Here follows an outline of the concluding section of a remarkably good book on Catholic teaching on marriage, family, and people loving each other:
Part 3: The Beauty of Love: The Splendor of the Body
Chapter 8: Loving with the Love of Christ: the Sacrament of Marriage
Explores the marital bond, aims to show how the indissolubility and fruitfulnes of marriage fulfill and crown the dynamism of love.
Chapter 9: Witnessing to the Fullness of Love: Christian Virginity and the Destiny of the Body
- The Sign of the Body
- Body speaks a language/a word--three fold
- Filial--man’s solitude before God, openness to God--locus of meeting with God
- Nuptial--gender sign of spousal vocation, call to journey towards God who comes as gift and gives spouse as gift
- Procreative/Parental--Union of spouses finds proper completion in fertility, family
- Body speaks these, offers way of being these.
- Living out threefold path from embodiment=”sacrament of creation”
- The New Measure of Love
- Sacrament of Creation--natural marriage: filial, nuptial, procreative
- Sacrament of Redemption--Christ & his Church
- The high point of all creation--reflected by natural marriage in spite of temporal sequence
- Grace (C&C) perfects/heals/elevates (Christian/Sacramental Marriage) Nature (natural marriage)
- Couples mediate Spirit to each other
- Human marriage rooted in/subsumed in Trinitarian life, thus ensuring permanence, stability, if couple remains open to God, grows in the divine life.
- Spirit permits faithful, fruitful (includes education) Christian marriage
- Faithfulness Forever
- 2 challenges
- Not master of the future--how promise for life?
- Freedom--will binding committment to another diminish freedom?
- Marriage not based on transient feeling, but acknowledgement of intrinsic value/dignity of the other person (which endures)
- Human love enfolded, supported by God’s love--eternal, stable, so proper ground of lifelong committment.
- Christian Fidelity
- Within the embrace of the love of Christ, the risks of love (rejection, love not returned) no longer exist. All acts of love are received by Christ and reciprocated beyond comprehension.
- Fidelity to the spouse w/in the broader “field” of Christ’s love for his Church is supported by the Divine Love/Holy Spirit, enfolded, suffused.
- The Gift of New Life
- Fidelity naturally leads to fruitfulness
- Fruit (something generated beyond our powers, not entirely subject to choice or calculation) vs. product (something crafted intentionally)
- We can bear fruit only if we are rooted in a greater reality (God), as a tree must be rooted in the ground to produce fruit--even natural marriage.
- Child is not a product to be planned, but a gift to be received.
- In Vitro Fertilization
- Forbidden because violates the logic of gift. Places children within the realm of product, object of ownership.
- Places burden on parents of being source of child’s being in more comprehensive way (“creators” of the child) and hence responsible for child’s achievement of ultimate end in way would not if child received as gift from God.
- Infertile couples may yet be fecund in their community, their church, their labors in the world.
- Education in Love
- Motherhood a radiation of fatherhood
- Mother sustains, surrounds child
- Father reaches out to receive--draws child into space of freedom between the parents, suffused with the father’s love
- Education extension of natural marriage
- Raise child up as person, as lover/beloved, as competent in the world
- Christian marriage
- Parents called to educate child in salvation, life in the Spirit, into life eternal
- The Problem of Contraception
- Unitive and procreative acts inseparable--denying one is denying both.
- Effacing fertility destroys act of total self gift--failure to share gift of making the other fruitful--destroys conjugal act.
- Effaces also filial nature of love--couple children of God, who gave us human nature, bodies, etc. Refusal to use rightly is rejection of filial love.
- Issue of nature of contraception and motive for use
- Contraception distorts the language of the body, the logic of love, and so speaks a barren word
- Obscures ability of spouses to perceive the other as imago dei, inclines sex towards mere satisfaction of desire, not of conjugal love.
- Natural Family Planning
- Lovers undermine each other’s dignity as human persons unless follow logic of love.
- Truth of love is revealed in love’s natural aspiration to make a total gift of self.
- Only when lovers receive love as gift from God that they’re able to totally self-gift
- to receive human love as God’s gift is to respect the language of the body by which God expresses himself and speaks his generous love.
- Respects fertility, rather than suppressing it--follows the logic of the body (natural periods of fertility/infertility) to permit spouses to plan pregnancies.
- NFP is an education in the logic of love vs. contraception’s destruction of love
- Anthropological
- NFP: respect logic of the body, give totally to the other, adjust sexual behavior to follow rhythms of the body--self control, continence, view the other as a person, not mere means of satisfaction
- Contr: sex not occasion for total gift, but forced necessity. Use the other to feed appetites, refuse total gift of self.
- Moral
- NFP: Desire not believed uncontrollable--education in chastity, respect for the other, love of the person
- Contr: Desire believed uncontrollable--other to be used
- Conjugal Charity and the Call to Holiness
- Spousal mutual love is a path to God--means of imitating the divine life, logic of self-gift at the heart of the Trinity
Intimate, exclusive in our natural/supernatural end (death, resurrection of the body) reveals to us more of the nature of the human person, of the body.
- Christ and the Fulfillment of Nuptiality
- Christ’s body makes possible perfect expression of nuptial self-gift, reaching its peak in the Eucharist
Chapter 10: The Family and the Civilization of Love
- The Body Reveals Life and Death
- Passability of the mortal coil fruit of the Fall.
- Age, death forces us beyond mere self sufficiency to deeper openness and relationship.
- OT: Life=being in communion (with others, the world, God). Death=end of communion
- Logic of covenant sealed by God’s eternal name forced discovery of resurrection of the dead, life in the world to come. Verified by Jesus; God of the living, not of the dead.
- “Love is Strong as Death” (Song 8:6)
- Love opposes death, desires the endurance of the other/beloved--”Human love is a participation in God’s eternity”
- Human love insufficient to conquer/prevent death
- The Fulfillment of Sonship
- Resurrection of Jesus Christ/token of divine love sufficient to conquer death, offer hope.
- Christ’s body totally open to filial love with the Father, fulfills sonship written into body--sonship=essence of human life/existence--for this we were made.
- Fullest revelation of filial love/divine sonship/divine love on the cross
- Resurrection completes “filialization” of body--spiritual body, fulfillment of union of human hylomorphic unity and entry into divine life of the Spirit.elation to the Church but non-exclusive in relation to the individual human person.
- “Neither Marry Nor Are Given Into Marriage” (Luke 20:35)
- Resurrection transfigures body, gender
- Intimate communion with God unites all others in closest possible way--communion of saints.
- Conjugal love does not remove original solitude, but original solitude remains at the core and is enhanced by original unity--maintains a “virginal dimension” to spousal relations.
- Adam can only love Eve as wife if he respects her as daughter of God.
- Death is not final separation for spouses, but entre to transformed, purified, strengthened love
- Purity of heart--capacity to see presence of God in the union of love between man and woman.
- Resurrection fulfills, transfigures natural marriage by bringing conjugal chastity to its perfection.
- The Call to Virginity
- New with Christ--OT ignores value of virginity, sees as a lack. Christ introduces fecundity of virginity
- In relationship with God, all aspects of virginal call taken up, transformed, made fruitful.
- Virginity: The Fulfillment of Filiation, Nuptiality, and Paternity
- A preface to the eschatological fulfillment, life as it is meant to be lived for all eternity.
- In Christ, The Son: Fulfillment of Original Solitude
- Totally dedicated to the Father’s will--consecrated virgins share Christ’s filial dedication
- In Christ, The Bridegroom: Fulfillment of Original Unity
- Consecrated virgins follow Christ’s absolute self gift as bridegroom.--they are anxious to follow the will of God.
- Spiritual Fatherhood and Motherhood
- Consecrated virgins share in the fecundity of Christ’s virginity
- Mary, Mother of Virgins
- Filiation
- Never a person more closely created by God than this--Immaculate Conception
- Nuptiality
- Model of the Bride, the Church--she is the Spouse of the Spirit
- Parenthood
- Mother of all the faithful through her “spiritual marriage”
Family must be willing to go beyond own private goals to be a true family--fecund love reaches outside of immediate relationship to draw others in, self-gift. Parenthood involves a certain responsibility for the future for everyone.
- Social Life and the Common Good
- Common good=basis for life together in society.
- Not merely what we get as benefit from living in society--being together in a society is a good in itself, an end in itself, not merely a means to a higher end.
- If society merely a means to an end, then society is characterized by competition, the struggle for survival.
- The Common Good of the Spouses
- Family introduces humans to common good, on which alone can society be built.
- Marriage covenant teaches the common good--not good for man to be alone--spouse permits other to exist in fullness of humanity. Personhood only possible, achievable in communion with another.
- The good of one member of a family is the good of all--harm to one is harm to all.
- The Common Good of the Child
- Spousal communion of persons expands into community of father, mother, children
- Mother experiences existence of child as source of joy--to be valued by both parents for existence sake.
- Family teaches child to see other in full dignity and worth as a human being, raises up children for participation in the common social order.
- The Source of the Common Good
- Family opens eyes to Source (God) of society, of all good.
- Overpopulation/ecological concerns--must be seen not merely in numbers of resources terms, but in stewardship of home of communion.
- Common good of family based in acceptance natural givens of masculinity/femininity written into our bodies, uncreated by humans--family therefore teaches us reverence for nature, our place within it.
- Human nature has a cultural profile--family as transmitter of heritage, educator in folkways, salvation, way of being human
- Receive nature and culture from family as gift for our stewardship--suggests nature of reality as gift--indicates Giver, source of all things.
- Family, Become What You Are!
- Family=the matrix of the common good
- Social capital--network of values that hold the society together (trust, openness to others, etc)--arises from families, needed by state/society to exist, so state must encourage, defend families--society/state exist in the service of the family.
- Family is the natural habitat in which the dignity of the person is born
- Family the focal point of society, from which can view the whole clearly
- The Mission of the Family, The Mission of the Church
- Family=domestic Church
- Family teaches love, Church serves to radiate God’s love into the world, sacrament which effects God/man’s communion.
- Church is natural habitat of the family
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