THE VOCATION OF MARRIAGE IN GOD’S PLAN by Archbishop J. Francis Stafford
The Archbishop of Denver delivered this address in August, 1994 to the International Congress on the Family in Lima, Peru.
Before Discussion Notes:
- Struggling for the family– The struggle for the family will be won or lost not by the United States and industrialized Europe, but by nations and cultures in the southern hemisphere, such as your own, because you have not yet abdicated your common sense. You have not yet lost your soul.
- Marriage as vocation or contract– For example, when the Church speaks of “vocation,” she means a calling out to each person to accomplish a task preordained by God in the co-redemption of the world. The highest joy in life for a Christian is searching out, discovering, and pursuing the purpose for which God called him into existence. The idea of vocation implies and demands a larger design to life.
- Creation, chance, and necessity– Christians believe that God has revealed himself through the encounters, in creation and in history, between infinite divine freedom and finite human freedom. The world simply does not believe in that revelation; or if it does believe, God is nothing more than an impersonal force or universal consciousness without direct involvement in the life of humanity.
- Finally, without God, there can be no plan to creation. All is either by chance or necessity. For the Christian, all created beings have meaning; they are part of a grand symphony giving glory to the one triune God who out of love freely creates the world.
- Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown– In other words, contrary to the mythology of the past 25 years in the United States and Europe, divorce is a disaster for children. They do not “bounce back” from it. This trauma is deep and long-lasting, and it manifests itself in a great variety of ways.
- The American model– I take great pride in my country’s founding and framing principles. But something has gone wrong with the North American social fabric today, and instead of addressing it and attempting to heal it, we exalt and export it.
- The family, in its very structure, is a rejection of fear and an expression of hope. Its natural fertility brings the future into human flesh. It is the origin of life. The family has the privilege of being the domestic Church. It’s the doorway by which the triune God enters into humanity. That’s why the modern technological state fears it, and seeks to limit, dilute, and control it, to break it down even when the practical results of that breakdown are so destructive. The family is a competing, sovereign source of meaning. It demands unselfishness. It teaches community. It inculcates higher values that claim an authority independent of the state.
- The vocation of marriage in God’s plan today is a call to loving opposition and missionary zeal: opposition to the culture of death and zeal to spread the truth about the nature of the human person, which is fully revealed in Jesus Christ.
- Reflection of the Trinity– There is much more to Christian marriage than opposition. Christian marriage is not passive. Love is openly receptive. It creates new life. It renews humanity. It is an echo, in human flesh, of the sacred, creative ecology of love within the Trinity itself.
- Every moment of every day, a mother and father are teaching, guiding, and sanctifying each other and their children, while witnessing about their love to the world beyond the borders of their home. They cannot do otherwise. The structure of the marital covenant, if lived fruitfully and faithfully, takes them along this way, a way which leads to the eternal banquet of the Lamb with his Bride.
- The marital covenant provides a security to both spouses which enables each to come to full personal realization through the total gift of self to the other. The spouses thereby manifest the splendor of God’s Trinitarian love to the world.
- In this light we comprehend the divine plan that marriage is the foundation and guarantee of the family, and the family is the foundation and guarantee of society. Nothing else will serve; not government, not technology, not shared economic interests, not the will to individual self-fulfillment.
- It is within the intimate, personal community of the family that a child first learns those basic virtues like religious piety, loyalty, honesty, and selfless concern for others. Civil discourse in the public forum is absolutely dependent upon the cultivator of these virtues.
- The marital covenant is a mystery of unfathomable depths; it is charged with the miraculous. And the family, founded upon the marriage covenant, safeguards our fundamental social sense of community, because within it the child grows up in a web of intimately connected rights and responsibilities to others. It also protects our unique, individual identity, because it introduces the child into a sheltering and all-encompassing maternal love. And precisely here we find unfolding what John Paul II has described as “the radiation of fatherhood.” Here is present the enduring mystery of marriage. We most easily understand and believe in love when we, ourselves, are the fruit of spousal tenderness, forgiveness, and fidelity. Love lived in a family is the unanswerable argument for God—and also for the worthiness of the human heart.
- Holiness and truth– Every vocation is a call to holiness, and marriage is no exception. But what exactly does holiness mean? In everyday language, we use the words “good” and “holy” almost interchangeably. Holy people are, of course, also good people. These two words do not mean the same thing, however. “Holy” comes from the Hebrew word <kadosh>, which means “other than.” God is holy because he is “other than” us. His ways are not the ways of the world.
- We must remember that God is Truth. If we sincerely seek God, if we earnestly search for the truth, we will necessarily become more like him and contribute to the building up of the civilization of love.
- While we must not be conformed to the world, neither do we have a license to condemn it, or withdraw from it. God put us here to help him complete his work of redemption—because he loves the world. That’s why he sent his Son to die for it. As we realize in wonder and joy our call to holiness, so we draw the “groaning” creation toward fulfillment by our priestly mediation. This balance of love for the world and opposition to its ways is a difficult one.
- Missionary zeal– I have seen again and again that the human heart was made for the truth, and that people are hungry for the truth and will choose it, when they come to know that the way to the truth is Christ. But too often we treat the cross of Christ as if it were a “department” of our life, rather than its foundation.
- The personal love of each spouse for the other must be surrounded by the gleam of God’s glory. They do their best preaching, of course, by example. A married couple who models love becomes a beacon for other couples. At the same time, our families do need to recover an outward-looking zeal in spreading the Gospel of Christ and his saving death on the cross.
- No Catholic family can afford to be lukewarm about the mystery of Christ and the mystery of the Church.
- The vocation of marriage is to build, one soul at a time, the civilization of love—a city of abundant life which, in God’s plan, will one day embrace all creation. I am here in Lima to tell you that it is not a dream. I have seen it.
Though I pulled many excerpts for our notes, the address in its entirety is in the link above and here. As Catholics living in America during this time, I believe this address from 1994 is worth reading and deeply contemplating.
Farm to Jesus 