Explaining Why Marriage Between a Man and a Woman is So Special

Here is an excellent explanation from Mercator Net explaining the importance of traditional marriage, and why marriage between a man and a woman is so special.

What is marriage?

Marriage is a natural institution where a man and a woman give themselves to each other exclusively for life in a sexual relationship that is open to procreation. It is publicly recognised, honoured and supported because of its unique capacity to generate new human life and to meet children’s deepest needs for the love and attachment of both their father and their mother. Marriage is different and distinguished from other sexual or caring relationships because of its permanence, its natural orientation to life, and the way it brings together and expresses the fullness of humanity in male and female.  

Why does marriage have to be about the ability to have children? Older couples and infertile couples have always been allowed to marry.

When a married couple cannot have children, for reasons of age or infertility, they are still truly married because their lovemaking is designed to give life, even if it cannot give life at a particular point in time, or ever. Their sexual union is procreative by its nature, because husband and wife unite in an act that is naturally meant for the creation of a new human being. This is why sex deserves to be treated with a special reverence.

But surely marriage is more about two people in love than what kind of sex they have. Why is procreative sex special?

Sexual intercourse that is open to life is essential for marriage because marriage is not just a caring relationship between two people, but a union of love and life. In marriage a man and a woman pledge to love each other for life and to lovingly welcome and raise any children of their union.

Sadly, through the normalisation of casual sex, contraception, homosexual acts, condoms, abortion and IVF, our culture has denigrated and obscured the life-giving aspect of marriage and sexual intercourse. In spite of this, people still, deep down, know that the sexual act is about life – that it bonds a man and a woman together in a profound way because of the baby they may conceive.

People still sense the grandeur of the sexual act, its implicit promise of life-long love and commitment – “I will be here for you for always” – and this is why there is so much pain and heartache when sexual relationships break down or when a marriage is violated by adultery.

Isn’t the right to marry a basic human right?

“The right to marry and found a family” is written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). But international human rights law has always understood and affirmed the enduring truth that marriage is a life-giving union of a man and a woman. TheUnited Nations Human Rights Committee, which monitors international human rights treaties, has stated that the right to marry “implies, in principle, the possibility to procreate”. The right to marry and found a family is a basic human right, but this right has an objective meaning and content – forming an open-to-life union with a person of the opposite sex.

But what about human dignity? Homosexual people can never feel that they are fully accepted and worthy of love if they are not allowed to marry their same-sex partner.

To love someone sexually means being able to accept them completely, including their fertility. Sexual acts that are closed to life, like anal sex, oral sex and contracepted heterosexual intercourse, may seem loving.  But they cannot be truly loving because they reject the deepest part of the person’s sexuality – their capacity to give life, to be a father or a mother.

No one can deny that many homosexual persons sincerely care about their same-sex partners. But, as hard and painful as it is for those who suffer from same-sex attraction, real love demands chastity – the integration of sexual desires into unselfish love for the other person. This means abstaining from sex that is not marital and open to life.

Unfulfilled sexual desires can be a painful cross to carry. But a chaste life brings us true inner peace and joy, because we are living in harmony with the way our bodies have been designed and we are treating the person we love as a gift – loving him or her for their own sake, and not for the sexual pleasure they can give us.

CONTINUED 

From the Catechism: 


1601 "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 toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament."


1602 Sacred Scripture begins with the creation of man and woman in the image and likeness of God and concludes with a vision of "the wedding-feast of the Lamb." Scripture speaks throughout of marriage and its "mystery," its institution and the meaning God has given it, its origin and its end, its various realizations throughout the history of salvation, the difficulties arising from sin and its renewal "in the Lord" in the New Covenant of Christ and the Church.



1603 "The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. . . . God himself is the author of marriage." The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes. These differences should not cause us to forget its common and permanent characteristics. Although the dignity of this institution is not transparent everywhere with the same clarity, some sense of the greatness of the matrimonial union exists in all cultures. "The well-being of the individual person and of both human and Christian society is closely bound up with the healthy state of conjugal and family life."


1604 God who created man out of love also calls him to love the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. For man is created in the image and likeness of God who is himself love. Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator's eyes. And this love which God blesses is intended to be fruitful and to be realized in the common work of watching over creation: "And God blessed them, and God said to them: 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.'"


1605 Holy Scripture affirms that man and woman were created for one another: "It is not good that the man should be alone." The woman, "flesh of his flesh," his equal, his nearest in all things, is given to him by God as a "helpmate"; she thus represents God from whom comes our help. "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." The Lord himself shows that this signifies an unbreakable union of their two lives by recalling what the plan of the Creator had been "in the beginning": "So they are no longer two, but one flesh."

Vatican Criticizes Nobel Prize Being Awarded to in-vitro Pioneer

From CatholicCulture.org:  The Nobel Prize awarded to Robert Edwards, the pioneer of in vitro fertilization, is “completely out of order,” a Vatican official argued.


Bishop Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, acknowledged the significance of the work that Edwards had done, opening “a new and important chapter in the field of human reproduction.” But he argued that the procedure—which involves the creation of many human embryos, only a few of which are implanted in a woman’s womb—creates a host of moral as well as legal problems.


“Without Edwards there would be no market for human eggs,” the bishop said; “without Edwards there would not be freezers full of embryos waiting to be transferred to a uterus, or, more likely, used for research or left to die, abandoned and forgotten by all.” He also pointed out the “confusion of assisted procreation: children with four or five parents; babies born from their grandparents.”


The International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations also expressed concern about the Nobel Prize award, saying that although in vitro fertilization has helped many couples to produce children, “it has done so at enormous cost.” The group pointed to the thousands of embryos destroyed in the process, “undermining the dignity of the human person.”



The Catechism gives these reasons as to why the Church is against in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination:

2373 Sacred Scripture and the Church's traditional practice see in large families a sign of God's blessing and the parents' generosity.163


2374 Couples who discover that they are sterile suffer greatly. "What will you give me," asks Abraham of God, "for I continue childless?"164 And Rachel cries to her husband Jacob, "Give me children, or I shall die!"165

2375 Research aimed at reducing human sterility is to be encouraged, on condition that it is placed "at the service of the human person, of his inalienable rights, and his true and integral good according to the design and will of God."166

2376 Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral. These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage. They betray the spouses' "right to become a father and a mother only through each other."167

2377 Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that "entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children."168 "Under the moral aspect procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not willed as the fruit of the conjugal act, that is to say, of the specific act of the spouses' union . . . . Only respect for the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and respect for the unity of the human being make possible procreation in conformity with the dignity of the person."169

2378 A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The "supreme gift of marriage" is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged "right to a child" would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right "to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents," and "the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception."170

2379 The Gospel shows that physical sterility is not an absolute evil. Spouses who still suffer from infertility after exhausting legitimate medical procedures should unite themselves with the Lord's Cross, the source of all spiritual fecundity. They can give expression to their generosity by adopting abandoned children or performing demanding services for others.

Morality of IVF

Archbishop Fulton J Sheen Speaks on Peter, Vicar of Christ