English
EspañolThe intimate union of love and life formed between a man and a woman is inscribed as the most natural, excellent, and complete model in the heart of human beings. We must not be afraid of stating this truth and giving permanent testimony of it with our life.
A loving and tender heart sensitive to our neighbors can understand this. An ego-centric heart that is self-seeking and needs to appropriate others sees this as confusing and too sacrificial. A heart that has been turned to stone hates this and rejects it.
Text
“As Christians, we can hardly stop advocating marriage simply to avoid countering contemporary sensibilities, or out of a desire to be fashionable or a sense of helplessness in the face of human and moral failings.” (The Joy of Love, n.35)
Commentary
As an intimate communion of love and life between a man and a woman, marriage remains the simplest and most profound reference to the truth and goodness of male and female sexuality. It manifests its personal meaning and the complementarity between man and woman through its power to unite in a bond of faithful, definite, and child-bearing union.
Other sexual alternatives come and go. In terms of sexual formulas, there is nothing new under the sun. The so-called progressive or modern options are, in fact, quite old. Only marriage and the family it founds persists through time, places, and cultures. Why? Because it responds to the entire nature of the human being, to his or her whole condition as a male or female corporeal person. It responds to the ability to love each other through gifting themselves and embracing one another as man and woman, thus giving and reciprocally embracing their paternity and maternity, which are dimensions of their whole being as male and female. This giving and embracing must be faithful and definitive because that is the unconditional, singularly unique, and permanent value of each person as man or woman.
Only the indissolubly faithful and procreative marriage contains that complete unity in the sexual complementarity between man and woman. Because of this integrity, the family, founded on marriage, is capable of fulfilling the strategic social functions of the survival and humanization of society as a whole. The faithful and lifelong spousal love radiates its values to the love shared between parents and children, between siblings, between grandparents, and grandchildren. The procreation of one´s children, whose father and mother are each other´s spouses, originates a genuine, authentic, and complete kinship among children who are siblings and truly their grandparent´s grandchildren. More than any different formula, the marital family is the most fruitful. It is the most effective in the upbringing and education of children; in the transmission of values and virtues; in the ability to care for and accompany in health and sickness, in the good times and bad, and, through shared family life, teach how to love and be loved unconditionally throughout life.
The other sexual alternatives cannot entirely and satisfactorily fulfill the vital social functions because of the partial or fragmented character of their bonds. Some formulas do not even have the capacity to procreate their children by themselves. If only these alternatives existed, and not the marital family, society would not have a guaranteed generational replacement. Only marriage and the family it founds persist through time, places, and culture, for only within it does one experience the power of faithful and definitive union, the values and virtues of intimate communication and procreation between man and woman.
Spouses and families cannot live in ignorance of what they are. And, therefore, in the fears, reservations, or complexes, it is essential to reaffirm the truth and human goodness of marriage and family that we have chosen to govern our lives. To reiterate this with deeds, loving each other more and better, here and now, in ordinary life events. Reaffirming this means helping one another, showing mercy when faced with each other´s faults and failings, lending a hand, and working together.
We must strengthen our knowledge regarding the structure and dynamics of conjugal love and of every familial love, which comes to life in the present time, even if we must often go against the tide. It is in the bosom of a family whose core is the faithful and fruitful marriage, where human love has its most proper, most authentic, and complete habitat. Despite contrary tends, it can never go out of fashion because marriage and family are not just another style, but the original and permanent natural truth. Let us not attribute personal defects and human weaknesses that sometimes seem to flourish in an inordinate way to the institution of marriage. Whoever has truly loved, has he not often had to go against the current?
