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Marriage as Sacrament (OSV Encyc. 1997)
Marriage was instituted by God from the start of creation (Gn 1:27-28, 2:18-24). It represents a major part of the divine design for the good of persons - of the spouses and children - as well as of society.
For Christians marriage is much more. It is also a sacrament, one of those "efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us, [and which] bear fruit in those who receive them with the required dispositions" (CCC 1231). Marriage between Christians is therefore a source of grace. "Since it signifies and communicates grace, marriage between baptized persons is a true sacrament of the New Covenant" (ib. 1617).
It is a defined dogma of faith that marriage is one of the seven sacraments (Denz. 1601), although the exact moment when Jesus raised it to the sacramental level is not certain (as it is not certain in the case of Confirmation or Anointing of the Sick). Nevertheless a common opinion would assign it to the wedding feast of Cana (Jn 2:1-11), sanctified by the presence of Jesus and the occasion of his first miracle. There the Church sees "the confirmation of the goodness of marriage and the proclamation that henceforth marriage will be an efficacious sign of Christ's presence" (CCC 1613).
While Matrimony does not confer sacramental "character" (as do Baptism, Confirmation and Order: CCC 1121), it does consecrate a person to and for a special way of life, and so becomes a source of continuing graces. The Catechism (no. 1535), putting Matrimony alongside Order as involving a "particular consecration", quotes Vatican II: "Christian spouses have a special sacrament by which they are fortified and receive a kind of consecration in the duties and dignity of their state. By virtue of this sacrament, as spouses fulfill their conjugal and family obligations, they are penetrated with the Spirit of Christ, who fills their whole lives with faith, hope and charity. Thus they increasingly advance towards their own perfection, as well as towards their mutual sanctification" (GS 48).
What a sacrament symbolizes or signifies is important. Still more important is that it causes or effects what it signifies. Naturally enough, theological reflection centers particularly on this efficacy of the sacraments; on how they sanctify more than on what they signify. Baptism, through the symbol of cleansing by water, actually purifies the soul from sin. Dogmatic treatises on the Eucharist (leaving aside the aspect of sacrifice) dwell not just on its representative value of nourishment for the individual or of a fraternal meal, but particularly on its effect in bringing about a real participation, in the individual and the community, in the actual life of Christ. This is generally true of the other sacraments; the thought of the Church has dwelt more on what each effects than on what it signifies. Peculiarly, this has not been the case with the sacrament of matrimony. Theological reflection on the sacramentality of marriage has rather centered on its sign-function - christian matrimony as signifying a great supernatural reality (union of Christ and the Church) - paying little attention to its sanctifying effect on the spouses themselves. Given the teaching of Vatican II on the universal call to holiness (LG, Ch. V; cf. CCC 2012-2013), a new emphasis seems called for here; all the more inasmuch as many married Christians, who perhaps celebrate their wedding anniversary in joy and gratitude, seem seldom motivated by a consciousness of sacramental graces - peculiar to them in their married state - once received and constantly operative.
A point that makes Matrimony unique among the sacraments should be noted. Only in it is a natural reality - the conjugal covenant - raised to the permanent dignity of a sacrament. In other words, it is the natural marital relationship which is sacramentalized. That marriage should be a sacrament seems specially fitting, for thus the highest form of human community is sanctified; and grace is conferred so that the fruitful union of the sexes, made in the trinitarian image of God, can infuse supernatural love into the conjugal and family relationship between Christians.
Another point worthy of note is that while all the sacraments are sacraments of union, Eucharist and Matrimony are specially so. The Eucharist makes each individual one with Christ. Matrimony makes two individuals one with one another, identifying them at same time with Christ. The love and union of persons is the whole scope and purpose of existence, its paragon being the Blessed Trinity. Christ comes to incorporate all of us into this loving union. But, for us, such a union can only be achieved through self-giving which entails generosity, i.e. through sacrifice. If marriage is a sign of the loving union of Christ and his Church, its particular effect is to enable the spouses to achieve a similar union - of love expressed in sacrifice. Conjugal love has to be sacrificial like that of Christ, who "loved the church and gave himself up for her" (Eph 5:25).
Traditional theological reflection, in seeing marriage as a sign of the union between Christ and his Church, has tended to see the husband's role in the image of Christ, and the wife's in that of the Church (cf. Eph 5: 21-33). Today's Magisterium tends to stress, along with equal dignity between the spouses, the equality of dedication and sacrifice they must put as a basis for their marital relationship and their sanctity.
"Our Savior encounters christian spouses through the sacrament of matrimony. Christ dwells with them, gives them the strength to take up their crosses and so follow him, to rise again after they have fallen, to forgive one another, to bear one another's burdens, to 'be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ' (Eph 5:21) and to love one another with supernatural, tender and fruitful love" (CCC 1642).
Christians, like non-Christians, marry because they are attracted by the good things it promises: love, companionship, support, a stable home, children... These are great values, to be received and to be given. But they are values that are always threatened by individual selfishness. Today in particular they receive no help - rather the opposite - from the atmosphere prevailing in society. Such a life-long intimate relationship as marriage is not possible without developing an open and generous heart, which is a condition of human and supernatural charity. This can only be achieved with a particular help of God. The help is there; but it must be adverted to and make use of. In marrying, Christians, perhaps without realizing it, receive graces - gifts - to strengthen them to live marriage in the fullness of the conjugal commitment and so to achieve its true ends.
Marriage is a union between equals based on mutual love and complementarity. The mutuality of the sacrament of marriage is underlined by the teaching constantly followed in the Latin Church that the spouses themselves are the ministers of this sacrament (cf. CCC 1623). It is important that they do not lose the sense of being ministers and mediators of grace to one another, throughout the whole of their married life.
Christian marriage does not create new obligations substantially distinct from those characterizing non-christian marriage. It simply provides the spouses with help and strength to fulfil their natural conjugal obligations and achieve their christian goal. As Pius XI teaches in Casti connubii, spouses are "not fettered but adorned, not hampered but assisted by the bond of the sacrament". Greater reflection on this truth might dispel the prejudices which some Catholics have against "sacramental" marriage. When marriage is considered as a means and source of grace, its demands are seen as positive, exhibiting such greatness of purpose as to appear worthwhile on a totally new level and in a totally new light.
The Specific Graces of Marriage
Conjugal and family self-giving are therefore a way of achieving union with God. In loving each other and their children, married people learn to love God. So the new Catechism says: "Charity upholds and purifies our human ability to love, and raises it to the supernatural perfection of divine love" (no. 1827).
Like each sacrament, Matrimony offers distinctive graces, which correspond to the peculiar aspirations, challenges, duties and difficulties of married life. These graces certainly include the following:
- First of all, the grace that reinforces the couple's love so that it does not give way under the inevitable difficulties of a lifelong commitment, but is strengthened and grows with the passage of the years. "This grace proper to the sacrament of Matrimony is intended to perfect the couple's love and to strengthen their indissoluble unity. By this grace they help one another to attain holiness in their married life" (CCC 1641; cf. 1661).
- Love means loving the other as he or she is; i.e. as a real person with defects. The hardest tests of married life come when romance wanes and couples begin to discover the extent of each other's defects. The sacrament must offer special and particularly strong graces for living through such moments, learning to forgive, to ask for forgiveness, to develop the aptitude for dwelling on one's partner's positive characteristics and avoiding obsessions with those that appear negative: in a word, to keep loving one another in a truly self-sacrificial, Christ-like way.
- Matrimonial grace is no doubt further specified in the way it strengthens each spouse in sexual identity and donation: helping the man develop his distinctive spousal self-gift in a masculine mode and dedication, and the woman in feminine mode and dedication. The unity of marriage is not just indissoluble, nor simply interpersonal; it is intersexual. It calls for a growth in sexual identity, so threatened today by the tendency to belittle God's gift of sexual differences, character and function.
- A particular task of married love - for which the sacrament provides grace - is to purify the sexual relationship between husband and wife of the elements of selfishness and of possible exploitation which, in the present state of human nature, can affect it (cf. CCC 1606-1607).
One effect of Original Sin is to make man and woman become too immediately absorbed with the physical aspects and sense attraction of sex, preventing them from reaching, "seeing" and understanding the inner meaning and real substance and value of sexual differences and complementarity; and especially to share in the full meaning of conjugal-sexual self-giving.
The sacrament of Matrimony therefore provides special graces for living conjugal chastity. This chastity calls for a certain strength and restraint as between husband and wife, and makes them vigilant towards the tendency not to honor the mystery of their reciprocal sexuality, or to act according to the laws which their mind discovers in it: a tendency which is a temptation to use, and not to respect, the other. It is natural to each person to be aware of the presence of a selfish element in the realm of sexuality, just as it is natural for a married couple to want to free and purify their love from any self-seeking which may be present in their intimate relations. Little is said today of conjugal chastity; and yet its absence leads to the undermining of the mutual regard which should characterize the love of the spouses, as well as of the true freedom with which their reciprocal spousal donation should be made. Marital chastity is an essential safeguard for the strength, tenderness and permanence of conjugal love. But it is not likely to be attained without the help of special graces (cf. CCC 1608).
- The married couple usually and naturally become a family, for spousal love is normally meant to develop into parental love. Matrimony undoubtedly offers particular sacramental graces for the unfolding of personalities, redirection of affections and acquisition of new abilities involved in this gradual and vital process, so powerfully geared to the maturing of persons.
It is a particular mission of parents to mediate God's paternal and maternal love. The sacrament of Matrimony should therefore grant spouses special graces to grow in parental indentity and love; so that each learns to be a true father or mother, as the case may be. A sanctified marriage means a marriage where the partners have learned to be holy spouses and holy parents.
- From the purely natural viewpoint, the family, with its unique functions of humanizing and socializing, is rightly called the first vital cell of society. From the christian point of view, married couples along with their children are called also to be a gospel leaven in the world. The sacramental graces peculiar to the married state must be designed to give powerful apostolic stimulus and strength. If a couple are not aware of these graces - if they are not often reminded of them, in pre- and post-marriage preaching and catechesis - they may fail to activate them or rely on them, and so miss a large part of that christian evangelizing mission which is so peculiarly theirs. Nothing can so contribute to bringing the world to God as the example of married couples who, in keen awareness of the graces coming to them from the specific sacrament they have received, are living their conjugal and family life in active reliance on these graces.
This apostolic dimension of the married vocation cannot be lost sight of. The Catechism places Matrimony together with Holy Orders, saying that these two sacraments "are directed towards the salvation of others. If they contribute as well to personal salvation, it is through service to others that they do so" (1534). In loving each other and their children, spouses offer a witness to generosity and faithfulness that can draw those around them powerfully to God. The Catechism relates conjugal fidelity to "the fidelity of God to his covenant [and] of Christ to his Church. Through the sacrament of matrimony the spouses are enabled to represent this fidelity and witness to it" (1647).
The graces specific to the sacrament of Matrimony are many and powerful. They are given with the sacrament, and are continuing graces that are always there. But, like all other graces of the christian life, they must be relied on, they must be sought and prayed for. If a married couple lives unaware of these sacramental graces, without invoking them constantly, it is unlikely that their married life can be happy or even survive. Couples who rely on these graces and constantly invoke them, will have God's special help to achieve union and happiness and eternal life.