Sunday Pope Quote: Bl. John Paul II on St. Gianna Molla
Apr. 28, 2013
Today, April 28, is the feast day of St. Gianna Beretta Molla, a married saint whom we profiled earlier in our married saints series. In honor of St. Gianna’s feast day, today’s Sunday Pope Quote comes from the 2004 mass in which Bl. John Paul II canonized St. Gianna along with five others.
Bl. Pope John Paul II: “Gianna Beretta Molla was a simple, but more than ever, significant messenger of divine love. In a letter to her future husband a few days before their marriage, she wrote: ‘Love is the most beautiful sentiment the Lord has put into the soul of men and women’.
Following the example of Christ, who ‘having loved his own…loved them to the end’ (Jn 13:1), this holy mother of a family remained heroically faithful to the commitment she made on the day of her marriage. The extreme sacrifice she sealed with her life testifies that only those who have the courage to give of themselves totally to God and to others are able to fulfill themselves.
Through the example of Gianna Beretta Molla, may our age rediscover the pure, chaste and fruitful beauty of conjugal love, lived as a response to the divine call!”
- Homily at the Canonization of Six New Saints (May 16, 2004), emphasis added
Sunday Pope Quote: Sede Vacante
Mar. 3, 2013
At 8:00 p.m. Italian time on Thursday, February 18, Pope Benedict XVI concluded his pontificate and the Church entered a time of “Sede Vacante,” the time in between the end of one pontificate and the election of a new pope. For helpful materials on the Sede Vacante, please see this USCCB resource page.
Thank you, Pope Benedict, for your leadership of the Church during your eight years as pope! In a particular way, thank you for your consistent and courageous teaching on the meaning of marriage. You have given the Church a wealth of insight on what marriage is and why it matters to the world.
Please visit the Church Teaching page and click on Pope Benedict XVI to see a selection of the many, many addresses, speeches, and exhortations on marriage by our now-Pope Emeritus, such as:
“God created us male and female, equal in dignity, but also with respective and complementary characteristics, so that the two might be a gift for each other, might value each other and might bring into being a community of love and life.” – Homily at the closing mass of the 7th World Meeting of Families in Milan (June 3, 2012)
“Dear friends, all human love is a sign of the eternal Love that created us and whose grace sanctifies the decision made by a man and a woman to give each other reciprocal life in marriage. Live the period of your engagement in the trusting expectation of this gift.” – Address to engaged couples (Sept. 11, 2011)
“Marriage has a truth of its own – that is, the human knowledge, illumined by the Word of God, of the sexually different reality of the man and of the woman with their profound needs for complementarity, definitive self-giving and exclusivity – to whose discovery and deepening reason and faith harmoniously contribute.” – Address to Members of the Tribunal of the Roman Rota (Jan. 27, 2007)
We will continue to share Pope Benedict’s wisdom about marriage, the human person, and the family here on Marriage: Unique for a Reason. Thank you, Holy Father Emeritus.
Sunday Pope Quote: Bl. John Paul II on the family as “a school of deeper humanity”
Jan. 20, 2013
Today’s Sunday Pope Quote is a short little quote from Bl. Pope John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio.
Bl. John Paul II: “All members of the family, each according to his or her own gift, have the grace and responsibility of building day by day the communion of persons, making the family ‘a school of deeper humanity’ [GS 52]: This happens where there is care and love for the little ones, the sick, the aged; where there is mutual service every day; when there is a sharing of goods, of joys and of sorrows.”
- Familiaris Consortio, no. 21
Sunday Pope Quote: Benedict XVI on the grandeur of marital love
Nov. 11, 2012
Today’s Sunday Pope Quote comes from a homily given by Pope Benedict at the 2011 World Youth Day in Madrid. The context is a reflection on vocations.
Pope Benedict XVI: During this prayer vigil, I urge you to ask God to help you find your vocation in society and in the Church, and to persevere in that vocation with joy and fidelity. It is a good thing to open our hearts to Christ’s call and to follow with courage and generosity the path he maps out for us.
“The Lord calls many people to marriage, in which a man and a woman, in becoming one flesh (cf. Gen 2:24), find fulfilment in a profound life of communion. It is a prospect that is both bright and demanding. It is a project for true love which is daily renewed and deepened by sharing joys and sorrows, one marked by complete self-giving. For this reason, to acknowledge the beauty and goodness of marriage is to realize that only a setting of fidelity and indissolubility, along with openness to God’s gift of life, is adequate to the grandeur and dignity of marital love.”
- Homily at Prayer Vigil with Young People, World Youth Day, Madrid (Aug. 20, 2011), emphasis added
Made for Life, Part 1: “Being open to children is so foundational.”
Oct. 16, 2012
A few weeks ago, we read through the Viewer’s Guide for the video “Made for Each Other,” which is about sexual difference and complementarity. Now, in this Respect Life month of October, we’re going to read through the Viewer’s Guide for the second video in the Marriage: Unique for a Reason series, “Made for Life.”
“Made for Life” features real-life married couples and parents who share their reflections on what it means to be open to life, why fathers and mothers matter for children, what it means that children are a gift, and so on. Their reflections aim to help viewers understand the life-giving nature of married love and why that matters to what marriage is.
In the first section, we look at what openness to life means and why love and life are inseparable.
“Being open to children is so foundational. When you’re open to children, you’re not just opening yourself to the possibility of the gift of life, but you’re [also] opening yourself up to your spouse.”
Marriage is made for life. It is a singular institution that brings a man and a woman together as husband and wife, who vow themselves into a union directed not only toward themselves but simultaneously to the gift of new life. As Katie relates, this openness to life is part and parcel of married love, and it is deeply personal, that is, it accords with the nature of the human person. Openness to life also accords with the nature of love itself. As the bishops of the United States taught in their pastoral letter on marriage, “It is the nature of love to overflow, to be life-giving.” [i]
Marriage is the natural human context wherein a child is properly conceived and welcomed into life as the “supreme gift of marriage.” [ii] And in this stance of openness and welcoming, meant to mark every aspect of married love, a husband and a wife grow closer to each other. They share themselves fully with each other, inviting deeper trust and the freedom that comes from each spouse making a gift of himself or herself to the other. Being open to one’s spouse and being open to children is one and the same choice and act. As Pope John Paul II taught, “Thus the couple, while giving themselves to one another, give not just themselves but also the reality of children, who are a living reflection of their love, a permanent sign of conjugal unity and a living and inseparable synthesis of their being a father and a mother.” [iii]
In other words, in marriage, love and life are inseparable. This is what the Church means when she teaches that the unitive and procreative meanings of married love are inseparable. [iv] In embracing each other, husband and wife embrace their capacity to conceive a child and are called to do nothing deliberate to close part of themselves to the gift of the other. This does not mean that a child will be—or should be—conceived from every act of sexual intimacy. Marriage is not a mechanical factory for the mass production of children. The Church teaches couples in their openness to life to practice responsible parenthood by discerning whether or not they have serious reasons, in keeping with God’s plan for marriage, to postpone becoming a father and a mother here and now. [v]
The inseparable connection of love and life means that husband and wife are called to give everything to each other in their acts of intimacy—including their capacity for fruitfulness. Otherwise, their gift of self would not be total. Being open to each other, open to receiving the gift of the other, and therefore being open to life, is not something optional for marriage. Instead, it is at the core of marriage, and only a man and a woman can make the radical promise that marriage entails: “A man and woman united in marriage as husband and wife serve as a symbol of both life and love in a way that no other relationship of human persons can.” [vi] This is why marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Persons of the same sex lack the sexual difference that is the necessary foundation for a husband and wife’s ability to live both “gifts”—the total gift of self exchanged between them in marriage, which includes their openness to the gift of a child. [vii]
[i]. USCCB, Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2009), 13.
[ii]. Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, no. 50, in Vatican Council II: Volume 1: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing, 1996). All subsequent citations of Vatican II documents refer to this edition.
[iii]. Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, no. 14.
[iv]. For more on the Church’s teaching about the inseparability of the unitive and procreative meanings of the sexual act, see Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], no. 2366; Gaudium et Spes, no. 51; Pope Paul VI, On the Regulation of Birth (Humanae Vitae) (Washington, DC: USCCB, 1968), no. 12; Letter to Families, no. 12; Familiaris Consortio, nos. 29 and 32; and Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan, 11-21. Also see Pope John Paul II’s commentary on Humanae Vitae in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (TOB), trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), nos. 118:–132:6 (audience and section numbers), especially nos. 118:2-6.
[v]. At the heart of “responsible parenthood” is the prayerful discernment by husband and wife whether or not to postpone pregnancy for “just reasons” (See CCC, nos. 2368-2370; see also Humanae Vitae, no. 10). The Second Vatican Council taught that responsible parenthood “involves a consideration of [the spouses’] own good and the good of the children already born or yet to come” as well as consideration of the spouses’ “situation on the material and spiritual level, and, finally, an estimation of the good of the family, of society, and of the Church” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 50). Responsible parenthood responds to the objective moral order established by God and written into the procreative capacity of husband and wife (see CCC, no. 2368). In this way, responsible parenthood preserves “the total meaning of mutual self-giving” and can mean not only postponing a birth, but also increasing one’s family (CCC, no. 2368, quoting Gaudium et Spes, no. 51). For more about responsible parenthood, see Pope Benedict XVI, Charity in Truth (Caritas in Veritate) (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2009), no. 44; Letter to Families, no. 12; TOB, nos. 121:1-6; and Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Washington, DC: Libreria Editrice Vaticana–USCCB, 2004), nos. 232-234.
[vii]. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that homosexual acts “close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity” (no. 2357).
“Every time we make love…we’re making life…giving life…It’s not just sex…I come alive, and there’s a sense of forever in that.”
Sep. 21, 2012
Note: Over the next few weeks, we’ll be reading through the Viewer’s Guide for the video “Made for Each Other.” In the video, married couple Josh and Carrie reflect on the meaning of sexual difference. Each section of the Viewer’s Guide takes a quote from either Josh or Carrie and fleshes it out. The goal of the Viewer’s Guide is to help you, the reader, become more confident in promoting and defending the meaning of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
This is part 7 of the series, and we’ll reflect on what it means that married love is unitive and procreative, and also look at the deeper meaning of sex and the good of friendship.
“Every time we make love…we’re making life…giving life…It’s not just sex…I come alive, and there’s a sense of forever in that.”
While not every husband may put into words what Josh expressed, Josh is speaking about more than just personal experience. He’s getting at the deeper meaning of sex, of conjugal love, the love between husband and wife. The unique bond of spousal love is itself life-giving. This is what the Church means by the inseparability of the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act. [i]
The Church’s teaching on marriage and sexual difference is deeply connected with her teaching on sex itself. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 2360), “Sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman. In marriage the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and a pledge of spiritual communion.” Human sexuality in the context of marriage is an organic, holistic reality. Sex is both procreative and unitive, meaning that sex can lead to new life and unite the spouses. [ii]
How about we go deeper: Within the context of marriage, these three elements, sexual difference, spousal love, and natural procreation (fruitfulness), work together. [iii] A husband and wife’s love for each other directs their sexual energies exclusively toward their spouse. Spouses’ sexual activity brings them closer together, and may result in a child whom they both love. The child is equally the child of both husband and wife, now father and mother. And when these elements are together and respected, the child is welcomed as a gift. Also, as expressed by Josh and Carrie in their openness to life, married love is still called to be fruitful even without the blessing of a child. [iv]
The modern alternative to the Church’s teaching is that sex is a private recreational activity, that it may be deliberately made sterile and has no moral or social significance. In this view, it is “perfectly proper” to disconnect sex from marriage, from procreation and even from love. Sexual difference becomes reduced to a superficial and arbitrary social construct. The modern world teaches that we can have sex without babies, have babies without sex, and have either without any connection with one’s husband or wife. The modern world considers these legitimate expressions of our independence and freedom.
This downgrading of the sexual act to immediate pleasure, rather than the true and complete union of two persons, man and woman, has gone hand in hand with the increasing isolation between men and women. Sex in the context of marriage creates deep and meaningful connection between the sexes. But in modern society, sex is often focused on the self and on personal pleasure, rather than on mutual self-giving. In this context where sex is detached from marriage, sex ceases to be a union of anything, but rather simply and exclusively an occasion for mutual stimulation. Sexual acts performed with these attitudes do not create a union of persons but deter such a union. Instead of being a couple who give to each other, objectively the people are a pair of individuals who take from each other.
In this context as well, authentic and holy friendship, a good for all people, has suffered and has been devalued. The heroic recovery of the inseparable connection between chastity and true, virtuous friendship is needed today.
[i] See Pope Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Humanae Vitae (1968), no. 12; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction Donum Vitae (1987), part 2, no. 4; and CDF, Instruction Dignitas Personae (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2008).
[ii] For more information on married love and the Church’s teaching on the difference between Natural Family Planning and contraception, see USCCB, Married Love and the Gift of Life (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2006).
[iii] See Angelo Cardinal Scola, The Nuptial Mystery, trans. Michelle K. Borras (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 82-109 and 362-367.
[iv] Even when a child does not come forth (for non-deliberate reasons), authentic married love is still fruitful. On the different ways married love can be fruitful in service to life, see Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, no. 41.
Previous sections:
- “We were made for each other, as a man and a woman.”
- “That connection…to be authentic, it has to be the whole person.”
- “Making love and having children…that depends on our difference.”
- “That’s why it’s unique to a man and a woman.”
- “It’s not just about biology…”
- “We share a common humanity, but our sexual differences are essential to who we are.”
Sunday Pope Quote: Bl. John Paul II on the fruitfulness of married love
Sep. 9, 2012
Today’s Sunday Pope Quote comes from Bl. John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio (The family in the modern world). Here he is discussing what it means for married love to be fruitful…and it might surprise you how truly wide and deep this concept is!
Bl. John Paul II: “Fruitful married love expresses itself in serving life in many ways. Of these ways, begetting and educating children are the most immediate, specific and irreplaceable. In fact, every act of true love toward a human being bears witness to and perfects the spiritual fecundity of the family, since it is an act of obedience to the deep inner dynamism of love as self-giving to others.
“For everyone this perspective is full of value and commitment, and it can be an inspiration in particular for couples who experience physical sterility.
“Christian families, recognizing with faith all human beings as children of the same heavenly Father, will respond generously to the children of other families, giving them support and love not as outsides but as members of the one family of God’s children.
. . .
“Family fecundity must have an unceasing ‘creativity,’ a marvelous fruit of the Spirit of God, who opens the eyes of the heart to discover the new needs and sufferings of our society and gives courage for accepting them and responding to them.”
- Familiaris Consortio, no. 41
“Making love and having children…that depends on our difference.”
Sep. 4, 2012
Note: Over the next few weeks, we’ll be reading through the Viewer’s Guide for the video “Made for Each Other.” In the video, married couple Josh and Carrie reflect on the meaning of sexual difference. Each section of the Viewer’s Guide takes a quote from either Josh or Carrie and fleshes it out. The goal of the Viewer’s Guide is to help you, the reader, become more confident in promoting and defending the meaning of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Section 3 will look at how sexual difference is the avenue towards true union and life, and why marriage is a *unique* commitment.
“Making love and having children…that depends on our difference.”
This is a key line. Let’s pause to take in what Josh is saying…
Life-giving love—the two-in-one-flesh communion of persons—depends on sexual difference. In simple terms, sex and babies depend on the difference between man and woman. The ability to make love assumes that the right context is already in place, that the vows have been exchanged, bringing about husband and wife. “Making love” [i] is about self-giving. The husband gives his “body-person” (his whole self) to his wife; the wife gives her “body-person” to her husband. The spouses give themselves and receive each other in and through their difference.
As Josh says, “every natural process of the body” can be done naturally by oneself—“everything but making love and having children,” which depends upon a different body-person. Sexual difference is the avenue towards real, “body-personal” union, a union that is also open to life.
Love and commitment are important in marriage, as they are important in many relationships among family and friends. But marriage involves a unique love and commitment. As counter-cultural as this may sound, marriage depends on the capacity to form a true union of persons through the body, that is, through sex. Such a true union is by its nature ordered towards life and is meant to remain always open to life. Why is this counter-cultural? Sex has so frequently been emptied of its real meaning and significance. It has become de-personalized, accepted as a casual or recreational occurrence. Sex’s personal meaning and responsibilities are many times ignored, but this disregard bears harmful and tragic consequences, whether manifest in contraception, attachment and broken relationships, STDs, the tragedy of abortion, depression, and the list could go on. This is not God’s plan for sex. Sex has been made for marriage, and only a woman and a man are able to form through marriage an intimate union of love and life, a union that deservingly holds unique status and responsibilities in society.
[i] “Making love” is a colloquial phrase used to capture in simple language the uniqueness of the marital embrace or the conjugal act. Of course, since God is love (see 1 Jn 4:8, 16), all love is a gift from God. The love between husband and wife is only possible because God has “first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19).
Previous sections:
Sunday Pope Quote: Bl. JPII on the body as a witness to love
Aug. 19, 2012
Today’s Sunday Pope Quote: a gem from Bl. Pope John Paul II’s teaching on the theology of the body. This is one to really chew on – it contains a wealth of wisdom about men, women, the body, and love. Note: when John Paul uses the word “sex” he means not the act of sexual intercourse but man’s sexual identity as male or female.
Bl. John Paul II: “The body, which expresses femininity ‘for’ masculinity and, vice versa, masculinity ‘for’ femininity, manifests the reciprocity and the communion of persons. It expresses it through gift as the fundamental characteristic of personal existence. This is the body: a witness to creation as a fundamental gift, and therefore a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs. Masculinity-femininity – namely, sex – is the original sign of a creative donation and at the same time the sign of a gift that man, male-female, becomes aware of as a gift lived so to speak in an original way. This is the meaning with which sex enters into the theology of the body.
- Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein, sec. 14.4; italics original, bold added
Cardinal Dolan to Knights: Thank you for defending marriage!
Aug. 11, 2012
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.
