Your marriage is a holy union. Protect it from the evil one’s subtle and cunning pitfalls that can come along the marital path (especially when we are weak or feeling alone).

From Dear Newlyweds by Pope Pius XII

SECRETLY UNFAITHFUL

The law of the Divine Redeemer, which is a law of love, also protects and preserves true love and true fidelity. It is a law of love which is not confined to the detailed and formal provisions of a code, but penetrates the spirit, the heart, to the point of excluding even the sin of desire (Mt. 5:27-28).

Could there be, then, despite appearances, a secret infidelity hidden in the most intimate recesses of the heart? Without doubt, for out of the heart, says Our Lord, come evil thoughts and other iniquities (Mt. 15:19). And yet this sin of secret infidelity is unfortunately so frequent that the world pays no attention to it and the lulled conscience grows used to it, like the spell of an illusion.

However, true fidelity which has as its object and foundation the mutual gift not only of the bodies of the wedded couple, but their spirits and hearts as well, opposes and overcomes every deceptive charm. Is it not perhaps true that the least infraction of this exquisite and ardent fidelity, leads sooner or later to breakdowns of married life and happiness?

With the wedding ring as its symbol, fidelity is truly a most delicate virtue! Before it was formulated and taught by Our Lord, it had been carved by the Creator in the depths of honest hearts, as exemplified by Job’s famous saying that he had made a covenant with his eyes to refrain from any impure look.

Compare such an austere restriction, which is the prerogative of any soul that is its own master, with the conduct of so many Christians washed from birth in the waters of regeneration and raised in the glowing light of the Gospel. Like children accustomed to regarding the anguish of maternal solicitude as an exaggeration, they smile at the moral anxiety of their mother the Church.

And yet she is not the only one to give thought to this; all serious persons, even those who are far from the Christian concept, utter a cry of alarm. Along the public roads, on the beaches, at entertainments, women and girls shamelessly expose themselves to impertinent and sensuous glances, to indecent solicitation and unseemly promiscuity.

How violently the passions are aroused under such conditions and encounters! With the exception of the final step, the descent into formal infidelity—supposing that by some miracle they do not go this far—what difference would there be between such habits and the conduct of those unfortunates who openly cast aside all shame?

Unless we blame the decline of their sense of morality, we cannot understand how honorable men tolerate the bold looks and familiarities which their wives and fiancées permit other men or how a fiancé or a wife who values her dignity could stand for the husband’s or fiancées taking such liberties and intimacies with other women. Who does not see the last dying flame of honest feeling revolt and rise up against such grave outrages to the holy fidelity of chaste and legitimate love?

But we have said enough concerning these regrettable and disconcerting debasements. In the order of the spirit and the heart, discernment between good and evil is even more delicate. It is true that there are natural tendencies, blameless in themselves, for which present living conditions offer easy and frequent outlets. Whatever danger they may sometimes present, they do not, of themselves, offend fidelity.

Nevertheless, we must warn you against any secretly sensual intimacies, against love that would be called platonic but which is all too frequently merely the prelude to, or discreet veil for, an affection less pure and licit.

As long as intellectual attraction is limited to sincere and spontaneous agreement on ideals, to the enjoyment and admiration of a soul’s grandeur and nobility, it is without reproach. Nevertheless, St. John of the Cross warns these same spiritual persons against deviations which could follow from this.

Imperceptibly, the proper order of things is often turned about, so that an honest attraction for a person, arising from a similarity in thinking, habits or character, reaches a point, by unconscious consent, where a person harmonizes and conforms his own views and ideas to the views and ideas of the one he admires.

At first, one gives ground on trifling questions, then on more serious subjects—on matters of a practical nature, on more intimate topics of art and taste, then in the truly intellectual or philosophical field, and finally on religious and moral doctrine, to the point of renouncing one’s own personal criteria so that one thinks and judges only under the other’s influence.

Principles are subverted, norms of living are abandoned. While the human spirit naturally, and often to the point of excess, proudly adheres to its own opinions, how can one then explain such an easy submission and complete subjection to the ideas of another?

But at the same time that the spirit in this way comes gradually to be modeled on that of a stranger, each day it becomes more alienated from the soul of its lawful husband or wife. To everything the husband or wife thinks or says, one begins to react with an irresistible instinct to contradict, with irritation, with scorn.

This feeling, unconscious perhaps but no less dangerous, indicates that the mind has been conquered and monopolized, that there has been delivered into the power of someone else the spirit which had been irrevocably given on the wedding day. Is this fidelity?

Guard against a subtle and misunderstood illusion. It could be that through the influence of a noble ardent soul, motivated by purest zeal, an intellectual attraction would become the dawn of a conversion; but more frequently than not it is dawn only. Rarely does the morning light brighten to midday.

On the other hand, how many in this way have lost their faith and their Christian perception! Illustrious examples, even though they are rare indeed, seem sufficient to reassure some who imagine themselves a Beatrice or a Dante. In many cases, however, it develops that in their twofold blindness they tread upon the slippery edge of the road and both fall into the ditch.

Even supposing that the spirit was not, as has been said, the “dupe of the heart,” the heart, blind in its own right, is the spirit’s companion and does not hesitate in its onrush to drag the spirit along as well. Once the spirit gives way, the heart yields, but not without becoming unfaithful to the person to whom it was given in the beginning in an indissoluble bond.

The world is content to proclaim as faithful the wife who has not physically committed a fault, to boast of her magnificent fidelity because, perhaps by heroic sacrifice, but only human heroism, she continues to live without love at the side of the husband to whom she had joined her life, while her heart, her whole heart, belongs definitely, passionately to another.

 More saintly and austere is the morality of Christ!

One may try to exalt the nobility of a pretended union of hearts chastely joined “as the stars and the palms,” to wrap this passion in the cloud of empty religiosity, which is only nonsense nourished by poetry and novels, not by the Gospel or by the Christian bond. They may try to fool themselves into continuing this love in lofty serenity, but nature, after original sin, is not so receptive to conceited aphorisms of deluded spirits. Fidelity was already violated by the illicit passion of the heart.

Young husbands and wives, guard against these illusions! Illumined by the Divine Light, under the protection of Mary, Mother Most Pure, love each other in a holy way, drawing ever closer your lives, your spirits and your hearts.

In a happy home, parents often hold firm against other allurements which tempt them to put the needs of their children in an inferior place. Such allurements include the desire for an overly active social life, the constant pursuit of pleasure in the form of commercial entertainment and the exclusive choice of hobbies (golf, cards, dancing clubs, etc.) from which children are excluded. -Fr. George Kelly, 1950’s

Beautiful Wire Wrapped Rosaries! Lovely, Durable. Each link is wrapped around itself to ensure quality. Available here.

by Emerson Hynes St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota

+J. H. Schlarman Bishop of Peoria President NCRLC

Sacramental Protection of the Family

(Notes from a talk by Emerson Hynes to the Rural Life Summer School, St. Bede College, June 25, 1945.)

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on the Catholic home and rural living. For I believe deeply that, even in this tempestuous world, where headlines dealing with military movements of millions are the order of the day, where the decisions of leaders are apparently shaping the future of all of us, where the charter of nations at San Francisco encompasses the whole world–even in such a world the most important things are still the Family and the Church.

None of us will question the position of the Church. But I wonder if we do not have a tendency to regard the family as less important than we should. Theoretically, of course, we know and preach its place. But in fact we like to talk and plan in terms of modern science, the state, of so many billions of units of this and that, of a national income of 160 billion dollars, of full employment and 60 million jobs, of international economic and social and military cooperation.

Those are challenging objectives. We are aiming at a better world. And it is a world of mass production and of science. I do not mean to decry these objectives or to suggest that we do not need to be concerned with planning on a large scale.

It is rather that we must always keep in mind that all this has meaning only in terms of human persons and of human families. All this size, all this science, all this production, is good only if it contributes to better living for persons. And persons live most intimately and most of their time in that little unit called the family.

The Family the Basis of the Future

We must see, first, that the family is really the basis of the future. We cannot start at the top with international organization and imagine that other things will work out all right. We must start at the bottom.

That does not mean automatically that the top will work. But it is the first requisite. Hence every leader can have hope and consolation.

No matter how dark the world picture is, he can do effective work. No matter how little cooperation he gets from others in the wider circle of social activities, he can always make progress with his own little group.

No matter that society seems to be destroying itself, he can always be building it by building the families under his care.

G.K. Chesterton, with his flair for seeing the important in the commonplace, once made a striking analogy by comparing the family to a cabbage.

A prosaic soul, he said, would think, while walking in the garden, that a cabbage was a very ordinary vegetable. But a man of vision would be struck by the grandeur, by the monstrousness of that gigantic head of cabbage growing from a tiny taproot in the soil. That something so large and bulky could come from one little root!

So it is with the family, which seems small, like one of millions of roots in the fields. But it bulks large in importance as it grows and matures. In itself it is “wild and elemental.” It is dwarfed by the whole field, yet it is a supreme object in itself.

It is the place where the basic processes of life occur by nature: birth, growth, and death. It is able to produce the greatest love and the greatest hatred, too; the greatest joy and equally the most stinging sorrow.

So we must recognize the importance of the family in the lives of men. We must shape our thinking to better the family; and in so doing we shall be performing the most important and most revolutionary work possible. We can never be discouraged if we are improving family life.

1. The Sacramental Aspect of Family Life

It is but natural that priests and other Catholics should think first of the spiritual side of marriage. It is not only tremendously important. It is our unique treasure.

All leaders of good will can work with us and we with them to improve the family wage, the family housing, the family health, the family recreational facilities.

But our specific gift is the fact that marriage is a sacrament, instituted by Christ to be a source of grace. And how urgently that grace is needed! For it gives parents the strength to endure much. After all, material standards are relative. The necessities of life today were undreamed of only a century ago. The best house in the nation in 1850 would be substandard today.

The troubles and inconveniences should be avoided; but merely avoiding them will not make healthy family life. It is the spirit that counts.

From the fact that marriage is a sacrament, several points follow:

A. Marriage is a continuous sacrament. This truth was stressed by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical on marriage. We heads of Catholic families need to be reminded of that fact repeatedly. We cannot be told too often.

Marriage is not a sacrament merely on the wedding day. It is a continuous “sign instituted by Christ to give grace.” How consoling it is for parents to know this!

How it gives them strength! How it checks them when human weakness inclines them to quarrel! How it increases the joy of their two-in-one-ship! How it enables them to see their children as blessings! How it helps them to offer up to God their daily work: their care of children, their meals, their play, their household tasks.

Who would dare to bicker and quarrel and deliberately sin in the presence of the other six sacraments? Who dares to despair, then?

Even so, Catholic parents can be led to understand and then practice the same joyful spirit in their special sacrament. We stand in great need of explanation. That is a place where any servant of Christ can begin to improve family life. Tell us of the beauty and depth and grace of marriage.

B. From the first point it follows that marriage is a vocation. Truly it is a religious vocation, in the broad sense of that term. It is a way of salvation, chosen by the majority of the people. And since it is a way of salvation, it must be looked upon as such.

Marriage should not be viewed simply as a proper means of perpetuating the human race. Every marriage is that, pagan (or natural) or Christian. It surely should not be viewed merely as a legitimate means of quieting concupiscence. That is a secondary aspect.

The special thing about a Christian marriage is that it is truly a means of serving God, a way of salvation. And how marvelous and mysterious it is! For by choosing the way of marriage, man and woman no longer work alone for salvation, but together in a most intimate way.

Their marriage is a means to sanctity, and the advance of one should be a help to the other; the defect of one will weigh down the other. In any event, we need to realize more than we do that marriage is a vocation, a chosen way of serving God. And in that realization the family will take on new and deeper meaning.

How blessed the parents will see they are! They have all the joys of the natural family. But over and above, they have, in their sacrament, a religious way of life, too.

How much more important the family becomes as we begin to see that, although in a different way, we are serving God as are the priest and the nun! It will not solve all difficulties, of course, just as ordination or solemn vows do not automatically make perfect men. But you know what an aid to perfection is the knowledge of one’s vocation. So it should be with Catholic parents.

C. If marriage is a continuous sacrament and a true vocation, then daily family living must give evidence that it is a religious life. Both in the spirit of the members and in the externals of the home itself religion must be evidenced. Here we Catholic parents need help. We need instruction and we need confidence..

“You should fear nothing, if you are equipped with the strongest spiritual weapon —Holy Communion. It prevents mortal sin—the greatest evil in the world—from taking root in your soul and even washes away the stains of venial sin so long as you have no affection for it nor desire to commit it in the future. The coming of Jesus in Holy Communion awakens new love in your heart and encourages you to live in purity and sinlessness, which is a necessary condition for happiness.” -Clean Love in Courtship, Fr. Lovasik http://amzn.to/2fOwQm9 (afflink)

 

As no sensible person would make a long road trip without first consulting a map, so the person intent upon gaining Heaven should first resort to a competent guide to reach that Goal of all goals. And no better guide to Heaven exists than An Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), Doctor of the Church. It is at once easy to read, being laid out in short chapters, yet thorough, authoritative, reliable, kind and gentle a mirror of its author. It is a book, moreover, for all, because all are called to the devout life. True devotion to God, the author points out, adorns every vocation. The devout life, moreover, is a lovely, a pleasant, and a happy life.

If your life seems to make no sense, or if you don’t know which path to take, St. Francis de Sales will console and inform you. In this warm little book, he explains to you what God’s will is and how He reveals it yes, even to you, and even in the seemingly random events of your life.

No matter what you’re going through now (or may have gone through), you’ll see why you should love and trust in God’s will and long for its fulfillment. Best of all, you’ll learn a sure method for discovering God’s will in any situation today!

As you begin to discern God’s loving hand even in seemingly chaotic events, St. Francis de Sales will lead your mind and your heart to the still waters of God’s gentle consolation.

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