SACRAMENT OF MARRIAGE

• Marriage and Sacrament of Marriage

Michael lawler- dq

• Pre-note

1. Catholic teaches that Marriage is a SACRAMENT.
2. Two realities involved in marriage as sacrament: Marriage and the sacrament of marriage.
3. Love: common human reality of two realities.
4. Three things to consider this chapter: sacrament of marriage, marriage, and marital love.

• The sacrament of marriage

1. Early Scholastics defined sacrament as both a SIGN and a cause of GRACE. They looked upon marriage as a sign but not cause of grace (not listed among sacraments) because it involved SEXUAL INTERCOURSE which Augustine had thought was always SINFUL, even between husband and wife, except in the case when it was for the procreation of a child. Conjugal intercourse for the sake of offspring is not “sinful but sexual intercourse, even with one’s spouse to satisfy concupiscence is a venial sin. ”

2. For Augustine, it is not sexual intercourse ITSELF that is sinful but CONCUPISCENCE (the sexual appetite OUT OF CONTROL).

3. Peter Lombard (12^th century) defined sacrament in the categories of SIGN and CAUSE: “A sacrament, properly speaking, is a SIGN OF GRACE and the form of INVISIBLE GRACE in such a way that it is its IMAGE and its CAUSE.”

4. 13^TH century Dominicans, Albert the Great and his pupil, Thomas Aquinas, who securely established marriage among the sacraments of the Church.

                Albert the Great: “Marriage confers grace for doing good, not just any good but that specific good that a married person should do.”

                Thomas Aquinas: “Marriage, in so far as it is contracted in FAITH in Christ, confers grace to do these things which are required in marriage.” In his Contra Gentiles: “It is to be believed that through this sacrament (marriage) grace is given to the married.”

5. The first church document to list marriage as a sacrament was by the Council of Verona (1184) against the Cathari (preached that sexuality and marriage were sinful).

6. Council of Lyons (1274) to which Aquinas was traveling when he died, first listed marriage among seven sacraments as part of the formula for healing the great schism between East and west.

7. Council of Florence (1439): The seven sacraments both contain GRACE and confer GRACE ON THOSE WHO RECIEVEIT WOTHILY.

8.  Council of Trent (16^th century): Marriage is a SACRAMENT, that it CONTAINS and CONFERS GRACE, that is, indissoluble.

9. A marriage is a sacrament: it reveals and celebrates the intimate COMMUNION of life and love, and GRACE between God and God’s people and between Christ and Christ’s people, the Church.

• marriage

1. For a valid marriage, only one moment of the ritual radically counts, the solemn moment of giving CONSENT.
2. Ancient Roman: Mutual consent between the parties makes marriage.
3. Ancient Germanic: Sexual intercourse between the spouses makes a marriage.

4. Gratian (Master of the University of Bologna) proposed a compromise solution which combined both views: Consent initiates a marriage (ratum); subsequent sexual intercourse then completes or consummates it. This opinion which settled the debate and is today is still enshrined in CIC (Can 1061) that governs marriages in the Roman Catholic Church.

5. Consent initiates marriage and sexual intercourse then consummates it.

6. A sacramental marriage is not just a wedding to be celebrated (event) but it is also, and more critically, an EQUAL and LOVING PARTNERSHIP to be  lived for the whole life.

• Marital love

1. In contemporary American usage, love always means romantic love, usually a passionate feeling of affection for another person of the opposite sex. That is not entirely what love means. Feeling is frequently part of love but it is not always part of it, and it is certainly not all there is to love.

2. Love would end when the transient things that fuel romantic love end.

3. Marriages based on feeling-love would also end, as many of them indeed do. If love were merely FEELING, the love of neighbors and enemies commanded by Jesus would be impossible, for few of us can feel love  for some of our neighbors and even fewer for all of our enemies (Mt 22:39; 5:44).

4. Love that is STEADFAST and LASTING and that gives STABILITY to marriages is more than feeling, it is also WILLING or INTENDING. It wills the good of the beloved.

5. Love is FREE.  An ancient maxim : nihil amatum nisi praecognitum (nothing is loved that is not first known).

6. The first movement of love is a RESPONSE, a response to the knowledge of the other’s being, the other’s goodness, beauty, and lovableness.

7. To that extent that one is responsible, love is free. It is something to do as well as something that happens; it is action as well as passion.

8. As a freely willed act, love is a species of PROMISE or COMMITMENT, the giving of word to do something, namely, to will the good of another. The action in which commitment is expressed in the SYMBOL OF LOVE and the symbol of one’s intention to love for the whole life.

9. The symbol not only expresses to the one loved one’s intention for the whole life but it also confirms the intention. Both mutually commit to one another as lovers to make love permanent and to communicate it as permanent.

10. Love can intend to be indissoluble and can make it indissoluble, for love stretches out into the unknown future along with life.

11. The commitment to love is also a commitment is also a commitment to the principle of honor and to fidelity to that honor.

13. Mutual commitment of love between lovers creates between them an interpersonal relationship and a bond which is morally binding. That interpersonal bond can be further bound by further ritual: in Christian marriage, it can be bound by SACRAMENT and the GRACE OF GOD.

14. In Christian marriage, therefore, there are three bonds binding the spouses: the bond of love, the bond of legal marriage, and the bond of sacrament. None of these bonds occurs in any physical reality, they occur only, but really and ontologically in the INTERPERSONAL SPHERE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.

15. Togetherness is to be created in a marriage; the spouses have to become one coupled-We. Admired, valued, and cherished otherness, however, is also integral to true love and marriage. It is very coupled otherness, the marriage that is the communion between distinct I and a distinct Thou, with all its negative conflicted,  and sad moments as well as its positive, peaceful and happy moments.