Recently, some have claimed that marriage should not extend to same sex couples because the potential for procreation, not the union of two into one, has always been the central core of marriage. (1)
I ask myself, can this true? If true, why is there no evidence to suggest the potential for procreation is the core of civil marriage? Can we find positive sources to learn what people thought to be the core of marriage? Although non-religious, I was raised Catholic, so I turn to popular Catholic texts, limiting my search to those that predate the SSM political controversy.
In 1929, Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote his very popular book “MARRIAGE: the mystery of faithful love”. Many will not have heard of Professor von Hildebrand, but his writings were held in quite high esteem by Pope Pius XII who called him “the 20th century Doctor of the Church.”
In “MARRIAGE” we find the chapter: “Love is the core of marriage” which begins:
Why does Holy Scripture choose this particular relationship as an image? It is chosen because marriage is the closest and most intimate of all earthly unions in which, more than in any other, one person gives himself to another without reserve, where the other in his complete personality is the object of love, and where mutual love is in a specific way the theme (that is to say, the core) of the relationship.”
Love and giving of each other fully are the core of marriage. As to children: they are the end, result or blessing of marriage. Von Hildenbrand also asks:
Is this not a clear indication that marriage is a symbol of the union of the soul with God, that it possesses, as such, a sublime importance and that it exists in the first place for its own sake and not exclusively for the sake of any result that it produces?
In his book he answers: marriage exists for its own sake, and not that of the children it may produce.
Many readers who have followed the argument about procreation and marriage know that the potential to procreate is not required for civil marriage; it is not a traditional ground for divorce. Some answer: this is not evidence to counter the premise that procreation is the core of marriage, it is simply too difficult to test for inability to procreate.
But is the difficulty to detect infertility the reason we permit post menopausal women or castrated men to marry? According to von Hildenbrand, it is not the reason.
Let us examine what he thought about infertile couples. He asks:
When both partners, even though childless, belong to each other in the most perfect conjugal love, in unchangeable loyalty to one another, in imitation of the union of the soul with God, is not the ideal of marriage fulfilled to an even higher degree than in the case of a marriage with perhaps many children, where the partners are unfaithful to each other and desecrate the sacred tie by a lack of love and loyalty?
So, childless couples are not a pale imitations of procreative models; we do not accept them because it is too difficult to screen them out. They represent the true meaning of marriage by displaying marital fidelity and loyalty even when they are not blessed by children.
Like Lot of the Old Testament, the ideal exists in loyalty and fidelity even when God withholds children, his blessings.
Moving away from von Hildenbrand, what of Pope Pius XI? Were he alive today, he would surely oppose same sex marriages, as he opposed divorce and birth control; he held procreation in high esteem. However, I do not believe his opposition to SSM would be based based on the belief that procreation is chief reason or central purpose of marriage. His opposition SSM would be based on something else.
Let us seek Pope Pius XI’s opinion on the purpose of marriage in CASTI CONNUBII:
24. This mutual molding of husband and wife, this determined effort to perfect each other, can in a very real sense, as the Roman Catechism teaches, be said to be the chief reason and purpose of matrimony, provided matrimony be looked at not in the restricted sense as instituted for the proper conception and education of the child, but more widely as the blending of life as a whole and the mutual interchange and sharing thereof.
Reading these words and others in his Encyclical, there is no doubt that Pope Pius XI thought children important; they are a blessing to and benefit of marriage. Children should be welcomed and embraced by parents. Certainly marriage benefits children; a fact he notes.
Nevertheless, neither children nor procreation are the chief reason or purpose of marriage. The chief reason for marriage is the mutual molding of husband and wife. Matrimony is not to be looked on narrowly as existing solely to conceive and educate children.
The central core, purpose and meaning of marriage was the loving, loyal, faithful and committed bond between partners, not procreation or even the potential for procreation.
If the Catholic Church did not believe procreation was the central purpose of marriage, what of others? Might legislators, or the public at large have agreed with the teachings in these texts? Might this not be the reason marriage and divorce laws reflect the idea that marriage is a loving sexually faithful and supportive commitment between two people?
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