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The Vocation of Marriage Faith, vol, 43, no. 4 (2011), pp. 6-9
Marriage is a vocation; it is the vocation to which the vast majority of people are called. It has two clear purposes or, as the Catechism says, a "twofold end...: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life" (n. 2363). It is a call both to faithful love and to fruitful love.
1. The first purpose is that spouses grow together in goodness, and in that openness to goodness which prepares them for heaven. This means specifically that they are meant to grow in loving God (the first commandment) by means of growing in love for each other throughout their lifetime.

The De-humanization of marital sex (Faith (2011), pp. 11-15)

1. Humanae Vitae initiated a new analysis of the conjugal act

Humanae vitae, Paul VI's 1968 Encyclical is principally recalled as reiterating the Church's perennial condemnation of artificial birth-control. But it is much more than that. It opened up the way for a deeper human understanding of what, in sexual intercourse between husband and wife, justifies its being termed the conjugal act.

What would be St. Augustine's reaction if he returned to the world at this start of the third millennium, and had to evaluate the modern attitude toward marriage and toward human sexuality?
I believe that (with surprise, or perhaps without it) he would identify two phenomena that he experienced in his own time (even if under somewhat different modulations); two attitudes that he combatted; two valuations, seemingly located at opposite poles, and nevertheless intimately related to each other.
Disesteem for marriage; exaltation of sex

Self-esteem: Why?; Why not?
There is a proper mode of self-esteem which is beneficial to each individual, and there is a mode or model being propagated worldwide today which can be very harmful. First let us take a summary look at this latter mode which has in a short time come to dominate the psychological and educational thinking under which most modern young people are formed. Then we will note 1) the growing secular criticism being directed towards it, 2) analyze its fundamental anthropological defectiveness and, 3) see how a realistic self-esteem, in which positive and negative elements combine, is necessary to each person if he or she is to have psychic and spiritual health - and that this distinctive form of self-esteem is in fact inherent in a Christian spirit properly assimilated. Finally we will consider, with some concrete examples, how harmful self-esteem philosophy can make its way into Catholic religious education manuals.