The Vatican’s top teaching office issued a firm statement Nov. 25 defending monogamous marriage and calling for a renewed effort to educate young people about the richness of the marital union in contrast with the selfishness and immodesty that prevails in secular conceptions of sexuality.
The document, titled “Una caro: in praise of monogamy,” was published in Italian by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF). The DDF has not yet published the text in English.
According to Vatican News, the document addresses the “global context of expanding technological power” and the concept of human beings as “creatures without limits.” It also distinguishes the value of marriage as an exclusive union between two persons as opposed to the increasingly popular trends of “polyamory” in the Western world.
True Christian marriage “mirrors ‘the union between Christ and his beloved bride, the Church,’” Vatican News reported, quoting the document. “Addressed primarily to bishops, the doctrinal Note is also meant to help young people, engaged couples, and spouses grasp ‘the richness’ of Christian marriage, fostering ‘calm reflection and sustained deepening’ on the topic.”
Against manipulative or possessive relationships
Marriage involves mutual giving and therefore a kind of mutual belonging, the document outlines, but “the mutual belonging proper to exclusive reciprocal love requires delicate care, a holy fear of violating the other’s freedom, who possesses the same dignity and therefore the same rights.”
“One who loves knows that ‘the other cannot be used as a means to solve one’s own frustrations,’ and that one’s inner emptiness must never be filled ‘by exercising power over the other,’” the text states, according to Vatican News. “The Note deplores ‘the many forms of unhealthy desire that lead to explicit or subtle violence, oppression, psychological pressure, control, and ultimately suffocation.’ These are ‘failures of respect and reverence for the dignity of the other.’”
The DDF also points to the value of prayer in marriage, a “precious” means by which couples can grow closer to one another and form a vital friendship that leads to each person closer to their fulfillment.
Children
“Conjugal charity also expresses itself in fruitfulness, ‘though this does not mean that every sexual act must explicitly aim at procreation,’” the note states, according to Vatican News, which reported that the DDF defended the validity and essence of marriages even when they remain childless: “The Note also affirms the legitimacy of respecting natural periods of infertility.”
The need to form new generations
The DDF decries a number of strains of thought that have pervaded the public square, obscuring the nature and value of marriage for younger generations. A culture of “postmodern consumerist individualism” stands in the way, as well as the “universe of social media, where modesty vanishes and symbolic and sexual violence proliferate,” the document states, according to Vatican News.
That cultural context “shows the urgency of a new pedagogy.”
“New generations must be prepared to welcome love as a profound human mystery, presenting it not as a mere impulse but as a call to responsibility and ‘a capacity for hope that involves the whole person,’” Vatican News reported.
One avenue of reinculcating society with a proper understanding of marriage is a reemphasis of the Church’s teachings on each person’s relationship to their neighbors. The charity owed by the Christian individual to his or her community, and in particular to the poor, is an antidote to the same self-focus and individualism that obscures the meaning of marriage, the DDF suggests.
“In conclusion,” the outlet reported, “the Note reaffirms that ‘every authentic marriage is a unity composed of two individuals, requiring a relationship so intimate and totalizing that it cannot be shared with others.’ Thus, of the two essential properties of the marital bond—unity and indissolubility—it is unity that grounds indissolubility. Only then can conjugal love become a dynamic reality, called to continual growth and development over time, rooted in a ‘promise of the infinite.’”
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