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            The mentality of our age is hostile to the christian concept of marriage and to any true marital commitment. Couples in ever-growing numbers are living together casually and temporarily, without a thought of marriage, and apparently with no sense that they are excluding something profoundly human from their lives. Of those who cohabit in this way no doubt quite a few do think of an eventual ceremony or social event which will "formalize" their relationship - always provided that it has gone satisfactorily.

            Even among those who still consider marriage as a major goal in life, many seem to regard sexual activity as a normal and natural way to express a pre-marital loving attraction. Thus they of course destroy the possibility that their actual marriage, if it ensues, will mark their relationship in any new and truly singular way. What is there in marriage to help them continue to consider it as a major life-goal? It can remain attractive for those who treasure its fruitfulness, although for many today children are a treasure that may cost more than they are worth. But the singularity of marriage is gone; and so, of course, is its permanence.

            Marriage has been radically devalued by the current almost universal acceptance of divorce. To most people (perhaps also to most Catholics) it seems to make obvious human sense that if a marriage breaks down, it should be terminated in such a way that the parties are free to marry again. Marriage binds for only so long as love holds it together - as long as two loves hold it together, for the love or the fidelity of one of the parties alone has today lost its power to hold the other to a freely-made interpersonal commitment.

            All of this indicates a massive loss of values, involving a process of trivialization of what formerly were human realities filled with promise, mystery, wonder, commitment, and risk. Sex, now little more significant than a nod or a handshake, is banalized. Children are considered as a means of "fulfillment" which many feel little need of. The pros and cons of marriage can then be weighed according to fiscal calculations. In the end whole social milieux choose to see little difference between a wife or husband and a partner or "companion" who, as the inexorable logic of the new situation gathers acceptance, may - why not? - be of the same sex.

            The question of nullities has to be seen within this general panorama.

Too many nullities?

            Are there too many declarations of nullity? I have little doubt that there are too many on the overworked grounds of consensual incapacity, and too few on those of simulation (especially exclusion of indissolubility or of offspring). In cases of consensual incapacity (canon 1095 of the new Code of Canon Law), although one or both parties wanted to give a true and full married consent and thought they were doing so, the consent given was in fact invalid, because their mind and/or will labored under some grave psychic deficiency which rendered them incapable of an adequate minimum critical appreciation of the essential rights or duties of marriage, and/or of assuming its essential obligations. While canon 1095 was a new introduction in the 1983 Code, the principles it enshrines had been well developed in rotal jurisprudence and tribunal practice over several decades previously. Nevertheless it should be observed that, before the Council, declarations of nullity because of consent vitiated by a psychic defect (then generally handled under the broad and toned-down concept of "amentia") were rather infrequent. The official records show that of a total of 950 rotal decisions (for or against nullity) given in the years 1960-1965, 53 (approximately 5%) were based on psychic incapacity.

            In the case of simulation the person, being in normal possession of their psychic faculties, consciously and deliberately excludes some (or all) of the essential properties of marriage: exclusive fidelity, permanence of the bond, openness to offspring. Simulation of marital consent used to be the most common grounds of nullity. Of the 1960-1965 rotal cases noted above, 442 (41%) were on grounds of simulation (the next most numerous grounds was metus or "force and fear", with a total of 275 or some 26%). The figures at the level of lower tribunals were similar. Nowadays however it is extremely rare (Italy tends to be an exception) to find a petition for nullity on grounds of simulation. Some tribunals in fact firmly steer people away from such grounds and towards those of consensual incapacity.

            Nullity practice has gone through a period of great change, and it seems evident that an imbalance has been created. It is less clear what the result would be if the imbalance were corrected. A reduced overall number of nullities? Possibly, but I am not sure to what extent the reduction would be substantial.

Different scenarios

            Let us suppose (I assign arbitrary figures) that 50,000 marriages of Catholics break up each year, that 40,000 of these apply to church tribunals for an annulment, and that 38,000 of the petitions are answered Affirmatively (i.e that the marriage was null from the beginning). Let us further consider two quite distinct hypotheses that could correspond to this scenario:

            A) 99% of the nullities declared are under canon 1095, that is, on grounds of original consensual incapacity;

            B) 75% of the nullities are given under canon 1101, that is, on grounds of simulation, with most of the remainder being under c. 1095.

            The first of these two hypotheses corresponds more or less to the present position. It is a situation that is running out of credibility. How is it, it may be asked (and people do ask), that the Catholic Church is the one church to find that its followers, in extraordinarily high numbers, are incapable of something as basic and natural as consent to marriage? How many canonists themselves really believe the explanations given in the 1970s and the 1980s to justify the massive application of the grounds of consensual incapacity: that having reached a new level of psychological sophistication, and knowing so much more than before about the limitations or defects of the human personality, we have discovered that more - many more - people are not capable of valid consent [1]?

            The second hypothesis outlined might be credible. At least it rests on a different presupposition; i.e. not that the great majority of those whose marriage fails were incapable, at consent, of any true marital commitment, but that they deliberately did not engage themselves in such a real commitment at all. In other words, they wanted, say, a "trial marriage", or a "contraceptive marriage"; consciously accepting a "marriage" open to divorce, or one closed to children.

            This latter scenario is not our present situation. If it were, would we have less declarations of nullity than at present? I repeat that I do not know. What I do feel is that we would be in closer touch with reality and more directly to face with the real problem of the present time which, to my mind, is not the inability to commit oneself in marriage, but the widespread unwillingness to do so.

            I would add here that just as important as the over-invocation of c. 1095 or the under-invocation of c. 1101, is the neglect of c. 1676, which says: "Before accepting a case and whenever there seems to be hope of a successful outcome, the judge is to use pastoral means to induce the spouses, if at all possible, to convalidate the marriage and to resume conjugal living". While the canon speaks of the ecclesiastical judge, the pastoral guidelines it offers are clearly binding on all involved in a marriage that is running into troubles. Some commentators play down the applicability of the canon in view of the widespread practice of not accepting a petition for nullity unless civil divorce proceedings have been concluded or are well advanced; and so, they say, it is too late, when the petition is presented, for the Judicial Vicar to try to remedy the situation. That may be so, but my judicial experience has brought me into contact with a considerable number of cases where a person seeking advice in a marital situation, on the very first contact with people in the ministry - pastors, marriage counselors, tribunal officials - , received as immediate and basic advice: "seek a nullity". Hopefully the underlying pessimism of such cases is an exceptional phenomenon.

Married personalism and the "good of the spouses"

            Why, within the Church, and following precisely on the Second Vatican Council which sought to offer guidelines for the renewal of christian life in general and married life in particular, do so many marriages of Catholics currently fail? Some lay the blame on modern "personalism", which they feel has served to intensify a self-seeking approach to marriage, encouraged - so they consider - by an emphasis on marriage as a union of love, accompanied by a downplaying of its procreative orientation.

            To illustrate this, they point to canon 1055 (the very opening canon in the section of the 1983 Code on marriage), and to the changed presentation it makes of the ends of marriage: "The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered to the good of the spouses and to the procreation and education of offspring". Matrimony is no longer stated to have a "primary end" - procreation - (as in canon 1013 of the 1917 Code), but to have two apparently co-equal ends: "good of the spouses" and "procreation".

            The "good of the spouses" (bonum coniugum), is not only an expression of undoubted personalist flavor, but also a totally new term in ecclesial parlance, the 1983 Code being the first time where it is used in a magisterial document to express one of the institutional ends of marriage. With its subsequent adoption by the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 2363: "the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses, and the transmission of life"; cf. no. 2249), it is now part of the Church's general magisterium. It appears as an extremely rich notion that is bound to have very substantial repercussions. It therefore calls for deep and careful analysis, especially from the theological, scriptural and anthropological viewpoints. Any well-grounded canonical appraisal of the juridic content and effect of the new term will bear this in mind.

            The term made its appearance in an interesting way which is worth recalling. The Council set in motion a whole movement of speculation among canonists on the possible juridic consequences of the Gaudium et Spes description of marriage as a "community of life and love" (GS 48). The personalist thrust, very present in the work of the 1970s for the revision of the old Code of Canon Law, centered on marriage as a "communio vitae", proposing in particular the recognition in the new Code of a series of rights connected with the interpersonal relations of the spouses (rights unspecified in nature, but in any case different to those traditionally accepted) which would be counted among the "essential elements" of marriage and whose exclusion would invalidate marital consent. Different formulae to this effect were introduced into various "schemata" under consideration by the Pontifical Commission for the Revision of the Code, but all had been dropped at the end of the process in 1983. The bonum coniugum ran a different route. Introduced (in a 1977 draft) not as an "essential element" but as an end of marriage, it received unanimous support from the Consultors of the Commission, and went on to take its important place in the Code.

            Here a number of points should be noted. When it came to a definition or description of marriage (in our present canon 1055), the new Code bypassed the proposals that seemed more directly inspired in the Council - "communio vitae" or "coniunctio vitae" - simply saying that marriage is a "consortium totius vitae" ("a partnership of the whole of life"), which is a classical description taken directly from Roman law. So, the influence of personalism in the drawing up of the new Code did not affect the description of marriage, nor did it lead to the recognition of any new rights or "elements" that can be considered essential to the constitution of marriage. What it did lead to was the reformulation of the ends of marriage, and specifically to the expression of one of the ends as the "good of the spouses" [2].

            The distinctions here may seem subtle; but they are clear and important. The bonum coniugum is an end on a par with procreation. Therefore, the exclusion of an openness to (ordinatio ad) the bonum coniugum would invalidate consent, just as would exclusion of openness to procreation. Canon law has always required an openness to the ends of marriage; however it has never made a capacity to achieve the end essential to a valid marriage. Thus, if one of the partners turns out to be sterile, the marriage is still valid (c. 1084, § 3). Tribunals that invoke an "incapacity to achieve the bonum coniugum" (whatever this might mean; no easy question) as grounds for declaring a marriage null, would seem to be working from incorrect principles.

            With this in mind, one could venture a few comments on the possible canonical nature of the bonum coniugum.

The nature of the "good of the spouses"

            Some writers have identified the bonum coniugum with the "psycho-sexual harmony" of the spouses, their "interpersonal affective integration", or the building of a "true community of life and love" between them. Such interpretations seem inadequate from a christian standpoint, also because they could easily tend to resolve the bonum coniugum into a matter of natural "compatibility". One can then be led into holding that seeming incompatibility is an enemy of the good of the spouses, whereas pastoral experience shows that many highly "integrated" marriages are of couples whose characters are extremely diverse and even apparently opposed, and who could well have ended up "incompatible" unless they had resolved (in an evidently maturing effort) not to do so. Rotal jurisprudence has consistently declared that this psychological concept of incompatibility offers no grounds for a declaration of nullity.

            Similarly, to make the bonum coniugum consist in the achieving of a comfortable or untroubled married life, is scarcely in harmony with a christian understanding of the real good of the human person. In fact it does not seem possible to understand the "good of the spouses" in a christian way, unless it is seen as resulting from the commitment aspect of the married covenant.

            In seeking to identify the nature of the bonum coniugum, it is natural to seek guidelines first of all from the official Vatican Press volume annotating the "Sources" of the canons of the new Code (Codex Iuris Canonici, Lib. Ed. Vaticana, 1989). There the first magisterial source indicated for c. 1055 is Pius XI's famous Encyclical on marriage, Casti connubii, a pre-conciliar herald of married personalism. This gives good reason to hold that the essence of the bonum coniugum is to be found in the line of the "mutual interior formation" of the spouses and their "constant concern to help each other toward perfection", which the 1930 Encyclical gives as a main purpose of marriage understood in the sense of a life partnership (AAS 22 (1930) 548). In other words, it is for their ultimate "bonum" - growth in virtue and sanctity - that the spouses are meant to help each other. Another source indicated for the canon is a well-known Address of Pius XII of 1951, where Pius spoke of the "personal perfecting of the spouses" as a secondary end of marriage. Among Vatican II documents given as sources of c. 1055 are no. 48 of Gaudium et Spes, nos. 11 and 41 of Lumen Gentium and no. 11 of Apostolicam Actuositatem. In all of these passages, the emphasis is on the human and supernatural growth of the spouses: "Husband and wife ... help and serve each other by their married partnership; they become conscious of their unity and experience it more deeply from day to day ... Fulfilling their conjugal and family role... they increasingly further their own perfection and their mutual sanctification" (GS 48). The supernatural aspect of this is particularly drawn out in the pertinent paragraphs of Lumen Gentium, especially in no. 11: "Christian spouses help one another to attain holiness in their married life and in the accepting and rearing of their children". Similarly the Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People insists: "Christian spouses are for each other... cooperators of grace and witnesses of the faith" (AA 11).

Scripture and the "good of the spouses"

            Encouragement might be forthcoming for "conservatives" to look positively on the bonum coniugum, and equally for "liberals" to pursue a more comprehensive analysis of its content, if both adverted to the striking evidence in Scripture that the original divine plan for the creation of the sexes and for marriage is both procreative and personalistic, at one and the same time; and that the good of the spouses is an institutional end of marriage which (no less than procreation) God himself assigned to it. An analysis which follows these lines harmonizes the two (apparently contrasting) accounts given in the book of Genesis of the creation of man - male and female - and of the institution of marriage. One expresses a clearly procreative finality, while the other can fairly be described as personalist. The first, the so-called "elohist" text, reads: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply"..." (Gen 1:27-28). The other, the "jahwist" text (considered the earlier in date of composition), says: "The Lord God said, "It is not good [non est bonum] that man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him [adiutorium simile sibi]" (Gen 2:18). So God created woman; and the narrative continues, "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Gen. 2:24).

            Theological tradition has hitherto been content to stop at the "adiutorium" aspect of Gen 2:18, with little if any analysis of what this "help" should consist in or, more importantly, what it is aimed at. We are now in a new situation with the emphasis transferred from the means ("mutuum adiutorium") God chose, to the end he intended (the "bonum" of man and woman).

            The question now up for analysis is: what was that ultimate "good" or bonum that God was seeking in and through the marital union of man and woman? It does not seem strained to suggest that the answer is the maturing of the spouses, through the commitment aspect of marriage, for eternal life.

            Jesus himself made no bones about drawing his Apostles' minds right back to this original and demanding design of God regarding the marital commitment, precisely in regard to its permanent and unbreakable nature: "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one'? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder" (Mt 19:4-6); "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so" (Mt 19:8). Our problem today is that we are too like the Apostles, in their spontaneous reaction to the words of Jesus: "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not wise to marry" (Mt 19:10). In other words, "indissolubility is just too much; surely no one can be expected to take it seriously!"... Our modern world too seems, at least at first sight, far from understanding John Paul II's words in Familiaris Consortio: "it is necessary to reconfirm the good news of the definitive nature of conjugal love" (no. 102).

            A definitive commitment: surely that is what the ages have read into the marital commitment: that it is for better or worse, til death do us part? Is that not precisely the good news that human love wishes to communicate to someone who may answer the same in turn: "I will love you for always"? Does no one today any longer mean that, or expect that? Have the majority of people so lost hope? Is it possible too that there has been such a massive loss of natural human values among pastors, educators, marriage counselors and judges, that many consider indissolubility as bad news and not good news, something contrary to - and not in accordance with - what people wish to find in married love? It is serious if something along these lines has happened, and even more serious if it is thought to be a consequence of married personalism.

Personalism and the marital commitment.

            A somewhat superficial approach to the analysis of the bonum coniugum has been accompanied by a tendency to see in it the whole or at least the central expression of the married personalism present in the new Code. This is certainly not adequate, and may reflect the rather inexact understanding of christian personalism itself and of the mode and effect of its introduction into canon law on marriage, still shown by not a few writers from all sides of the field.

            Christian personalism can be rightly regarded as the philosophical or anthropological view underlying the teaching of the Second Vatican Council on personal and social life, and particularly too on marriage. But what does it mean in practice?

            The key personalistic text is Gaudium et Spes no. 24: "man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself". The same Constitution applies this notion directly to marriage, speaking of it "as a mutual giving of two persons", or a union in which the spouses "mutually give and accept one another" (no. 48).

            Christian personalism, then, is not individualism; just the opposite. It is concerned not mainly with the rights of the individual but with his growth. Its thrust is not self-concern and self-protection, but self-giving. It basically calls the individual out of himself. It is by sincere giving, in response to worthwhile values, that the individual realizes or fulfils himself or herself (the gospel roots are clear: give your life, so as to find it).

            When this is borne in mind it becomes obvious to a reader of the new Code that christian and conciliar personalism has configured another fundamental canon besides c. 1055, and done so in an even more direct fashion; canon 1057. The importance of this point can scarcely be exaggerated, not only because the two canons are closely interrelated, but particularly because the clear formulation of c. 1057 arguably contains essential clues to the understanding of the somewhat obscure content of the "good of the spouses" of c. 1055.

            Canon 1057, § 2 deals with the nature of the act of marital consent, and contains one of the most radical changes in the marriage law of the new Code. The 1917 Code offered an unappealing and what was generally considered an over-physicalist description of matrimonial consent: an act of the will "by which each party gives and accepts a perpetual and exclusive right over the body, for acts which are of themselves suitable for the generation of children" (c. 1081, § 2). The corresponding canon of the 1983 Code says that consent is an act of the will "by which a man and a woman, through an irrevocable covenant, mutually give and accept each other in order to establish a marriage". Here then is another new and fundamental notion: that consent to marriage is an act of "self-giving" and "other-acceptance" ("se tradere / alterum accipere"). The idea could scarcely be formulated in a more personalist fashion.

            An advantage for the on-going task of analyzing the juridic significance and effect of this notion is that we are not dealing with a totally new or hitherto unknown expression (as is the case of the bonum coniugum). On the contrary, that marital consent involves the gift of self was already expressed in 1930 in Casti Connubii, which says that people "enter on marriage through the generous gift of their own person for the whole of their lifetime" (AAS 22 (1930) 543). Gaudium et Spes enriches this notion in a very significant way, speaking of the "act by which the partners mutually give and accept one another" (no. 48).

            To my mind, the "self-giving", and very particularly the "other-acceptance", of c. 1057 hold the key to the proper understanding of the bonum coniugum. It is not good for man or woman to be alone. Aloneness is a great enemy to personal development, and indeed to salvation. The "good" that God wants for the spouses through the married commitment, is the final result of the generous and unconditional conjugal giving of self (as one is, defects and all) and, perhaps even more so, of the generous and unconditional acceptance of one's partner as he or she is, also in their defective selfhood - prolonged, with the help of grace, throughout a life time of exclusive fidelity, and of openness to the fruit of mutual conjugal love.

Self-giving and self-fulfillment in marriage

            There seems something inadequate in certain analyses which see married personalism as simply involving a new acknowledgment of the dignity of conjugal love. This interpretation can easily remain at the surface of the matter, especially if it dwells on the "rights" or expectations of love and not, at least in equal measure, on its "duties" and demands. True personalism looks to the maturing of the person; and it is, we repeat, the commitment of marriage - with the demands of a faithful and sacrificed love - that brings spouses to the fullness of personal development: their sanctification, in which lies their true and definitive "good".

            St. Augustine, in his defense of the goodness of matrimony against the pessimism of the Manicheans, developed his doctrine of the "goods" ["bona"] of marriage which show its dignity: its nature as an exclusive, permanent and open-to-life relationship between a man and a woman. I have written elsewhere (Covenanted Happiness, Ignatius Press, 1990, pp. 42ss). on the modern tendency to see the augustinian "bona" not in their natural attractiveness as values or "benefits" of the married state, but simply in the aspect of the obligation which accompanies each. This applies particularly to the "bonum sacramenti" (indissolubility) and the "bonum prolis" (offspring). It is true that the wholehearted acceptance of these "goods" takes a sustained effort; but it also true that this effort is a source of happiness and has as well a deep maturing effect on the persons who face up to it.

             Gaudium et Spes, following Casti connubii, teaches that it is "for the good of the spouses, of the children, and of society" that the marriage bond has been made unbreakable (GS 48; cf. Casti connubii AAS 22 553). Indissolubility positively favors the bonum coniugum, for the effort and sacrifice involved in fidelity to the unbreakable character of the bond - in good times and in bad, etc. - serve powerfully to develop and perfect the personalities of the spouses. Similarly Gaudium et Spes states that "children greatly contribute to the good of their parents" (GS 50). Children enrich their parents' lives in many human ways, and not least in virtue of the generous dedication they tend to evoke in them.

            It is through devotion, effort and sacrifice, especially when made for the sake of others, that people grow and mature most; that way each one comes out of himself or herself and rises above self. Loyalty to the commitment of married life - to be mutually faithful, to persevere in this fidelity until death, and to have and rear children - contributes more than anything else to the true good of the spouses, so powerfully realized in facing up to this freely accepted commitment which, by mutual consent, also becomes a duty owed in justice. In a 1987 Address to the Roman Rota, John Paul II described this duty as involving "a conscious effort on the part of the spouses to overcome, even at the cost of sacrifices and renunciations, the obstacles that hinder the fulfillment of their marriage" (AAS 79 (1987) 1456).

            The Pope's Letter to Families of 1994 dwells on "the antithesis between individualism and personalism. Love, the civilization of love, is bound up with personalism. Why with personalism? And why does individualism threaten the civilization of love? We find a key to answering this in the Council's expression, a "sincere gift". Individualism presupposes a use of freedom in which the subject does what he wants... He does not want to "give" to another on the basis of truth; he does not want to become a "sincere gift". Individualism thus remains ego-centric and selfish... The "ethos" of personalism is altruistic: it moves the person to become a gift for others and to discover joy in giving himself" (no. 14).

            This christian view of fulfillment is radically opposed to the idea of fulfillment which not only dominates almost all of modern psychology and psychological training, but which also colors the outlook of many Catholics.

            Within the Church too it is not uncommon to find normality, maturity or capacity evaluated according to fundamentally self-absorbed parameters: self-identity; self-actualization rather than self-transcendence; responding to self rather than to others or to values; an exaggerated sensitivity to personal rights along with a poor sense of personal duties [3]; autonomy rather than inter-dependence ("becoming an independent person in one's own right..."; "building a non-dependent personality..."); self-acceptance and, even more, the obsessive pursuit of self-esteem (that sign of "moral puberty" as Emmanuel Mounier put it), which makes one guilty at "self-doubt" and vulnerable to "victimization"; acceptance by others, rather than acceptance of others; validation of self..., healing of self...

            Judges, advocates, defenders of the bond, psychological experts who accept these as parameters of "fulfillment" or capacity are going to see more null marriages than those who have achieved a better understanding of personalism. On a different (but not less important) level, counselors who have absorbed such an individualistic psychology rather than one that is truly personalistic, are not likely to form people well for any life that demands self-giving (priestly service no less than married dedication) or to help them overcome the difficulties they are bound to meet along their way.

Not incapacity but diffidence...

            I doubt I have satisfied the reader regarding the question of declarations of annulment. I am not satisfied myself. I favor a large switch from the grounds of consensual incapacity to those of simulation. Whether this may result in any substantial reduction in the numbers of marriages declared null is something about which, as I have said, I am not at all sure.

            What I am quite sure of, and where my concern centers, is that there are too many valid marriages breaking down - due to poor preparation, to little reliance on prayer and the sacraments in times of stress, and to inadequate or negative pastoral advice, often based on the excessive invocation of an ill-defined "good of the spouses", and on insufficient reflection on both the self-donation and the other-acceptance of marital commitment and consent.

            Our crisis today is not incapacity, but diffidence. Our trouble is not radical inability to commit oneself, but a deep-rooted suspicion about the worthwhileness of doing so. Christian personalism is there not to confirm the former, but to solve the latter, by helping people see that without self-giving, there can be no happiness or self-fulfillment; that any truly christian way is one of commitment - fidelity to which brings happiness, and is possible with God's grace, being impossible without it.

NOTES

[1] To many inside and outside the Church this seems absurd; or perhaps comic - with the appearance of a virtual reality game. Why fool yourselves?, says Sheila R. Kennedy; would it not be more sincere to admit there was a real marriage which simply failed, and to have recourse to divorce? This, for Protestants, can seem a matter of natural logic. For some Catholics, it may give rise to an agenda.

[2] This end, as the Pontifical Commission specifically stated, is not to be understood in a subjective sense, as the personal end(s) of the spouses, but in an objective sense, as an end of marriage itself as an institution (cf. Communicationes, (1983) 221). So it is an institutional and a personalistic end, at one and the same time. It is incorrect and unhelpful to classify the ends as if the bonum coniugum were "personalist" while procreation is "institutional". Both ends are institutional, just as both are personalist; cf. C. Burke: "Marriage: a personalist or an institutional understanding?": Communio 19 (1992), 287-289.

[3] Assertion of rights is not always a sign of maturity; waiving them may more often be. Preoccupation with rights is a most probable sign of immaturity. You don't grow just by exercising your rights (not infrequently you may grow more by renouncing them): you grow by fulfilling your duties.