Given from the Catholic Broadcasting Station 2SM Sydney Australia
Choose a topic from Vol 4:
The monogamic system is not to be judged by those who fail to observe its requirements, but by its rightness or wrongness in itself. As Christians we know it to be the revealed will of God. No considerations of mere expediency or of the preferences of men can alter that. If there are abuses, the remedy for those abuses is not the abolition of Christian standards of marriage and morals, but a return to those standards.
If no more than conventional rules are to be acknowledged, then all rules will be undermined and family life ruined altogether. For that would mean that the law of God need not be considered at all, and that marriage legislation is a matter of human agreement only. In other words, man becomes his own lawgiver in this matter, subject to no higher authority, not even to that of God. The way is left open for the replacing of Christian standards by pagan standards whenever men so desire.
It is true that the religious ceremony expresses the sacredness of the union, but does not constitute it. The sacredness of the union lies in the contract itself, for Christians raised by Christ to the dignity of a Sacrament of the Christian religion. The word sacred means holy; and holiness implies a relationship with God the infinitely Holy, and the source of all holiness. If God and religion are excluded, and whatever one intends by sacred is in the minds of the participants only in regard to their attitude towards each other, then the parties would be justified in changing partners as often as they changed their minds! They would have no sacred obligations to each other at all.
You advocate the changing of the law from the accepted standard of one man and one wife so as to permit a man having several wives thus making polygamy legal; or, alternatively, that the community should recognize the right of single women to have children by any men they please without shame or contumely. But God made the laws regulating marriage and morality, not the community. And the community has no authority to alter them. It is for human beings to obey the laws of God; and no considerations of expediency can dispense us from them The end does not justify the means.
The church-wedding idea as a kind of optional extra makes merely a travesty of the Christian religion. The bride-to-be may think a church wedding prettier or more socially respectable, but if the parties do not take a religious view of marriage itself, they would be more honest if they contented themselves with a civil ceremony only. To have a marriage celebrated in a Christian church is to make a public profession of entering into a Christian marriage; yet thousands enter into marriage church-wedding and all, without the haziest notion of what Christian marriage means.
Nothing except hypocrisy for those who take only a secular view of marriage and regard a church-wedding as good for their vanity and social pride. The secular view of marriage is that it is but a contract ratified by civil law, granting social respectability to two people of opposite sexes who want to live together�a contract which the State itself can dissolve on certain not very exacting conditions. But the truly Christian outlook is very different. Marriage is not merely a contract, but a Sacrament of the Christian religion, instituted as such by Christ. It is terminable only by the death of one of the parties and imposes duties opposed to the whole trend of public opinion in our modern secularized society. But the Catholic at least knows that, if he prepares for marriage as he should and receives it with reverence as a Sacrament of the Christian religion, he will receive the grace and the power to fulfil its duties and merit the special blessing of God.
If people are living in adultery, deathless love and touching devotion do not make things any better. For it is not a question as to whether one's love for a paramour is deathless, but as to whether its indulgence is lawful. Are we to say that if a man is living with a woman who is not his wife it is adultery if he loves her only a little for a short time, but that it is not adultery if he loves her a lot for a long time?
Anyone who has not abandoned the use of reason. People who make love its own law and just live together because they are passionately fond of each other, ignoring the law of God, enter into a state of concubinage, not of marriage. However much they profess to love each other, they are not huband and wife. Nor is their case made any better however many instances they can quote where those who are husbands and wives are not happily adjusted to each other. Marriage has religious and social implications which demand the protection both of the law of God and the law of the land. And both sets of laws are to be complied with, if the parties want civil respectability and freedom from guilt of sin in the sight of God.
"THAT CATHOLIC CHURCH
A Radio Analysis"
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