English
EspañolA marriage and family are not given life through external laws and abstract doctrines. The fountain of its life is a good love truly shared, in its entirety, through the sincere self-giving and embracing of an intimate communication, through the warmth and sweetness present in everyday life. Seek within and not outside for the love that will embed your marriage with life.
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“We also need to be humble and realistic, acknowledging that at times the way we present our Christian beliefs and treat other people has helped contribute to today’s problematic situation. We need a healthy dose of self-criticism.”
“Then too, we often present marriage in such a way that its unitive meaning, its call to grow in love, and its ideal of mutual assistance are overshadowed by an almost exclusive insistence on the duty of procreation.”
“Nor have we always provided solid guidance to young married couples … At times we have also proposed a far too abstract and almost artificial theological ideal of marriage, far removed from the concrete situations and practical possibilities of real families…”
“We have long thought that simply by stressing doctrinal, bioethical and moral issues, without encouraging openness to grace, we were providing sufficient support to families, strengthening the marriage bond and giving meaning to marital life.” (The joy of Love, nn 36 and 37)
Commentary
The crisis of marriage and family is not a painful event alien to Christians, in which we have no responsibility. On the contrary, we have our share of duty. If we honestly want to overcome this crisis and rebuild the strength of marriages and families, it is essential to discover what was done wrong in order to correct it.
Given that children are the fruit of the union of love, and not conjugal love the fruit of children, we have been exposed to biased and simplistic interpretations of the relationship between the unitive and procreative dimensions of marriage. It seemed acceptable for a couple to have children without loving each other but not the other way around; to love each other without having children. Many doctrinaires maintained that conjugal love had nothing to do with the valid marital bond; that loving each other was an accidental matter to validity. This way of thinking betrayed the meaning of love in Christian marriage. It introduced a contradictory and dissociative principle in the inseparability that conjugal love has with its procreative fecundity, favoring the assumption that the Christian notion of marriage is a means of procreation and conjugal morality, nothing else than the guarantee that sexual acts would be open to conceiving offspring.
To propose as the Christian concept of marriage this reduced and biased vision of love, the marital union, and sexuality between spouses has left many, married or aspiring to be so perplexed and disappointed. From this profound error, how can we defend the orthodoxy of a husband who at appropriate and inopportune moments demands coitus open to pregnancy, when at the same time is accustomed to shouting at his wife from the break of dawn and treats her inconsiderately as well as in a contemptuous manner in front of their children and friends? When a man did not object to having children, was his infidelity not considered, by some, to be less severe than the wife´s adultery? Obviously, the Christian view never defended such marital schizophrenia. And yet, similar behaviors were not, unfortunately, an exotic rarity among spouses married before the Church. To say that spousal abuse or infidelities were a cross “willed by God” for the wife was a false, unjust and devastating response. In Cana, Jesus Christ asked for jars of clean water, not the fecal waters of violence, abuse, adultery, and humiliating contempt for women.
Another failing has been adequately accompanying newlyweds with proposals adapted to their schedules, languages, and specific concerns. At other times, we have presented a kind of doctrinal kit of marriage that is too abstract, almost artificially constructed, set far from the concrete situations and the actual possibilities of real families. A theological doctrine made by theologians for theologians, a conceptual dialogue between colleagues, not clear and straightforward teaching for married couples and their ordinary lives.
This generic and impersonal abstraction, which has broken the daily trust in the grace and the personal and living encounter with Jesus Christ, has not made marriage more human and attractive, but quite the contrary. For this very reason, families with a doctrinaire environment have functioned less well than families based on a shared love carried out every day. It has been forgotten that love and its “living” union do not come from the law and doctrinal reasoning but from the heart and its concrete work.
