Vatican
City, 26 January 2013
(VIS) – This morning in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic
Palace, the Holy Father received members of the Tribunal of the Roman
Rota on the occasion of the opening of the judicial year. His
address, from which ample extracts follow, focused on the
relationship between faith and marriage in light of the "current
crisis of faith that affects various areas of the world, bearing with
it a crisis of conjugal society."
“The
Code of Canon Law defines the natural reality of marriage as the
irrevocable covenant between a man and a woman. Mutual trust, in
fact, is the indispensable basis of any agreement or covenant. On a
theological level, the relationship between faith and marriage has an
even deeper meaning. Even though a natural reality, the spousal bond
between two baptised persons has been elevated by Christ to the
dignity of a sacrament.”
“Contemporary
culture, marked by a strong subjectivism and an ethical and religious
relativism, poses serious challenges to the person and the family.
First, the very capacity of human beings to bond themselves to
another and whether a union that lasts an entire life is truly
possible. … Thinking that persons might become themselves while
remaining ‘autonomous’ and only entering into relationships with
others that can be interrupted at any time is part of a widespread
mentality. Everyone is aware of how a human being's choice to bind
themself with a bond lasting an entire life influences each person’s
basic perspective according to which they are either anchored to a
merely human plane or open themselves to the light of faith in the
Lord.”
"‘Whoever
remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me
you can do nothing,’ Jesus taught His disciples, reminding them of
the human being’s essential incapacity to carry out alone that
which is necessary for the true good. Rejecting the divine proposal
leads, in fact, to a profound imbalance in all human relationships,
including marriage, and facilitates an erroneous understanding of
freedom and self-realization. These, together with the flight from
patiently borne suffering, condemns humanity to becoming locked
within its own selfishness and self-centredness. On the contrary,
accepting faith makes human persons capable of giving themselves …
and thus of discovering the extent of being a human person."
“Faith
in God, sustained by God’s grace, is therefore a very important
element in living mutual devotion and conjugal faithfulness. This
does not mean to assert that faithfulness, among other properties,
are not possible in the legitimate marriage between unbaptised
couples. In fact, it is not devoid of goods that ‘come from God the
Creator and are included, in a certain inchoative way, in the marital
love that unites Christ with His Church’. But, of course, closing
oneself off from God or rejecting the sacred dimension of the
conjugal bond and its value in the order of grace make the concrete
embodiment of the highest model of marriage conceived of by the
Church, according to God’s plan, arduous. It may even undermine the
very validity of the covenant if … it results in a rejection of the
very principle of the conjugal obligation of faithfulness or of other
essential elements or properties of the marriage.”
“Tertullian,
in his famous “Letter to His Wife”, which speaks about married
life marked by faith, writes that Christian couples are truly ‘two
in one flesh. Where the flesh is one, one is the spirit too. Together
they pray, together prostrate themselves, together perform their
fasts; mutually teaching, mutually exhorting, mutually sustaining one
another.’"
“The
saints who lived their matrimonial and familial union within a
Christian perspective were able to overcome even the most adverse
situations, sometimes achieving the sanctification of their spouse
and children through a love reinforced by a strong faith in God,
sincere religious piety, and an intense sacramental life. Such
experiences, marked by faith, allow us to understand, even today, how
precious is the sacrifice offered by the spouse who has been
abandoned or who has suffered a divorce—'being well aware that the
valid marriage bond is indissoluble, and refraining from becoming
involved in a new union. … In such cases their example of fidelity
and Christian consistency takes on particular value as a witness
before the world and the Church'.”
Lastly,
I would like to reflect briefly on the ‘bonum coniugum’. Faith is
important in carrying out the authentic conjugal good, which consists
simply in wanting, always and in every case, the welfare of the
other, on the basis of a true and indissoluble ‘consortium vitae’.
Indeed, the context of Christian spouses living a true ‘communio
coniugalis’ has its own dynamism of faith by which the
‘confessio’—the personal, sincere response to the announcement
of salvation—involves the believer in the action of God’s love.
‘Confessio' and ‘caritas’ are 'the two ways in which God
involves us, make us act with Him, in Him and for humanity, for His
creation. … “Confessio” is not an abstract thing, it is
“caritas”, it is love. Only in this way is it really the
reflection of divine truth, which as truth is also, inseparably,
love'.”
“Only
through the call of love, does the presence of the Gospel become not
just a word but a living reality. In other words, while it is true
that ‘Faith without charity bears no fruit, while charity without
faith would be a sentiment constantly at the mercy of doubt’, we
must conclude that ‘Faith and charity each require the other, in
such a way that each allows the other to set out along its respective
path.’ If this holds true in the broader context of communal life,
it should be even more valuable to the conjugal union. It is in that
union, in fact, that faith makes the spouses’ love grow and bear
fruit, giving space to the presence of the Triune God and making the
conjugal life itself, lived thusly, to be ‘joyful news’ to the
world.”
“I
recognize the difficulties, from a legal and a practical perspective,
in elucidating the essential element of the ‘bonum coniugum’,
understood so far mainly in relation to the circumstance of
invalidity. The ‘bonum coniugum’ also takes on importance in the
area of simulating consent. Certainly, in cases submitted to your
judgement, there will be an ‘in facto’ inquiry that can verify
the possible validity of the grounds for annulment, predominant to or
coexistent with the three Augustinian ‘goods’: procreativity,
exclusivity, and perpetuity. Therefore, don’t let it escape your
consideration that there might be cases where, precisely because of
the absence of faith, the good of the spouses is damaged and thus
excluded from the consent itself. For example, this can happen when
one member of the couple has an erroneous understanding of the
martial bond or of the principle of parity or when there is a refusal
of the dual union that characterizes the marital bond by either
excluding fidelity or by excluding the use of intercourse ‘humano
modo’.
“With
these considerations I certainly do not wish to suggest any facile
relationship between a lack of faith and the invalidity of a marital
union, but rather to highlight how such a deficiency may, but not
necessarily, damage the goods of marriage, since the reference to the
natural order desired by God is inherent to the conjugal covenant.”
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