With finals over and Christmas Day sufficiently celebrated, the student brothers of the Dominican House of Studies have been set loose upon their families for eight days. For most of us, it is the first time we have seen our family since our summer home-visits. Many of us owe our vocations directly to our family members, and it is a wonderful work of providence that, when we make our winter home-visits, we are able to celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family with those who first demonstrated to us the love of Christ. 

“Nothing truly can be more salutary or efficacious for Christian families to meditate upon than the example of the Holy Family, which embraces the perfection and completeness of all domestic virtues.” So proclaimed Pope Leo XIII in his 1892 letter Neminem fugit, commending devotion to the Holy Family as a sure protection against all attacks against the family. This salutary devotion is one that we seem to require now, more than ever, as political and social influences seek to alter our understanding of the family by redefining its underlying principle of marriage.

The proper understanding of the family is essentially tied to marriage. A man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family (CCC 2202). Other relationships certainly exist which we call families, but this is the natural definition of a family, and all others exist only with respect to this understanding. This definition of the family is proper because marriage and the marital act are per se ordered to the formation of families through the procreation and generation of children (CCC 1652). Without the complementary union of man and woman, no children arise and no family exists. Except for a desire to form a family, why do a man and woman bind themselves together? When they are properly understood, the intrinsic link between marriage and the family is clearly seen.

But this is not the understanding of marriage that prevails today. Instead many people believe that marriage is merely a legal contract between consenting parties as an expression of their mutual affection (some may even say their love). If you are in love, then you get married. It’s not for the sake of children or even for the sake of mutual sanctification. Instead, it’s about each party’s personal good and the public statement they make by this contract.

Yet marriage is more than this. Marriage—and, subsequently, the family—is based on something much higher than mutual affection or legal contracts. It draws its constitution from the will of God that man should increase and multiply (Matt 19:3-6). Marriage is specifically oriented, by its nature, to the production of offspring by means of the marital act. To this end, God made man and woman in mutual compatibility. This compatibility is not one of similarity, but one of difference. The difference between men and women is not one of domination, but a generative difference that depends on the mutual self-gift of the spouses to bring forth life in the image of God (CCC 2205, Eph 5:21-31). There is no such compatibility in a homosexual act. There is no generative difference and, thus, no chance of procreation. Because of this, by its nature, there cannot be a true marriage between members of the same sex. 

This distinction is not a matter of exclusion, but of expressing reality. When procreation is removed from the definition of marriage, the family loses its foundation. Any such alteration to our understanding of the family has disastrous implications for all further levels of society. Leo XIII begins Neminem fugit with this same observation: “No one escapes the fact that the happiness of private and public affairs depends, above all, on domestic institutions.” With this in mind, let us turn to the Holy Family, that, by their intercession, God may establish all families firmly in his grace and peace.

✠

Photo by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. (used with permission)