Marriage and Unmarriage
My dear sisters and brothers in Jesus Christ,
On the Feast of the Holy Family, I preached at the Cathedral on family life. This would hardly be the biggest surprise of the year. After all the Holy Family are put before us as models for family relationships. If we truly believe in the mystery of the Incarnation then we know that family relationships among Jesus Mary and Joseph were dynamic and growing.
One of the nonsense pieces of our society is that trash about the perfect family. Sorry, it does not exist as the perfect person does not exist. All of us are flawed and the relationships that we live in are flawed also. We work on these all our lives with the hope that they will feed us and we will grow from them.
I suggested during the homily that the Catechism of the Catholic Church had a simple yet profound statement on the family; Paragraph # 1601 says:
"The matrimonial covenant by which a man and a women establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered towards the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament."
Pope Paul VI had interesting comments when he visited Nazareth. There he reflected on the place of the Holy Family and suggested that it was a school of love where people can learn the gift of silence, the gift of family relationships and the gift of learning to work. Each of these is critical for family life today.
In the second part of the homily, I asked the people to look at the shadow side of marriage today. We have many unmarriages or non-marriages that are posing as marriages. Indeed their existence is a challenge to the Christian community and a cause of friction and discord in families and parishes. Again the Catechism hits the issues with singular bluntness. Par. # 2390:—
"In a so called free union, a man and woman refuse to give juridical and public form to a liaison involving sexual intimacy.
The expression "free union" is fallacious : what can union mean when the partners make no commitment to one another, each exhibiting a lack of trust in the other, in himself, or in the future.
The expression covers a number of different situations: concubinage, rejection of marriage as such, or inability to make long-term commitments. All these situations offend against the dignity of marriage; they destroy the very idea of the family; they weaken the sense of fidelity. They are contrary to the moral law. The sexual act must take place exclusively within marriage. Outside of marriage it always constitutes a grave sin and excludes one from sacramental communion."
Not only is this teaching of the Church clear, it makes it patent what we must expect. If people are living in a sexual union that is not marriage, they have no right to receive Holy Communion. That is to say if people are living together before marriage, they are living in a gravely sinful state.
One of the most common arguments used against this is: "My conscience says it is O. K" There is a simple answer to this. You need re-education. Your conscience has been formed by the world and not by the Church and objective moral norms. People saying that wrong in right does not make it so.
I pointed out the great frustration of priests who have to deal with such a high percentage of marriages in which the people already are living as if they were married. All are hauled into this deception. The bride and groom are given away. In fact they have already been living as bride and groom. Who is fooling whom? What an insult to the guests.
I also raised the issue of parents who are afraid to confront children. How can parents permit their children and their partners to visit them and live as husband and wife when they are not married? The parents are thereby approving of the sinful situation. What about people who celebrate the birth a children born out of wedlock as if this were just the same as if the parents were married? Is this thinking in line with the truth and the teaching of the Church? Not really.
Why is there a lack of respect for marriage? Because there is a lack of respect for real sexuality. When the sex education in the schools assumes or encourages young people to be sexually active from the first moment, how can we bring back morality to people? It has been proved that the divorce rate is higher among those who live together before marriage.
When are we going to start to call sin — sin; fornication — fornication and adultery — adultery and know that one leads to the other. Un-marriage is so widely accepted in our society that we have a genuine social disease. Pray for its end.
© Diocese of Antigonish Official Website
This item 1077 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
