Marriage

In view of the upcoming Extraordinary Meeting of the Synod of Bishops addressing the theme of “Pastoral Challenges to the Family in the Context of Evangelization,” the present issue of Communio focuses on the questions of the nature and pastoral care of marriage and the family.

“The nuptial dimension proper to every form of love is the point of departure for addressing pastoral challenges regarding marriage and the family.”

“The new openings for a pastoral approach based on mercy must take place within the continuity of the Church’s doctrinal tradition, which is itself an expression of divine mercy.”

“Belonging to the one flesh of Jesus and the Church is what makes the one flesh of the spouses new, sealing it with the same indissolubility of Christ’s love for his members.”

"Indissolubility, the incapacity of being dissolved, is the truth of giving."

"The deepest wounds in our culture stem from a crisis of faith."

“There is nothing more human than marriage, and yet no general human reality is more full of grace: marriage is, as St. Paul said, the ‘mega mystery.’”

“Even as a reality belonging to the order of nature, sexual union is a kind of liturgical act uniting . . . self-possession and self-sacrifice, in a gesture analogous to the Eucharist.”

“Public reason as it is currently configured in numerous court decisions, acts of legislation, and in political debate generally, in its blindness to communities as natural and integral wholes, effectively conceives all marriages as essentially ‘gay.’”

“Failing to strengthen love’s demand for faithfulness unto death . . . will take the Church to the point of becoming worldly, insignificant, and pastorally incapable of communicating God’s love.”

“[L]ive at the heart of the sacrament of the Covenant, your marriage nourished by the Eucharist and the Eucharist illumined by your sacrament of marriage; the future of the world depends on it.”

“[T]oo great a desire to adapt himself to the needs of his time would endanger the authenticity of the historian’s work and by that very fact would deprive it of the interest it could have for his contemporaries.”

Stratford Caldecott was a man fitted for our time. We must submit to providence about why he has left us so soon. We come to mourn his passing, but also to recall his life.