Marriage is thus a union between three hearts: that of the man, the woman, and God. Marriage, as God intends it, is the union of a woman and a man which is open to procreation.
Marriage is one of the seven sacraments instituted by God and administered by the Catholic Church through the hands of its clergy. It is a lifelong commitment that only death can separate. Divorce is therefore impossible, as the Church does not possess that power.
“Jesus confirmed this institution which existed ‘from the beginning’ and healed it of its later defects in the New Testament. He thus restored its dignity and its fundamental requirements. By integrating it into the mystery of the love which unites Him as Redeemer to His Church, Jesus sanctified this state of life (GS 48, 2). For this reason, the responsibility for the pastoral guidance and organization of Christian marriage has been entrusted to the Church itself (cf. 1 Cor 7:10-11),” wrote the International Theological Commission in 1977.
Today in France, there is administrative marriage and the true Marriage, which is instituted by God and which validates and makes licit the union of a man and a woman. Administrative marriage is an obligation imposed by the Republic, thereby denying the authority of Our Lord in France.
According to the Republic, the Lord no longer has legitimate authority to unite a man and a woman. The Republic, acting on its own initiative as an opponent to the Lord, has also introduced the recognition of homosexual marriage, a practice which is not open to life and is not in accordance with God's will, but rather an attack on His Law.
For Marriage to be authorized by the Catholic Church as a true conjugal union, the following are required:
- A man and a woman
- Ensuring that the man and the woman are free.
- That they recognize the indissoluble character of Christian marriage,
- That they be mutually faithful
- That they accept the possibility of children being born from their union.
Saint Francis de Sales, in his magnificent book on the devout life, has an excellent passage on what Marriage is between a man and a woman.
Saint Francis de Sales said that:
“It was God who brought Eve to our first father Adam, and gave her to him as a wife; it is also God, my friends, who with His invisible hand has tied the knot of the sacred bond of your marriage, and who has given you to one another; why do you not cherish each other with a love that is wholly holy, sacred, and divine? The first effect of this love is the indissoluble union of your hearts.”
Further on, he exhorts married couples to a mutual love, a love recommended by the Holy Spirit:
“O married ones, it is nothing to say: ‘Love one another with a natural love,’ for pairs of turtledoves do that well; nor to say: ‘Love one another with a human love,’ because pagans have practiced that love well; but I say to you, after the great Apostle: ‘Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church; O wives, love your husbands as the Church loves its Savior.’”
And he also recalls the fidelity and union that God intended when He said that the married will become one flesh “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24):
Saint Francis de Sales says that:
“If you glue two pieces of fir wood together, provided the glue is fine, the union will be so strong that the pieces would split much sooner elsewhere than at the point of their joining; but God joins the husband to the wife in His own blood: that is why this union is so strong, that the soul should sooner separate from the body of one and the other, than the husband from the wife.
Now this union is understood not principally of the body, but of the heart, affection, and love. The second effect of this love must be the inviolable fidelity of one to the other. Seals were formerly engraved on the rings worn on fingers, as Holy Scripture testifies; behold then the secret of the marriage ceremony.”
Jesus Christ taught Mary Lataste that Marriage is not necessarily a goal for everyone nor a destiny in life.
“Before marrying, one must have a vocation. A young woman who wishes to marry must reflect deeply on her vocation and on the state in which she carries it so that she can bear the difficulties of this state by remembering: ‘It was the will of God’ after having embraced it.
She must take great care not to enter this state lightly, by caprice, or even less by passion, but solely because God has given her this vocation. She must ask God to make known to her the one to whom she should unite her days, to ask for a support for her life and to give her heart when she knows her vocation and has reflected on it maturely.”
Then, further on, Jesus Christ offers good advice to future spouses:
“When her choice is made and approved, let her from that moment give her love to the one she has chosen, let her give him her word and never withdraw from him either her word or her heart. For this, let her not fix her gaze on others and not seek to make a new choice. This one is according to God; the second could be according to sin and the devil. In the first meetings with the one she has chosen, this young person must above all guard her eyes, remembering that the eyes are the main gates through which the impure spirit enters.
She must keep them full of reserve, not only for her own sake, but also for his. She must also watch her words very much, but without excess: too great a reserve could be misinterpreted and taken for disdain, coldness, or as a formal refusal. One must therefore avoid both too much freedom and too much reserve. Let her manners be good, gentle, polite, honest, frank, affectionate, and let everything in her radiate the good fragrance of my grace and modesty. Let everything in her conduct testify that she embraces the state of marriage not by caprice or passion, but to fulfill the will of God who gave her this vocation.”
Marriage, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is a matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, ordered by its nature to 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.
The Catechism continues and stipulates that Sacred Scripture begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:26-27) and ends with the vision of “the wedding feast of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7, 9). From one end to the other, Scripture speaks of marriage and its “mystery,” of its institution and the meaning God gave it, of its origin and its end, of its various realizations throughout the history of salvation, of its difficulties arising from sin and its renewal “in the Lord” (1 Cor 7:39), in the New Covenant of Christ and the Church (cf. Eph 5:31-32).
The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. God himself is the author of marriage. (GS 48, § 1). The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes. These differences should not cause us to forget its common and permanent characteristics. Although the dignity of this institution is not transparent everywhere with the same clarity (cf. GS 47, § 2), there is nevertheless a certain sense of the greatness of the matrimonial union in all cultures. “For the well-being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life” (GS 47, § 1).
God who created man out of love also calls him to love—the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:27) who is himself love (cf. 1 John 4:8, 16). Having created man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes (cf. Gen 1:31). And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: “And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’” (Gen 1:28).
The Bible also offers us precious advice for the conduct of our marriage, so that it may be lived in the best possible way.
Also read | Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent
Saint Paul said:
“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
Pope John Paul II speaks of this redeemed state of marriage as a place of love, gift, and mutual submission, rather than as a state in which the husband dominates the wife, as the Lord said humans would do to lower animals.
He explains it beautifully:
“Love excludes every form of submission by which the wife would become a servant or a slave of the husband, an object of unilateral submission. Love makes the husband simultaneously subject to the wife, and subject in this to the Lord himself, just as the wife is to the husband. The community or unity which they must form by reason of marriage is realized through a reciprocal gift, which is also a mutual submission.”
(Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, 89:4)
This is a minimal part of what Marriage truly represents for a Catholic; there would be so many other things to say, to quote, there are so many magnificent texts on this beautiful sacrament, on this union between a man and a woman, whether philosophically or theologically.