On Tuesday, August 7, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York gave an address at the Supreme Convention of the Knights of Columbus, in Anaheim, CA. In his talk, peppered with delightful stories (we’ll let you read the one about Archbishop Sheen and the honeymoon suite for yourselves), the Cardinal concentrated on marriage and the beauty of married love.
Some great snippets:
“We Catholics are hopeless romantics, you know, when it comes to married love . . .
“Against all odds, we still believe that, when a man and woman vow that they’ll love and honor each other, ‘for better or worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, until death do us part,’ they really do mean it;
“We still hold fast to the teaching of the Bible that God so esteems marriage that He compared His personal, passionate, eternal love for Israel to that between a husband and a wife; that Saint Paul tells us that the love of Jesus for us, His Church, is just like that of a groom for His bride;
“We still have in our gut the Church’s timeless ‘Valentine’s Day card,’ that the love between a husband and a wife has the same characteristics as does that of God for us: it is faithful; it is forever; it brings about new life in children.
“We are such hopeless romantics that we contend the best way to get a hint of how God loves us now, and in eternity, is to look at how you, married couples, love one another. ‘The love of a man and woman is made holy in the sacrament of marriage, and becomes the mirror of your everlasting love . . . ,’ chants the Preface in the Nuptial Mass.”
Cardinal Dolan affirmed the importance of vocations not only to the priesthood and consecrated life, but to marriage: “‘For an increase in vocations to the priesthood, consecrated life, and the Sacrament of Marriage‘ should perhaps become the new phrasing for a prayer of the faithful at every Mass, as we are sobered by the gloomy statistics that only 51% of our young people are approaching that sacrament, a piece of data you all somberly see verified even among your own children and grandchildren.”
And the Cardinal “tipped his zucchetto” to the Knights for their “indefatigable” work in defending marriage from the “well-choreographed, well-oiled crusade to conform marriage to the whims of the day instead of conforming our urges to God’s design, as revealed in the Bible, nature, and reflective reason.”
He closed with a reflection on the importance of marriage and the family for building what modern Popes have called a “civilization of love”: “The most effective guarantee of a civilization of love rather than the survival of the fittest: the culture of life over the culture of death; the law of the gift rather than the law of the ‘get’, solidarity rather than selfishness, is precisely the preservation of traditional marriage and family. When that goes, we all go.”
Cardinal Dolan’s whole speech is worth a read! Find the full version on Zenit here.
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