PROFANATION OF MARRIAGE

New Zealand Tablet, 18 November 1920, Page 13

PROFANATION OF MARRIAGE

l r~ — [A series of . lectures., delivered by Very Rev, Dean Power, at St. Joseph’s Church, Hawera.]

I.—A SIN AGAINST GOD''. T The Christian Faith, God’s gift to -, regenerate the world, first.' laid siege yip- the heart of man. The human heart was the grand . fortress of which Christ first wished to possess ' Himself: “My son, give Ale thy heart.” For the heart , is supreme in man and makes his personality. But, in the designs of the Almighty, man was intended to form a society, to live, on the earth as a social being, influencing and being influenced by his fellows. Now, the family is the first human society, the unit and germ of- the larger societies of the nation and of the race; and so we find that Christ, the Regenerator of the human race, made provision for the purifying of the family as His Almighty Father had in the beginning made provision for its well-being. It is a function of the Christian Faith, therefore, to regenerate the family and society’ through it, and to provide for its well-being as well as for that of the individual. Notwithstanding the statement made in our House of Representatives last Thursday, the Civil Law did not create marriage; nor did society; nor did any human convention it was terior to all these a fact that should be well borne in mind to-day when wicked Governments claim the right of breaking its indissoluble bond, of undermining its unity and sanctity,- and exposing it to profanation. It is God Who created marriage. He saw that it was not good for man to be alone, and He made for him a help like unto Himself. This marks the original relation between man and woman. By means of the woman society will be formed; she will be man’s help in the procreation of the race and in the generating of saints for heaven, and in all that this involves — companionship, sympathy and affection, in the education of offspring. And because of these divinely assigned duties, their companionship must not be for a season, or terminable at will, but will be indissoluble, no man daring to separate what God hath joined together it will be a union between two only, and to be maintained in its inviolable purity by both alike. For these are the three gifts of marriage, springing from no mere mutual compact, but from the institution and consecration of God Himself.

Marriage, then, is the primary human relation upon which God has established the family, and, through the family, human society. Upon it the civil life of every nation was originally based. So long as it preserved inviolate the three inseparable gifts of marriage its indissolubility, . itfi unity, and its sanctity,—it was well with the nation; but when moral deterioration set in, and immorality usurped and desecrated the hearth, the national door was opened wide to decay, and the wicked nation perished. Such was the fate of Greece, of Home, of Persia, of Assyria, of Israel. It could not be otherwise, for marriage and the social State were set upon an identical basis. Nothing degrades and desolates and withers up a nation like unnatural lusts and polygamy, whether this polygamy be simultaneous or consecutive, arising from divorce with remarriage; and nothing preserves a nation like fidelity to the fundamental social law given by the Creator of social life. The history of nations declares that there was never a people great or good in which the marriage bond was defective. When Christ came for the healing of the nations He found conjugal life everywhere fallen away from its original status. The right of divorce was universal, wrecking the first gift of marriage, and was exercised by Greek and Roman and Jew alike; polygamy was world-wide, degrading woman by making her a mere instrument of lust, and destroying the unity of the bond, its second gift; and the sanctity of marriage, its third gift, was destroyed by the adulteries which the Civil Lavpermitted to men with wives, and which were everywhere rife. There was immense moral corruption on all sides; for you cannot degrade woman without flooding the nation with that shamelessness of life, with those moral abominations, with that cult of voluptuousness which bring ruin and desolation in their train. Into the midst of this orgy of devastating lust Christ, the Healer, came, and His first great act was to restore woman to her rightful place, and, by consequence, to ennoble man, making them both co-heirs of all Christian rights and promises; not only saving the marriages of His people from the vices that had corrupted the bond, but raising it to the dignity of a great sacrament in the .Church which He 'sanctified by His blood. The union between husband and wife will henceforth be like

that between Christ and the indissoluble first of all, because Christ will never repudiate His Spouse, nor can she ever fall from . Him ;. a union .in the second place between one man: and one woman while both live, because there is only one Christ and ' one Church’;'* both faithful and unchanged to the end ; holy because holiness is the bond that binds together Christ and His unspotted Church; and sacramental because since the marriage of Christ and the Church is productive of grace, the marriage' of Christian, its symbol, ' effects the grace of which it is a sign. This is the Sacrament of Marriage which the Church received as a precious deposit from the hands of Christ; which she sot forth to the world in the days of its incontinence, which she propagated for three centuries in the face of carnal kings and licentious soldiers, of civil law and universal custom; which at the end of another three centuries overcame the wild passions of the barbarians, rolled back the tide of pollution, and sweetened the lives of those northern chiefs, whey later contributed so nobly to Christian civilisation; this is the Sacrament of Christian Marriage which she maintained as the public law of Furopo for 1500 years. She used this sacramental law as a defence of the weak and as a weapon against the strong, as a rampart of the family and society against their invaders. -«n standing by this sacramental law, which their energies had made a public law, the Ropes were never cowed h-v princes or potentates. They withstood the power of the royal and bloodthirsty adulterer of England; they triumphed over the seduction, and spurned the threats of Napoleon in the day when • his will, his genius, and Ins might surpassed those of Caesar and Alexander; and they boldly maintained the rights of the humble Protestant wife of Jerome Bonaparte, for she bad the same rights, because they were divinely guaranteed, in the home and by the throne of her husband as the bride of Cana had in the home that was honored by the presence of Jesus at tho marriage feast. And now, dear brethren, an attempt is being made in our own midst to silence our defence of this sacramental crown of family and social life, this fairest gift of God. Our Houses of Parliament have made it a crime to question the validity of any marriage sanctioned by the civil law, no matter what iniquities it may embody. Does the Premier of this Dominion wield the brutal power of Henry the Eighth of England, sir sloes he think that he can compel ns to call the profaners of marriage decent people? Henry signally failed to win from Blesesd Bishop Fisher and Blessed Thomas More an admission that he was anything else but a paramour and Anne Boleyn anything but a columbine. The Premier of New Zealand will meet with as signal a failure here. His misuse of power will only recoil upon himself, for recent Synodal and Assembly resolutions show that it is not Catholics alone he will have to trample upon. His great success will be to make himself the laughing-stock of the nations. Here is thu position in a nut-shell, slightly varied from the words used by Air. Asquith in the House of Commons, -when the member for Dublin University tried to have done in England what Has now been done in New Zealand. Benedict the Fifteenth holds that no Catholic is validly married who is not married before a priest; the Premier holds a different view; so that we have a Pope and an anti-Pope as to what is marriage hr the eyes of Heaven. The two Ropes are of different physical proportions, but which is the greater, time and the laughter of the nations will tell. Serious persons will find not satisfaction in gloating over this laughter; they will rather be filled with confusion, for the shame of the leader percolates through the nation. The people of this Dominion have a right to expect different conduct from the leader of its Parliament. Whatever fanatics may be, he. should be a man of serious thought and enlightened judgment. He should understand that any profanation of marriage, whether by polygamy or other crime is. as we will show in another instruction, a menace to the nation. He should understand that marriage in the Registry 'office, even in those-'cases where it is valid in the eyes of both Church and State, is a sign of loose morality, of a low concept of the nature of marriage, of its spiritual aim and divine sanction; and instead of making criminals of those who in some cases repudiate them and in all cases disapprove of them, he should be the very first to applaud them. Wo Catholics, as lovers of our fellow-men, of/ our country, and of our God, will ever hold the marriage bond in high esteem; by word and example we will ever foster a healthy public opinion on this matter, never admitting into our homes, never meeting in social intercourse either the . profaners : of the divine institution, or . the propagandist of a pernicious code of public morality; for these are outragers of human nature, criminals against social life, and enemies of God. _ . .