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A Free and Total Gift of Self

Posted by Sara Fox Peterson in Marriage on Thursday, October 01, 2009 10:00 AM

Over the centuries the Church has had rather a lot to say about the meaning and purpose of marriage and sexuality. Pope John Paul II alone wrote over 2000 pages on the subject. In some ways it is an amost infinitely complex subject because marriage is, as St. Paul tells us, “a great mystery” (Eph 5:32), but the basic Catholic understanding of marriage and the marital act (sexual intercourse) is beautiful, logical and all hinges on two main ideas.

The first is that in marriage as a whole, and in the marital act (sexual intercourse) in particular, each person makes a free and total gift of himself to his spouse and that each time they participate in the marital act they are restating, with their bodies, the vows they spoke with their voices on the day of their wedding.

“Conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter - appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of will ... it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility.”(Catechism of the Catholic Church 1643)

“Sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman. In marriage the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and pledge of spiritual communion. Marriage bonds between baptized persons are sanctified by the sacrament.” (CCC 2360)

Second, that both marriage and the marital act have two ends (purposes or meanings) - union of the spouses and the procreation of children - and that both of these ends are meant to bring us joy both in eternity and in this life. Furthermore, these two ends are so entwined that it is impossible to attempt to isolate one without also destroying the other.

“The spouses’ union achieves the twofold end of marriage: the good of the spouses themselves and the transmission of life. These two meanings or values of marriage cannot be separated without altering the couple’s spiritual life and compromising the goods of marriage and the future of the family.” (CCC 2363)

We see these truths, of course, when we think about the way we all know marriage is supposed to work: a couple falls in love, their love for each other brings them joy and impels them to give themselves to each other in marriage, the marital relationship results in children, marital love becomes family love by which parents are ultimately made both happy and holy. Naturally this is far from easy as we live it, but it isn’t really all that complicated either.

What trips us up are the exceptions, the situations where, because of the many consequences of sin (both original sin and our own personal sins), all does not go according to God’s original plan. When this happens, when we encounter situations where conception must be avoided, or where conception is not occuring despite the couple’s deep desire that it should, we often want to fix the problem by separating the two ends of sex and marriage and making use of one while eliminating the other.

This can seem quite reasonable, but it simply won’t—and can’t—work. Any time a couple alters either their bodies or the marital act itself in an attempt to avoid conception (or when they separate the process of conception from the marital act entirely as is done in artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization) the whole thing falls apart. The physical facts of being either male or female and the nitty gritty of how a married couple’s bodies fit together to allow for procreation are not accidental or unimportant. Rather, like every sacramental sign, they are deeply significant and cannot be altered without depriving the sacrament of meaning. 

We know that, by God’s design, most acts of sexual intercourse with not result in conception. Human couples are actually infertile for the majority of their lives (conception is possible during at most four or five days out of each cycle and not at all during pregnancy or after menopause) and even complete infertility is not an obstacle to a fruitful, holy marriage. But when a couple actively changes the physical components of the sacrament of marriage, for the purpose of avoiding concecption, they are no longer ‘speaking’ with their bodies the same vows and the entire meaning of the act is changed such that it cannot truly unite them either.

Next time we will consider the way these truths apply to specific questions about marital chastity.

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