Marriage- The Beauty of God’s Plan: Part III
Part three has arrived, and I pray that it continues to spread the knowledge and love of God to his people!
The Magisterium’s Words on Living the Sacrament of Marriage (cont.)
Expanding on the issue of the family, we can turn to John Paul II’s 1994 Letter to Families, written for the year of the family. “The family is the first and the most important”[9] way by which we are led to know, love, and serve God, and it is in the family that mankind shares in the “same love with which the Creator embraces the created world, as was already expressed ‘in the beginning.’”[10] In line with Pius XI’s ideas in Casti Connubii, John Paul II describes that “the words of consent define the common good of the couple and of the family.”[11] In agreeing to commit oneself to another for one’s entire lifetime and to be open to children, all with the goal of growing in relationship with God and one another, the spouses faithfully set up the stable and holy structure of the family.
Beautifully connecting theses ideas is a sentence from John Paul II’s brilliant mind, which says “In the newborn child is realized the common good of the family.”[12] The result of receiving a newborn child from unity and procreativity is even greater unity among the members of the family and an increased appreciation and desire for participation in God’s creative power. The community of a family, which springs from love, also constitutes the domestic church about which we have already written, albeit indirectly, when we discussed the proper Christian upbringing of children through education and love.
It is in this community of love that begets love that one finds communion. “The love between… [all] members of the household-is given life and sustenance by an unceasing inner dynamism leading the family to ever deeper and more intense communion, which is the foundation and soul of the community of marriage and the family.”[13] One can see how, through this “ever deeper and more intense communion,” the family becomes an earthly image of God’s Trinitarian love. How beautiful the gifts that the Lord God has given us, and how misunderstood and misused are his bountiful blessings!
“The domestic church, the Christian family, is the foundation and model for the interactions of society…”
The domestic church, the Christian family, is the foundation and model for the interactions of society on a larger scale. With this in mind, it becomes obvious both that the world has failed horribly in its duty to raise holy families and that the excellence of God’s plan calls us back to himself, that we may work towards perfection and communion with him. For those Christians that have lived the plan of God, the fruits of their labors are clear.
“From the communion that Christians experience in Christ there immediately flows the communion which they experience with one another: all are branches of a single vine, namely, Christ. In this communion is the wonderful reflection and participation in the mystery of the intimate life of love in God as Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit as revealed by the Lord Jesus. For this communion Jesus prays: “that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (Jn 17: 21).”[14]
We can see here that Christians are called to live in communion and that this communion is supposed to imitate that of the Trinity. It becomes increasingly obvious, then, that this communion must first be learned in the setting of the family, and thereby passed on to those outside of this nuclear family in the entirety of the Catholic Church. To think of ourselves as one Body in Christ and one family in the Church is, perhaps, the greatest way for us to transition into the larger context of family. After all,
“…there is a real, essential and constant bond uniting each of them and this is why the universal Church exists and is manifested in the particular Churches. For this reason the Council says that the particular Churches ‘are constituted after the model of the universal Church; it is in and from these particular Churches that there come into being the one and unique Catholic Church’(85).”[15]
The Church’s Wisdom Regarding Contraception and Marriage
It is quite clear that the Roman Catholic Church understands the evil of artificial contraception and that it has been the only institution to steadfastly take a stand against this evil, clearly and faithfully. The Church has seen what effects contraception can have not only on single people and their lives, but also on the lives of those who use it within their marriages. The negative effects are physical in nature for some and spiritual in nature for all. We will now look into the teachings of the Catholic Church regarding artificial contraception, aiming to show the particular evil of its use within marriage.
“Many people today even group children and sexually transmitted diseases into the same category of unwanted consequences…”
“Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body,”[16] because people do not understand why the Church holds as true those things that it teaches. As a result of this ignorance, modern man rejects these teachings as archaic and outdated. Instead of seeing his body as a “reciprocal self-gift,” he looks upon it as “a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless.”[17] With this mindset of the body as an object to be used for pleasure, contraception seems to logically follow as an apparent good. To modern man, his body is to be used for enjoyment and, in order to prevent unwanted side-effects or consequences, he tries to render his actions in these pursuits harmless. Many people today even group children and sexually transmitted diseases into the same category of unwanted consequences of sexual activity!
It is in this environment that we find ourselves today, and it is with these challenges that we must grapple. Mankind’s misunderstanding of his sexuality, particularly his genital sexuality in this case, fosters his bad behaviors and the culture of death about which John Paul II spoke so often. So much can be said about contraception on a broad scale, but we must look specifically at the problems to be found with contraception in marriage.
[9] John Paul II, Letter to Families, 2
[10] John Paul II, Letter to Families, 2
[11] John Paul II, Letter to Families, 10
[12] John Paul II, Letter to Families, 11
[13] John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 18
[14] John Paul II, Christifideles Laici, 18
[15] John Paul II, Christifideles Laici, 25
[16] Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 5
[17] Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 5