A procreative conjugal union

Commentary

God wanted to create human beings in his image and likeness. That is, to reflect the Trinity and its communion of love. That is why he made the human being male and female. The duality of male and female carries from the beginning the imprint of the radical complementarity in which the potentiality of being an intimate loving communion and the procreative potential of children is deposited; potentialities that stem from being created in the image and likeness of God. God united this power in marriage between man and woman. He entrusted them to our freedom. He asked us not to separate them.

The union of man and woman possesses this power of communion and procreation in and of itself. It is not given by the State, or by any political or religious human power, or by gold or silver, or any social or cultural imposition. To be spouses and fathers and mothers are integral human dimensions since they affect the spiritual, psychic, and physical planes. Moreover, they require their harmonious unity, that is, that fathers and mothers, at the same time, be united with the love of spouses. That union between loving communion and procreative power is what “God united and must not be separated by man.”

The procreative conjugal union between a man and a woman, which constitutes a family, has been identified in all cultures and places with a particular and exclusive name to differentiate it from the multitude of sexual relations that indeed occur. De facto relationships, for example, where there is no recognition of the woman in her dignity and quality of wife, as with concubines; or there is no will of a stable personal and procreative relationship, but only of sexual use, as in the relationships with passing lovers; or there is no possibility of procreation, nor consequently of integral communion, as in the relationship between the same sexes.

In the West, because of the influence in the Latin language of the function of the mother (matris munus), it was called marriage. Each language, not originating from Latin, has its own name to designate the intimate communion of life and love between man and woman. It is not, therefore, a question of nomenclature but content. We could have called it, for instance, “exemplary couple” or any other name with which we allude to its exclusive originality of containing by and in itself the union of these two exclusive potencies: the unitive loving potency and the procreative potency.

Moreover, if profoundly different realities must also be given different names, then it is unfounded to apply the exact name of marriage to homosexual unions. If this is done, it is not because it corresponds with the natural reality of conjugal union but because of an ideological imposition that pressures and even coerces culture, legislation, and the social environment.

It is a significant paradox that gender ideologies, so opposed to marriage as a traditional institution, claim it in order to include other types of unions. With this “egalitarian trick,” it seems as if they want to achieve the honorability and truth that marriage between man and woman has always contained.

Incidentally, many people with homosexual tendencies, who do not allow themselves to be dragged along by these lobbies, consider equating their relationships with heterosexual marriage inappropriate, shameful, and humiliation of their own differences. That is why they do not want or need to enter into “marriage.”