Matrimony As A Living Symbol Of The Love Between Christ And His Church

By JAMES MONTI

From the very beginning of her existence, the Church has seen herself as a bride, “the wife of the Lamb” as she is called in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 21:9), “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2). This nuptial imagery, which references in a particular manner the unitive dimension of marriage, has permeated the Church’s life for two millennia, expressed not only in the surpassing analogy of the bond between Christ and His Church, but also the bond between God and the soul, the spiritual bonds formed by vocations to the priesthood and consecrated religious life, the Church’s vision of the spiritual life and ascetical theology, the unique witness of martyrdom, and even the principles of Church architecture.
As Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has put it, “God has used marriage as the primary sacred sign of our relationship with Him, for the Incarnation is a marriage….” (“Liturgical Leadership in a Secular Society: A Bishop’s Perspective,” in Dom Alcuin Reid, ed., Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Issues and Perspectives, London, Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 147).
This analogy finds its beginnings in the Old Testament, where the covenant between God and the people of Israel is described as a marriage: “For your Maker is your husband; the Lord of hosts is his name…with everlasting love I will have compassion on you…my steadfast love shall not depart from you” (Isaiah 54:5,8, 10); “And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ‘My husband,’…And I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness” (Hosea 2:16, 19-20). The Church has always seen herself as the bride in the Song of Solomon.
St. Paul revealed this analogy as a tenet of Church doctrine when he wrote, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her. . . . ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’ ” (Eph. 5:22-27,31).
For such a beautiful analogy to be valid, and as a matter of divine Revelation we know it for certain to be so, the importance of such nuptial love must be true of marriage itself as a sacrament.
Yet there are some who have claimed that the Church’s “traditional” understanding of marriage, that is, her pre-Vatican II understanding and definition of the sacrament, did not include conjugal love, and that therefore the importance given to this dimension of marriage in the Vatican II constitution Gaudium et Spes, in Pope St. Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, in Pope St. John Paul II’s 1981 apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, in the 1983 Code of Canon Law, in the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church, and even before Vatican II in the writings of Dietrich von Hildebrand, represents a dangerous rupture with the Church’s centuries-old traditional teachings about matrimony.
Such critics claim as their “proof text” the definition of matrimony given in the 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1013, §1), which affirms procreation as the primary end of this sacrament and “mutual support” and the provision of a remedy to concupiscence as its secondary ends, but which assigns no role to conjugal love. These critics go so far as to suggest that the affirmation of conjugal love as integral to marriage constitutes a concession to the heresy of modernism and the adaptation of a view of marriage invented by nineteenth-century German Romanticism.
Yet this criticism is inherently flawed in that it has attempted to interpret the 1917 canon text in isolation from so much else of what the Church has said and done over the centuries in explaining and celebrating the Sacrament of Matrimony. We can begin by looking at what the Council of Trent had to say in this matter. Its decree of November 11, 1563 on the sacrament certainly gives “natural love” an important role:
“But the grace which was to perfect that natural love, and confirm that indissoluble union, and sanctify the persons married, Christ Himself, the instituter and perfecter of the venerable sacraments, merited for us by His passion, which Paul the Apostle intimates when he says: ‘Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church’” (Session 24, in H.J. Schroeder, OP, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, St. Louis and London, B. Herder Book Co., 1955, p. 180).
The Catechism of the Council of Trent similarly stresses the role of “a singular, holy and pure love” between husband and wife:
“This matrimonial faith also demands, on the part of husband and wife, a singular, holy, and pure love, a love not such as that of adulterers, but such as that which Christ cherishes towards His Church. This is the model of conjugal love proposed by the Apostle when he says: ‘Men, love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church.’ The love of Christ for His Church was great, not an interested love, but a love which proposed to itself the sole happiness of His spouse” (The Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. Fr. J. Donovan, Baltimore, Lucas Bros., 1829, part 2, chapter 8, n. 24, p. 233).
Particularly compelling is the evidence from the Church’s liturgical celebration of matrimony in the Middle Ages. The words and actions of these rites are permeated by the imagery of the creation of an indissoluble bond between the bride and bridegroom. And that bond, like the indissoluble bonds formed by priestly ordination and the profession of vows in consecrated religious life, can only be truly understood as a bond of love, as expressly stated in the opening words of a nuptial blessing for newlyweds in the medieval rite of matrimony for the Diocese of Barcelona:
“May the Lord + bless thee by the word of our mouth and join your hearts together in a perpetual bond of genuine love” (Amadeu-J. Soberanas, ed., Ordinarium Sacramentorum Barchinonense, 1501, Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1991, fol. 38r).
All sorts of symbols were used in the medieval ceremonies of matrimony to represent this bond of conjugal love. In Spain, a special ribbon called the jugalis, and/or a veil, or a priest’s stole, was placed over or around the kneeling bride and groom, “lest they should break asunder the conjugal joint of unity, “ as the Church Father St. Isidore of Seville (+636) explained it (De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, book 2, chapter 20, n. 7, PL 83, col. 811).
In the late medieval nuptial rites of southern Germany and the Austrian Tirol a similar custom arose — the binding together of the bride’s and groom’s joined right hands with the stole of the priest officiating at their wedding. In the marriage rite of Krakow, Poland (1591), this binding of the couple’s hands with the priest’s stole accompanied the very moment when the man and woman exchanged their wedding vows.
And the wording of the marital vow in this rite expressly mentions conjugal love: “I [Name] take you [Name] unto me for my wife; and I sacredly vow to you marital love, fidelity and honor; and that I shall not forsake you, as long as I shall live. So help me God, and all his saints” (Agenda seu ritus caeremoniarum ecclesiasticarum ad uniformem Ecclesiarum par universas Provincias Regni Poloniae usum, officio Romano conformati, Krakow, 1591, pp. 53-54)
By far the most common symbol of the matrimonial bond in the rite of marriage has been the wedding ring. The interpretation of this object as a symbol of conjugal love was emphatically affirmed by one of the greatest liturgical theologians in the history of the Church, the prelate William Durandus of Mende (+1296), whose pontifical largely formed the text of the pre-Vatican II Pontificale Romanum and whose Mass rubrics helped to form the rubrics of the Missale Romanum of 1570.
In his hugely influential work on the spiritual meaning of the Church’s ceremonies, the Rationale divinorum officiorum, Durandus describes the wedding ring as a “sign of mutual love,” elaborating upon this by explaining what the different materials used for wedding rings represent.
He observes that some were made of iron with a mounted diamond, “for just as iron conquers all things, so love conquers all. . . . And just as a diamond is unbreakable, so love also is unconquerable, for love is strong as death”; others were made of gold adorned with gems, “for just as gold surpasses other metals, so love surpasses all good things; and just as the gold is adorned with gems, so conjugal love is adorned with other virtues” (Rationale divinorum officiorum, volume 1, Antwerp, 1614, boo 1, chapter 9, nn. 10-11, fol. 43r).
Centuries earlier, St. Isidore of Seville explained the now universal practice of placing the wedding ring upon the fourth finger because it was believed that there was a vein in the fourth finger that ran directly to the heart (De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, book 2, chapter 20, n. 8), an idea dating back to the pagan Roman author Pliny the Elder (+79).
Clearly, from what has been cited above, the Church has had a long history of attesting the importance of conjugal love in marriage that vastly predates “German Romanticism.” To all this, we can add the testimony of Pope Pius XI. In his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, making his own the words of the Council of Trent that “husband and wife be joined in an especially holy and pure love,” the Pontiff speaks of “the love of husband and wife which pervades all the duties of married life and holds pride of place in Christian marriage,” a love not lustful but rather rooted in “the deep attachment of the heart, “ a love which “must have as its primary purpose that man and wife help each other day by day in forming and perfecting themselves in the interior life” (Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930, n. 23 — Vatican website translation — ©Libreria Editrice Vaticana).
What Dietrich von Hildebrand and the official declarations of the Church from Gaudium et Spes to the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church have had to say about the importance of conjugal love in marriage does not constitute a break with the Church’s tradition of procreation as the primary end of marriage; rather, what the Church has always implicitly believed about procreation as the sacred fruit of holy wedded love has been made explicit.
Correction regarding the September 19 Restoring the Sacred essay: In my essay “The Divine Invitation,” I mistakenly stated that the future Carthusian Neil Diamond’s conversion to the Catholic faith was a conversion from atheism. Actually, he did have a belief in God prior to his conversion, but his understanding of God reached its fullness only after his conversion.