their hierarchy) is confirmed and at the same time deepened from the point of
view of the interior life of the spouses, of conjugal and familial
spirituality" (John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology
of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein [Boston: Pauline Books, 2006], 643).
17. Human Sexuality: New Directions in American
Catholic Thought, A Study Commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society of America
18. In Familiaris
consortio, 32, John Paul II unfolds the logic of "inseparability"
in light of the truth of love as a total gift of self: "Sexuality, by
means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts
which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is by no means something purely
biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is
realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by
which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one another until death.
The total physical self-giving would be a lie if it were not the sign and fruit
of a total personal self-giving, in which the whole person, including the
temporal dimension, is present: if the person were to withhold something or
reserve the possibility of deciding otherwise in the future, by this very fact
he or she would not be giving totally. This totality which is required by
conjugal love also corresponds to the demands of responsible fertility."
19.
Procreation is not simply a biological fact. An essential aspect of what
parents are called to communicate to their children is the truth that the child
is the permanent sign and fruit of the love of the spouses for one another.
20. John Paul II, Familiaris consortio, 11.
21. John
Paul II writes: "The Eucharist is the very source of Christian marriage.
The Eucharistic Sacrifice, in fact, represents Christ's covenant of love with
the Church, sealed with His blood on the Cross. In this sacrifice of the New
and Eternal Covenant, Christian spouses encounter the source from which their
own marriage covenant flows, is interiorly structured and continuously renewed.
As a representation of Christ's sacrifice of love for the Church, the Eucharist
is a fountain of charity. In the Eucharistic gift of charity the Christian
family finds the foundation and soul of its 'communion' and its 'mission': by
partaking in the Eucharistic bread, the different members of the Christian
family become one body, which reveals and shares in the wider unity of the
Church. Their sharing in the Body of Christ that is 'given up' and in His Blood
that is 'shed' becomes a never-ending source of missionary and apostolic
dynamism for the Christian family" (Familiaris consortio, 57).
22. Familiaris consortio, 13.
23. Matthias Scheeben, The Mysteries of
Christianity, trans. Cyril Vollert
(London: B. Herder Book Co., 1946), 610.
24. In Familiaris consortio, 56, John Paul II
describes the sacrament of marriage as the specific source and original means
of sanctification for Christian married couples and families. It takes up again
and makes specific the sanctifying grace of Baptism. By virtue of the mystery of
the death and Resurrection of Christ, of which the spouses are made part in a
new way by marriage, conjugal love is purified and made holy." For an
extended reflection on marriage as a Christian state of life, see David
Crawford, Marriage and the Sequela Christi: A Moral Theological Study of
Marriage as a "State of Perfection" in the Light of Henri de Lubac's
Theology of Nature and Grace (Rome: Lateran University Press, 2004).
25. Paper
delivered at the conference, '"Keeping the World Awake to God': The Challenge
of Vatican II," at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on
Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.,
12-14 January 2012.
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