Marriage and Family
Bishops Concerned Over Federal Court Rulings Rejecting Marriage as Between One Man, One Woman
Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage, expressed grave concern regarding recent rulings by a federal judge in Massachusetts rejecting the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.
…read moreSex Gets Attention
Sex. Mere mention of the word or anything related to it can provoke a variety of reactions both good and not so great. Faithful Catholics are no exception to this rule. But some reactions seem extreme. On the one hand, I understand this because we are a sex-saturated culture. We know more about sex, especially as it relates to other people’s lives, than most of us ever want to know.
…read moreMarriage and Holiness
“They are no longer two flesh, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together no one must separate.” +Mk 10:9
We Catholics are in the world but are called to be not of the world. How so today, regarding our Lord’s counsel above? Think of same-sex unions versus Christian marriage. The culture of divorce against the Christian covenant. Casual commitment versus sacrificial couples. Me-ism against sacrifice; the world versus Christianity.
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Marriage: Forgiving and Being Forgiven
Raking up every old grievance in a marriage just reopens old wounds. Marriages that survive break this habit.
Marriage is not just something God calls us to at one point in our lives. Rather, it is also the way God speaks to us, the way we come to know the One whose whispered “This one!” set us on this road. What we learn from the struggle to be faithful in good times and bad slowly carries us deeper and deeper into the divine heart. But the journey is not always easy.
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A Basic Theology on Marriage
The twentieth century witnessed significant developments in the Church’s theology of marriage, beginning with Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, passing through the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, and culminating in the manifold writings and original insights of Pope John Paul II. In fact, over two thirds of what the Catholic Church has ever said about marriage in her two thousand year history has come from John Paul II’s pontificate.[1]The Second Vatican Council marked a shift from a merely “juridical” presentation of marriage, typical of many previous Church pronouncements, to a more “personalist” approach. In other words, rather than focusing merely on the objective “duties,” “rights,” and “ends” of marriage, the Council Fathers emphasized how these same duties, rights, and ends are informed by the intimate, interpersonal love of the spouses. “Such love, merging the human and the divine, leads the spouses to a free and mutual gift of themselves, a gift providing itself by gentle affection, and by deed; such love pervades the whole of their lives, growing better and growing greater by its generosity.”[2]
Continue Reading -> “A Basic Theology on Marriage”
