Lesson 21: Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders BY FATHER ROBERT ALTIER

In this lesson, we are going to look at the last two of the sacraments that have not been covered yet: Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders. These two sacraments look to the spiritual welfare of Christians.

Matrimony is that sacrament in which a baptized man and a baptized woman enter into a permanent communion of life and love by mutual agreement for the generation and the education of children, and in which they receive God’s grace to help them to grow in holiness and to fulfill the duties of their state of life.

If we look at that a little bit, first of all, we realize that the matter for the sacrament of Holy Matrimony is a male and a female who are both free to be married. If someone has made vows as a religious, if someone has been ordained as a priest, or if there is some other impediment in the way, that individual would not be able to be married. But it is part and parcel of the sacrament that it must be a male and a female. As Catholics, we have to recognize that this is the essence of the sacrament.

All of these unfortunate things that we have going on in society right now, trying to say that marriage can be two men or two women or a man and a dog (or whatever it is they want to try to get married to) cannot happen, and it never can happen regardless of what any other group wants to claim. It cannot be recognized in any way, shape, or form as marriage because it goes directly against the definition of marriage and it goes precisely against what the sacrament was founded to do. If you stop to think about it, the first end of marriage is children.

Two males cannot have a baby, and two females cannot have a baby. It does not work. There are lots of reasons we could go into, but essentially that is what it comes down to.

Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier

Lesson 21: Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders

So the sacrament is between a baptized male and a baptized female who enter into a permanent communion of life and love. The vows are for life. It is for the procreation and education of the children and the unity of the couple. As with all the sacraments, you receive the grace of God. There is an increase of sanctifying grace and also all of the actual graces, the sacramental graces, to help you live according to the state in life through all the things that will be entailed in the marriage.

If you look at marriage on a merely natural level, it is a contract. The state says that you have entered into a contractual agreement. If you think of a contractual agreement from a business perspective, you enter into an agreement with another business to provide goods and services, and if you do not like the goods and services being provided then you just break the contract and sign on with somebody else who is going to provide the goods and services you desire. That is how the state looks at marriage. It is a contract between two parties. It is a piece of paper that holds the two together, and if you do not like the goods and services being provided by the other party, you just go back to the judge and break the contract. Then you find somebody else and sign a new contract. And if you do not like that one after a while, well, go and try it again. From the state’s perspective, they do not care how many times you do this, as long as it is all done legally. You have to get a legal divorce; in other words, break the contract and then you can get legally remarried.

But the Church does not see it that way. Marriage, from the point of view of the Church, is not merely natural. There is a natural element to it, so we have to recognize the civil aspect of the marriage, but it is a sacrament. Therefore, it is something which is spiritual; it is holy. It is not merely a contract. Marriage is a covenant. A covenant is an agreement between God and His people, with God making promises on one side and the people making promises on the other. All covenants have three elements. They are permanent, faithful, and life giving. That is precisely what the couple promises right before they make their vows, that it is for life, it is permanent, and there will not be a third in there. It is only two, it is for life, and it is to give life. You are open to the possibility of children. That is precisely what a couple enters into. And this builds upon the covenant you have already entered into on the day you were baptized, because baptism is entrance into the covenant. Now you enter into another covenant which builds upon the baptismal covenant, and you cannot enter into this covenant unless you are already a baptized person. That is why it is between a baptized male and a baptized female. You have to be a member of Jesus Christ before you can enter into a sacramental marriage. It cannot be a covenant if there is not baptism already.

The purpose of this is to make you holy. This is how most people are going to become saints or fail to become saints: by the way they live their married life. People need to understand that in this day and age where divorce is so common. You have made a vow to God, and a vow is binding under the pain of sin. It is a vow to love this person every day for the rest of your life. You did not vow to love this person as long as you feel like you are being loved: “As long as I’m happy, as long as I’m being fulfilled, as long as I’m getting what I want, then I’ll love you.” That is not what you said. It is an unconditional vow to Almighty God, as well as to this other person, that you will love that person every day and every moment of every day for the rest of your life regardless of what that person is doing toward you. To be married requires that you be a saint, and any married person understands that.

The point of marriage, then, is to become holy. You are to help one another become saints, and that can be done in one of two ways. There is the positive way in which two people truly loving one another in a selfless manner seek to build one another up by pointing out in charity the faults of the other, by helping the other to grow, by praying together, by building up the unity that is there, and helping one another to reach higher and higher in the spiritual life. That is what matrimony is supposed to be. I suspect in most marriages the way that you become a saint is the negative way, that is, by living with somebody and being such a pain that the only way they can live in the same house with you is by being a saint. Well, that is one way to become a saint. However, you did not make a vow to be a hairshirt for the other person. You made a vow to love that person.

Remember that the definition of love is doing always what is best for the other. So if you truly love this person, that means you serve this person. It is two people serving one another. It is two people giving themselves entirely to one another. That is what you vow in marriage. You are giving yourself away as a complete and total no-strings-attached gift to the other person, and you receive from the other person that same total, one hundred percent, no-strings-attached gift to yourself. Therefore, because you have taken the other and the other has taken you, you do not belong to yourself anymore. You have given yourself away completely, so there is nothing left of you to take back. And you receive the other person to yourself, so there is nothing left of that person that you can reject. You have taken on the identity of the other person, and you have also taken on the responsibility for the other person, to serve that person and to help that person to grow. That, again, is what you are supposed to be doing in marriage.

When that act of the will is made, when you give yourself completely to the other and you receive the gift of the other to yourself, then and only then, can that be expressed physically in and through the body. The body expresses physically what happens in the will. When we make an act of the will then we can express it physically. That is why the Church is so clear with regard to sexual morality outside of marriage, and it is also clear about sexuality within marriage. Sexuality is not a free for all. It is not a matter that “now we’re married and we can do anything and everything we want.” No, you still have to treat one another with absolute dignity. The sexual relationship is not to be selfish. It is not a question of what you get out of it; rather it is a question of what you are giving to the other person.

If it is done properly, the sexual relationship should be approached with the attitude of two people saying to themselves, “I want this to be the most wonderful thing for you. I want this to be a gift to you. I want this for you alone. I’m not looking for anything for myself; I just want this for you.” The other person is supposed to be saying the same thing to you. To receive the gift of the other is part of the gift that you give. To take from the other is using the other person, and to use another person is the opposite of loving them. If you are approaching the other person selfishly – “I want pleasure for myself” – that violates the dignity of the other person. Rather it is to love one another, not to use one another; two people giving and two people receiving, not two people taking from one another. Outside of marriage, every single sexual act is always a sin because it is never an act of love. It cannot be because you are not trying to express something that truly exists. It is a violation of the dignity of the persons involved, and it cannot work.

I teach the marriage class in school to the twelfth graders and I tell them, “What if the priests got sick one Sunday. Some flu bug went through the house and all of us were sick and could not get out of bed. We have twelve seminarians from this parish right now, a couple of them are even deacons, so if we can’t get out of bed to say Mass, why not have one of the seminarians do it? Or how about if we get one of the deacons, because after all that is like being engaged to be married, they’re going to be a priest soon, so why don’t we just have a deacon do it?” You would say, “No, they’re not a priest. We can’t do that.” And I will say the exact same thing to every person who is not married. Why can the deacon or the seminarian not do it even though it is their desire to be a priest? Because they are not a priest. They would be trying to express something that does not exist. They would say, “This is my body,” and, “This is my blood,” and it would only be words because it is not the reality.

It is exactly the same for any couple outside of marriage. They are trying to express something that does not exist. It is a lie and nothing real takes place. Externally, it looks exactly the same as what happens with a couple in marriage, but the reality internally is diametrically opposite. Rather than being an act of love, it is using one another. Our society wants to talk about making love all the time, but there are very few people who actually make love because they do not know what love even is. We have a lot of people using one another.

This is why the Church is so clear with regard to Her teaching on contraception, because every act of contraception is an act of using one another for selfish purposes. It is not an act of love; it cannot be because the act of love is a total self-giving. That is what you offered in marriage, your entire self, which includes the potential to be parents. If you put a contraceptive in the way, you are saying, “Externally, I’m going to make it look like I’m giving myself entirely to you, but I’m not. I’m holding something back for myself. Therefore, I want pleasure with no responsibility. In other words, I’m going to use you for my own pleasure.” That violates the dignity of the person, it violates the dignity of human sexuality, and it violates the vows that were made on the day you got married. That is why the Church is so clear about this.

Society presents contraception as being this great invention that we have come up with to help couples with their marriages. It has done exactly the opposite, and the Church made that clear. I would highly recommend that you read the encyclical Humanae Vitae from 1968. Pope Paul VI wrote it. You will see how prophetic it is. Everything that he said would happen if contraception was allowed is now happening. While people say, “Why doesn’t the Church get into the 21st century,” the Church was into the 21st century fifty years before the 21st century came around. The Church was looking ahead and saying, “These things will violate women. These things will violate marriage. These things are going to end up destroying the very thing they were designed to save.”

All you need to do is look throughout history. If you go back to the 1910s, the divorce rate was less than 10%. Around 1920, they invented vulcanized rubber and were able to make condoms. Immediately, the divorce rate jumped. With each new contraceptive that came out, the divorce rate jumped again. At the end of the 1960’s, they came out with the contraceptive pill and it was available for everybody who wanted it. The divorce rate jumped to about 55%, and it has stayed there ever since. It destroys marriage because it is not an act of love and nobody likes being used. Of course, it opens the door to infidelity because if you can have relations with your spouse with no responsibility, then why not the person next door? Why not the secretary? Why not anybody else? It just opens the door to irresponsibility, to selfishness, and to violations of human dignity.

That is why the Church is so opposed to these things, not because the Church wants to keep people down, not because the Church is so mean and antiquated and living in the Middle Ages, but rather because the Church wants what is truly best for the people of God. The Church does not want to see people being used because that violates their dignity. The Church is very clear about these things and has taken quite a beating because of it, but will not change and cannot change.

It is an interesting point, by the way, that every Christian denomination, even after the Protestant Reformation, always forbade and condemned the use of contraception in any form until 1931. When the Protestants met at the Lambeth Conference back in 1931, suddenly they discovered that it was okay to contracept because it was all right with the Bible. From the time of their inception until 1931, they all condemned it, but suddenly all Protestants simultaneously recognized that this was okay. (Sound familiar? They just did the same thing with homosexuality about five years ago.) So the Church had to come out immediately after that and uphold Her constant teaching because the Catholic Church is the only group that stands up against contraception, always has and always will. It violates very clearly what is in Sacred Scripture. It violates the teaching of the Church from day one and it always will, because it violates the human person, it violates the marriage vows, and it violates the purpose of human sexuality.

That is why the Church is opposed to any form of contraception – because it violates everything that marriage is about. Rather than building one another up to be saints, contraception tears one another down. You have to understand that if you are sinning against one another, you cannot build one another up because you are pulling one another down. That is what happens outside of marriage. You try to talk to couples outside of marriage about discerning, first of all, their vocation; and secondly, if they are called to be married to discern whether or not this is the person they are to be married to. If you are sinning with the other person, you cannot see clearly. Your mind gets messed up and you cannot think clearly if you are in the state of mortal sin. Then all of a sudden you say, “I have to try to discern whether or not this is the person I’m supposed to marry,” and it becomes an emotional decision, not a rational one, because you cannot think clearly. Is it possible that such a couple can get things worked out? Yes, but it is not going to be easy trying to shift gears after they have already learned how to use one another and to be selfish and suddenly say, “Okay, let’s not be selfish anymore. Let’s love one another completely in this manner.” Good luck! Because you have taught one another how to use each other, to shift gears halfway through is like trying to catch a runaway barge and get it turned around. It can be done, but it is not easy. That is why the Church wants to be so careful about what happens before marriage and within marriage so that it does not get turned the wrong direction, so that there are not people violating one another, but that the proper approach to one another is there. And that proper approach is to love.

There are only two ways you can treat another human being: You can either love the person or you can use the other person. To love them seeks their good, to use them seeks your good. You may not violate another person by using them. We have to make sure we understand why the Church teaches what She does. It is not enough just to say, “Oh, all the commercials tell me how great this is. The Church is living in the Middle Ages someplace and that’s just stupid. Why should I do that?” Look at what the Church teaches and understand why. You will see it makes perfect sense. And that is what the Church is truly interested in, what is truly the best. The Church loves Her children and only wants what is the very best for them.

The idea, then, is to make one another saints, to make one another holy, and to build one another up. When we look at the sacrament itself, the marriage results from the free consent given and received by the two parties. In other words, at what point are you married? At what point does the sacrament actually occur? The moment you make your vows and receive the vows from the other person is the very moment you are married, and at the moment you are married, your souls are joined together and a miracle happens. It is a reverse of what happened in the Garden of Eden. In the Garden of Eden, God started with one and He made two. In marriage, God starts with two and He makes one. There is a reunification of humanity. There is the fullness of humanity because neither the male nor the female had the fullness of what it is to be human. But in marriage, there is the fullness because the two are one. And when the two souls are united, then and only then can the two bodies be united, because the body expresses what is going on in the soul. It is not a game. It is not a hobby. In America, it has become the national pastime now, but that is not what sexuality is about. It has to be the expression of the love of two persons.

That, by the way, is what a child is. A child is the living, tangible, enfleshed sign of the love of a husband and a wife. When you look at your children, you should be able to see in that beautiful little face the love your spouse has for you and the love you have for your spouse because that is the living love of a husband and a wife. That is what a child is. A child is a product of love, and that is what the Church teaches. A child has a right to be conceived in love. The Church condemns in vitro fertilization and all these other sorts of things, not because the Church does not want to help couples that are infertile, but because a petri dish is not a place of love. It is not an act of love that conceives those babies; it is an act of selfishness. Nobody has a right to have a child. Nobody. What we have done is to say, “I have a right to have a baby, so I’ll do it any way that I can.” No, you do not have a right to have a baby. But a baby has a right to be conceived in love because it is a person made in the image and likeness of God. God is love, so a child should only be conceived in love, which comes right back to what we were talking about before: Anything that is not an act of love is an act of selfishness.

So what happens at the abortion mills? “We didn’t want to have a baby. All we wanted to do was have selfish pleasure. Now we’ve got this baby, so let’s get rid of the baby because we didn’t want him in the first place!” You see the fruit of selfishness; it is just more selfishness. The fruit of sin is more sin. Again, you see why the Church teaches what She does. If two people are truly in love with one another, even if at a particular time they did not think it was a good time to bring a baby into the world and a baby happens to be conceived, number one, the baby was conceived in love, and number two, they will accept the child in love even if they did not think this was the best time for something to happen. But if it is a selfish thing, they do not want the baby. The baby was not conceived in love, and the baby is not accepted in love. They do not want it, so they reject the child. That leads to a lot of the problems we are dealing with today.

When we look at this difference between marriage as a contract and marriage as a covenant, one thing to understand is that most Protestants and non-Christians hold to the idea that marriage is merely a natural contract. They do not recognize marriage as a covenant, and they do not recognize marriage as a sacrament. Marriage is one of the areas where Catholics and Protestants are at totally opposite ends of the spectrum, even from the point of view of where the focal point is. For Catholics, the sacrament is called “matrimony.” Matrimony comes from two Latin words: mater and munos. Mater means “mother.” Munos means “office.” It is the “office of holy motherhood.” Catholic marriage focuses on the woman and the children. If marriage is properly arranged, it is set up for stability and security so that a woman and her children will be protected and provided for. It is the proper place to bring children into the world and it is the proper way to be able to raise them.

For Protestants, the focus tends to be on the man, not on the woman. They have it completely turned backwards. A successful marriage is one in which the man is successful in his job, because that is the way Protestants see the vocation. The job is the vocation and the marriage is there to support the job. That is not the way Catholics see it. For Catholics, the marriage is the vocation and the job is there to support the family. In America, we have it backwards where we are making work and the job the top priority. That is not the way it is supposed to be. The work is an avocation, not a vocation. Your marriage is your vocation, and the work is there to support your family. We have it turned backwards in America, and we need to get it back where it belongs because it is destroying our families. People are trying to get their kids into everything they possibly can get them into, all they do is run and run and run, and there is no family time. They do not eat together. They do not have time together. The only time they have together is when they are in the car, and usually they are stuffing McDonald’s into their face because it is the only time they have to eat between piano lessons and soccer and hockey and swimming and whatever else they have to run to. There is no time together as a family. We need to look at what the priorities are and we need to make the family the priority – not sports, not anything else. The family needs to be the priority for the sake of the children. That is where it has to be.

When we look at marriage merely as a contract, this is why in the Protestant churches do not have a problem with divorce and remarriage. They are not recommending it, but they do not have a big problem with it either. You can get divorced and remarried as often as you want. Not so in the Catholic Church. The only person who can get remarried in the Catholic Church would be either someone who was widowed or someone who has an annulment. An annulment, as we talked about in a previous lesson, is a study of the marriage to determine whether or not a sacrament ever existed. If there was something so seriously wrong at the moment you made your vows that your two souls were not united together, then you are free to be married to somebody else because there was never a sacramental union with that other person. However, if God united your souls together, they are together until death. Death ends the marriage. The two souls separate at that moment. The reason for that is because marriage is a prefiguration of heaven.

When you think about what we are going to be able to live in heaven, it is a perfect union of one another with God. We will be united with God and we will be united with one another. The unity is going to be even more intimate than the union a married couple shares. The marriage bond ends with death so it can be replaced by something even more profound and even more intimate, something which is pure and perfect love. The married couple, then, is going to be united not only with one another in heaven, but with every member of the Mystical Body of Christ and with the Lord Himself. That is why Jesus said, In heaven, they are not married and given in marriage, because it is not just the two. You will know who your spouse was; you will know who your children are, but you are not going to be united as husband and wife in marriage because you will be united with everyone in the Mystical Body and all of us are the bride of Christ. Whether we are male of female does not matter; we are all members of the bride of Christ. He is the Bridegroom; we are the bride. All of us will be united in that in perfect love for God and for one another. Marriage prefigures what heaven is all about.

When we look at the exalted nature of marriage, the two sacraments that are most closely aligned symbolically are marriage and the Eucharist. All of the symbolism is identical, but on two entirely different levels, needless to say. What happens in the Eucharist? Jesus sacrifices Himself and He gives Himself to us as a total gift of self, Whom we receive into ourselves, and we are called to give ourselves to Him totally in return, complete giving and receiving of the whole person. That is exactly what is to happen in marriage. Obviously, there is much more than just that, but what is heaven? It is an eternal marriage banquet, we are told. And what do we feast on? The Lord – He is the banquet. If you put that into a marital context, we are the bride. And what does the bride receive? Her husband. She receives her husband into herself. That is what happens when we receive Holy Communion. We receive Jesus into ourselves and heaven is to be an eternal marriage banquet. It is not a sexual thing at all. It is a total receiving and total giving. We receive Our Lord. We feed on Him; we feast upon Him. We already do in Holy Communion, but Holy Communion is merely a foreshadowing of what we are going to be doing in heaven. And marriage is merely a foreshadowing of what we are going to do in heaven.

You see that marriage is not some second or third-rate thing. One of the tragic things a lot of Catholics fall into is this idea that, “Well, if I can’t be a priest or a nun, I guess I’ll have to settle for being married.” That is nonsense. Marriage is a vocation. It is a call from God. It is not something that is second-class in any way. It is a highly exalted vocation, and it is the means by which you will become a saint. It is not something to be looked down upon. It is not “less than.” Couples who are married are to be a symbol to those of us who are celibate of what we are called to in heaven. I should be able to look at you and see a foreshadowing of what we are called to in heaven. I should be able to see in a married couple a love so profound, a union so deep, that I can see a foreshadowing of what I am called to in heaven in that unity with Jesus and all the members of the Mystical Body. But I also, as a celibate, have to stand as a sign to married couples that as beautiful and profound as marriage is, there is something even more beautiful and more profound, and therefore there are some who give up the beauty of marriage and stand as a symbol to a married couple that there is something even more, that there is something we have foregone in this life for something which is even greater in the next. Both of us stand, then, as a sign to one another. Not that one is better than the other, that is not the case at all. Objectively, we can say that one is higher, but that does not mean one is better. It is a question of what God is calling you to. If He is calling you to be married, that is the highest state for you and that is the way you will become a saint. If you look at it and say, “I think God is calling me to be married, but if being a priest or a nun is considered higher, that’s what I want to do,” then you are not doing what God called you to do. If that is the case, you are never going to be fulfilled and you are not doing what is the best for you. God wants only what is the best. If He is calling you to be married, it is because that is the best for you. If He is calling you to be a priest or a nun, it is because that is what is best for you. But you have to pray and ask Him so that you will find the fulfillment God has for you. You will only be fulfilled when you are doing what God wants.

You can say, “Well, I love children and I love the idea of being married, so God must be calling me to be married.” Not necessarily. When you look at the teaching of the Church and the reality of the way the Church is, everything is at the service of the family. Everything revolves around the family. The family is the foundation of the Church. The family is called the “domestic church.” It is a microcosm of the universal Church. The family serves the Church, and the Church serves the family. The old saying is “Celibacy is not hereditary,” so obviously celibate vocations have to come out of families. If we do not have families, we do not have a Church; and if we do not have families, we do not have a society. That is why everything has to be at the service of the family, to make sure the family is being properly cared for and built up so that everything else functions properly. When the family does not function properly, society does not function properly and the Church does not function properly. Look at the mess we have out there. Where does it start? It starts with the family. If we do not have husbands and wives loving one another and raising their children the way they are supposed to, we are going to have chaos. Look at what we have. It all is founded on the family. We need to make sure that we are doing for the family what needs to be done so the family will be able to prosper, be built up, and grow.

What we have to recognize with marriage is that it is the will of Christ. You can find it in His teaching in Matthew 19 and Mark 10. That is where we recognize marriage as a sacrament. If you read it carefully, Jesus said (when asked about divorce), It was not so from the beginning. They came to test Him. What were they testing Him on? To see whether He was going to fall into this camp or that camp. There were a couple of different rabbis who were teaching different things, and where was He going to come down? He said, “No, I don’t come down on either side, but what God intended from the beginning.” You can look at it and say, “But in the beginning, that was before sin. Then we have Adam and Eve in there and they sinned, so we can’t do what God intended from the beginning.” In Christ, we can. If we live according to redeemed manhood and redeemed womanhood, we can do what God intended us to do. We can live according to the grace of God. We will not have the integrity that Adam and Eve had, but we can live the way God intended, and that is exactly what Jesus tells us. We have to go back to the beginning and see the way God created things to be if we are going to live married life the right way, according to God’s will. We can do that in Christ. If we live according to fallen humanity, no, we cannot live marriage the way Christ intended it. But if we live it according to redeemed humanity, then we can live married life the way Christ intended it.

Seeing that it is clearly the positive will of Christ, as Catholics we recognize marriage as something which is supernatural and holy. I mentioned earlier that the purpose of marriage is twofold. First is the procreation and education of the children. That is the primary purpose of getting married. And secondly is the unity of the couple. That is why it has to be permanent, faithful, and open to life so the two become one. There is no room for a third; it has to be faithful. It is permanent; your souls are put together for life. It is not a five-year test drive to see how you like it. It is forever. And it must be open to life, and that must be at all times. It is not enough to say, “You already had a couple of kids,” and so now you can get fixed, as they say. No, every act of marital union must be open to life. It does not mean you have to intend life every time, but it must always be open to life, which means you cannot put anything artificial in the way of being able to conceive life.

When we look also a little further at this, as a sacrament, we said there is the matter, the form, and the intention. We talked about the matter, the male and the female, who are both alive and free to be married. You cannot marry a dead person, you cannot marry an animal, you cannot marry somebody of your own sex, and you cannot marry somebody who is not free to be married. That takes care of that part. The form is the vows. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, we went through a tragic period where people were trying to make up their own vows. They are not married sacramentally. It might sound cute to say, “As long as the sky is blue and the butterflies are flying, I’ll be in love with you.” It’s neat, but you are not married. It sounds cute, but it does not work. It is just like me making up my own words at Mass. If I said, “These words…they’ve been saying the same thing for two thousand years; I’m tired of it. I’m making up my own because I want to be creative. I want the words of consecration to reflect who I am.” Well, you will walk away from Mass saying, “That was a piece of bread and a cup of wine,” because nothing happened. The same thing is true if you mess up your marriage vows. Nothing happens. That is the proper form of the marriage, so if the vows are messed up, your souls are not united. That is a real problem a lot of people are dealing with when they realize there was no sacrament involved when they made up their own vows.

The ministers of the sacrament of marriage are the husband and the wife, the male and female. The priest is not the minister of the sacrament. People will often say, “Father so-and-so married us.” No, he did not. You married one another. Father did not marry you. I always make that point very clearly at the rehearsal. The vows always start with the male, and inevitably the guy looks at me as we are about to do the vows, and I say, “No, no, no. Don’t look at me. You don’t want to marry me. Look at her.” She is much more beautiful to look at anyway, but regardless, they do not want to marry me and I do not want to marry them either. The point is that you marry one another and you are the ministers of the sacrament to one another, which means when we look at the intention of the minister, that is you. That is your intention as you are standing there, not my intention of what happens at a marriage. My task at a marriage is simply to be a witness, to make sure everything is proper. Did we have the proper matter? Did we have the proper form? Was there the proper intention (as much as we can tell)? That is why we ask right beforehand if you intend this to be permanent and faithful and open to life and so on. We do not ask it exactly that way, but that is what the questions are about. You have to answer in the affirmative before the ceremony is over; otherwise, there was not a marriage. If it is not positive, we are not going to move forward. You have to have the intention that this is going to be permanent, that this is going to be faithful, and that this is going to be open to life. If any of those points is not present at the moment you make your vows, there is no marriage. The state would say that you are married, but the Church does not. God does not because there was something seriously wrong at the moment you tried to make your vows. That is why you need to make sure you understand what you are doing and what the Church intends when you get married, because you are the minister of the sacrament to one another.

Priests, by the way, not only witness on behalf of the Church, but the interesting thing in the United States, which is different from almost every other country in the world, is that the priest or the minister or the rabbi (as the case may be) is also the witness on behalf of the state. In the United States, you only have to get married in one ceremony. In most countries, you have to go to the judge one day and the priest another day because the Church does not recognize the state’s marriage and the state does not recognize the Church’s marriage. But in the United States, for the good of the couple, they passed laws that say the Church’s minister can also be the witness for the state. That is why it is necessary that we have the marriage license from the state, or else I go to jail. If I try to witness the marriage of a couple that does not have permission of the state, because I am the witness for the state I wind up in jail. The church would say that the couple is married, but I will be in jail because the state will say, “You did something you were not supposed to do.” Priests are actually the witness for both.

With regard to the dignity of marriage, I should also point out that there is, as Saint Paul tells the Ephesians, the imitation of the love of Christ and His Church. There is also the imitation of the love of the three Persons of the Trinity. In the Trinity, three are one. What binds them? Love. It is three Persons giving themselves entirely to one another and receiving the gift of one another perfectly and entirely; therefore, they are one. And what are we? We are the overflow of the love of the three Persons of the Trinity, made in the image and likeness of God. But we are also the overflow of the love of our parents, made in the image and likeness of our parents. You see then that for a married couple there is that imitation of the Trinity because it is the man and the woman and God. God is the One Who unites your souls. So there are the three, and you are one united in love. Love by its very nature overflows any boundaries we can put upon it; therefore, the love overflows the boundaries of the couple and becomes life-giving for children, made in the image and likeness of the parents (who provide the physical matter for the body) and made in the image of likeness of God (Who provides the soul). They are cooperating in the work of creation. Talk about dignity.

As I mentioned earlier, this is not a second or third-class way of life. People will say things like “Oh, I don’t think I’m worthy to be a priest,” or, “I don’t think I’m worthy to be a nun.” Do you think you are worthy to have a baby? Do you think you’re worthy to form the conscience of this little, beautiful child? No one is worthy of that! It is a pure gift. And look at how much God trusts parents that He would entrust this little child to their care. It is really remarkable that even when they are eighteen years old or so God is going to entrust kids to them. But you can see the dignity. You are co-creating with God. This is not some minor thing. In fact, on the natural level, to be a mother is the highest thing anyone can ever do. There is nothing on the natural level that is higher than motherhood. It is the most profound and beautiful thing on earth. Again, this is not a second-class way of life. This is an exalted way of life. This is the way of saints that God is raising up. It is very profound and something the Church protects with everything She has.

As a sacrament, marriage has two distinguishing marks; the first is unity, the second is indissolubility. Unity, as I mentioned, is that the two become one. The indissolubility concerns the permanence of marriage until the death of one of the parties. Because of these points, the Church forbids polygamy and also polyandry because they oppose not only the explicit Scriptural teaching on marriage, but they also the ends of marriage. Polygamy means “many wives.” Polyandry means “many husbands.” In marriage, there is one husband and one wife, period. The indissolubility of the bond means that the marriage does not end until death. That is true even in the cases of heresy, domestic incompatibility, the willful desertion of one of the parties, or even adultery. None of these things ends the marriage. Your two souls are united until death. If you want to get remarried to somebody, you cannot kill your former spouse and say, “We’re not married anymore.” That is true, you are not, but you cannot get married to somebody else if you killed this other person. You cannot get away with that.

Divorce also opposes the two ends of marriage, the unity and the procreation and education of children, because we all know that children are the ones who bear the burden of marriage more than anybody. Divorce violates completely what marriage is all about.

The religious consequences of marriage are twofold: first there is the marriage bond, and then there is the grace of the sacrament. The marriage bond is the two people giving themselves to one another completely and being united in that bond of marriage so the two are one again. That bond remains, as I mentioned, until the death of one of the spouses. From the moment the vows are made until death, that marriage bond remains. The second effect of the sacrament of marriage is grace. Since marriage is holy and it is a sacrament, it gives sanctifying grace just like the other sacraments.

In marriage, when the couple exchange their wedding vows, they become instruments of God for the sanctification of one another. That is what you are promising: to build one another up in holiness. Grace is given not only on the wedding day, but throughout the entire course of the marriage. Because marriage is for life, the grace of God is there for life. He is giving to married couples every single grace necessary for everything that will ever occur in the course of their marriage, but you have to ask. The grace is there, but you have to avail yourself of it. God is not going to force His grace on you. You have to ask for it and He will help you. He will give you every grace that you need for anything in your marriage, no matter how big the problems might be, no matter what the difficulties are, no matter what the circumstances will require. The grace of God is there to help you, whether that is learning to live together when you first get married, whether it is dealing with being parents and learning what needs to happen, whether it is learning to live all by yourselves again forty or fifty years down the line and figuring out how to deal with it. The grace is there for everything in your marriage, as long as you avail yourself of it. Since marriage is a permanent state, grace is permanent. Obviously, there is much, much more that I could say about marriage, but we need to move on to Holy Orders now.

Holy Orders is something which is mysterious for most people. A couple of things to quickly understand about it is that when a priest is ordained, he undergoes what is called an ontological change. Ontology is the study of being. So there is a change in the very being of the man who is ordained; he stands literally in the person of Jesus Christ. That is who the priest is; the priest is Jesus Christ. Just as the divinity of Jesus worked through His humanity two thousand years ago to be able to forgive people, to heal people, and do all the things He did, so now the divinity of Christ works through the humanity of the priest to continue to do those things which are done through the sacraments. That is why when you go to confession the priest does not say, “Jesus forgives you your sins,” but he says, I absolve you from your sins. It is also why at Mass he does not say, “This is our Lord’s body. This is our Lord’s blood,” but rather he says, This is my body. This is the cup of my blood, because it is Jesus Himself working through the priest at that moment. The priest literally stands in the very Person of Jesus Christ to continue the work of Christ. It is a very profound thing that happens with a priest. Saint John Vianney said that if people really knew who the priest was, they would die – not out of fear, but out of love – because it is all about the love that God has for His people to be able to bring them the sacraments.

The priest, remember, is a mediator. He stands between the people of God and God Himself. He offers to God the gifts that the people bring, and He offers to the people the gifts that God gives. The people bring the bread and wine, and God gives Himself. The priest is the one who stands in between that. The old saying is “The life of a priest is a life of sacrifice.” That is what it is to be a priest: It is to sacrifice yourself, and that is what happens at Mass. The priest is there to serve the people of God. As I have mentioned to you before, God likes a challenge. He does not choose the best and He does not choose the holiest; He chooses the worst and the least. If He could have found somebody worse, He would have, so that tells you what you are dealing with. That is why you need to pray for your priests because God picked the ones who were the least qualified and the worst. Then He likes to do a trick on Satan and say, “Now I’m going to try to raise this guy up and make him a saint if only he will cooperate.” So you need to pray. The priest is the shepherd, and if he is leading you out into the desert, you are in trouble. You need to pray because if the priest leads you along the verdant pastures and along the still waters, as Psalm 23 says, then you are going to be fine. The priest has to shepherd you by following the Good Shepherd, not by trying to figure out what he wants to do all by himself and lead you along his own way. He has to lead according to Christ.

There is another way to express this which I thought was rather profound. A priest simply held his hands up and said, “Right now you are looking at the most powerful hands in the world. They are not the hands of the President of the United States, who with a pen can send off a nuclear bomb and put us into war. They are not the hands of a professional football player who could crush your skull. They are the hands of a priest, the only hands in the world through which bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, and the only hands in the world through which sins are forgiven.” That is what a priest’s life is about. It is a very beautiful and profound thing. It is a gift from God. It is not something anybody has a right to unless one is called. Just like marriage, it is the same idea; you have to be called. It is a vocation.

[End of Lesson 21]

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